Day 5 (Sunday) At Sea – Happy Mother’s Day

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Good morning from Bermuda. What? That wasn’t on the cruise itinerary. Actually someone had a medical emergency last night and the ship had to divert here to deliver them to the local hospital. The captain says that if we run at full speed the rest of the way, then we can still get to Ponta Delgado on time. We will just have to see if that works or not. But for the moment we got a brief view of Bermuda (from their shipping channel).

Anyway, we went up to the Horizon Court for breakfast and viewing of the tip of Bermuda while we waited for the pilot boat to bring our doctor back. In the meantime we enjoyed a nice leisurely sunny morning and got a small glimpse of some place we hadn’t expected to see. In the process we discovered that the larger pools have been opened again (not the small ones yet) and people were starting to flock to them.

We did some more walking around the ship and exploring, and then returned to the Princess Theater to hear the next episode of what to expect in our tour excursions. This session was about Dublin, and it was mentioned several times that they have a local brewery there called Guinness. There are a lot of other things to see, but they said not to forget to sample the local brew. Actually, we have heard so many interesting things in each of the places, now we can’t remember exactly what we signed up to tour anyway.

Lunch today was hamburgers and hot dogs on the pool deck. It was not quite as elaborate a bar-b-que as the previous cruise, but the dogs were huge and very tasty with us sitting outside by the pool in the fresh sea air. Afterwards Janet went to see the first 10 minutes of a movie she had seen almost all of (The King’s Speech) and David headed for a dip in the pool. Princess ships still use fresh water (not salt water) in their pools, and that was actually the cause of the delay in opening the pools. Janet got fascinated with the movie and stayed for the whole thing while David returned to the cabin for an afternoon nap.

Dinner has been excellent each evening and today was no exception. We have a strange table situation because there are 10 chairs, but only 6 of us as regulars. Each evening (except the first night), they assigned some temporary people to our table (designated as “anytime dinners”). Each night there are different people filling the empty chairs so we have some people we are getting to know more thoroughly, but also new people to change the conversation and provide different topics to discuss. This evening we got a man & wife with their daughter-in-law. Their son was still in the cabin watching their 18 month grandson. So we had lots of parent/grandparent stories to exchange (appropriate for Mother’s Day).

That brings up the factoid that there are only 4 children on the ship (two 10-year olds, this 18-monther and a 12-month old). There are no teenagers and not many people that I would consider in their 20s, 30s, or 40s. So once again we are in the younger half, although there don’t seem to be a huge number of really old people (arbitrarily defined as more than 75).

After dinner we went to the show in the main theater and it was a hypnotist. He had a bunch of volunteers from the audience who then did a bunch of silly things. It was a silly show. If they recorded the antics and play them for the volunteers, then they will be thoroughly embarrassed (it would have been a good place to have Uncle Jim Siebert on the stage). But for us to just seemed kind of silly (except for the guy who was given the post suggestion that he was thoroughly in love with the cruise director – who comes on stage after each show to announce the next day’s activities).

After the show we stayed up late and went to the Movies-Under-The-Stars. It is a really big screen (probably at least 20 feet) and they were showing the movie Secretariat. We sat around the pool area on deck chairs, ate popcorn, and watched the movie. Then finally it was back to the cabin for a short night’s sleep (at 2:00 AM we lose another hour). So that was our Mother’s Day celebration – hope you all had a good day too.

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