Advertisement
Published: September 23rd 2018
Edit Blog Post
Hello from somewhere in the Bay of Biscay. Last night we sailed down the English Channel and headed south toward Spain. The captain had them hustle along last night so we could have a smoother ride during the day. It wasn’t anything we haven’t experienced before, but Janet had difficulty getting her sea-legs back and didn’t sleep very well. But throughout the day she started feeling better. We clearly can feel more motion on this ship than the QM2, but this is back to what is more customary on an ocean voyage. In a couple of days we will be in the Mediterranean Sea and it may be calmer there.
Because it was harder to sleep last night, we slept in later in the morning than we had planned. This was when Janet was still feeling unsteady, so she chose to skip the Knitters Meeting today. We went up to the buffet and found it very crowded. We finally got a table and David went through the buffet line getting Janet a plate of food and then some tea. Then he got his own and we had a peaceful breakfast. But neither one of us wanted to overdo this morning’s
meal.
We returned to the cabin and planned a fairly quiet day before we go to shore tomorrow. Janet was able to use the computer to read mail and do banking stuff. We got 2 bags of laundry (for free) sent off with the Cabin Steward for cleaning. And we caught up on some e-mail which had not been answered. The weather outside was in the high 60s in temperature this morning, but spritzes of drizzle and fairly gusty winds. This drove almost everyone off the open decks and into the lounges and common areas inside the ship. We decided just to stay in our cabin until about 12:30.
We went to the International Café for one of Janet’s special coffee drinks and a slice of cheesecake before going to a presentation in the theater. David got a ham & cheese croissant and a piece of pecan pie. Princess has changed the coffee program and Janet no longer gets a punch-card for coffee but instead they are assigned to her cruise card. However any unused coffees will expire when the card runs out at the end of the cruise. The old program would allow you to take a punch card from an earlier ship and use the remainder on a following voyage.
We went to the Princess Theater to listen to an interesting presentation on the life of Harry Houdini. There will be a magician/escapologist show on the open deck tomorrow night by this guy. We learned a lot about Houdini and found today’s session pretty interesting. Then we went back to the cabin for Janet to take a nap and David to read his book.
We should pause a minute and give everyone a little description of our cabin. Yes, we did pay a small fee to upgrade from the balcony cabin we had reserved to a mini-suite again. We have spoiled ourselves. There is a king-sized bed which is almost too high for Janet to climb into. We have a separate seating area with a sofa that would pull out into another bed if we wanted. There is also an upper bunk which can be lowered from the ceiling, so it really is possible to sleep 4 in this cabin. Because of that we have 4 life vests in the closet and a ladder which we do not plan to use. There are 2 large screen TVs, a fridge, desk, 2 chairs, and the bathroom even has a tub instead of just a small shower. The balcony is normal width but deeper so there is plenty of space outside too when the weather improves. So that’s what we have for lodging for the next couple of weeks. Pretty nice but we would never have booked it at the original price – just this small upgrade fee. And since we have the perks, there is a free full setup on the mini-bar too.
The Sapphire Princess spends a lot of the year in the Far East so many of the permanent signs (in the halls, elevators, lounges, instructions in the bathroom for the shower and flushing the toilet, etc) are in both English and Chinese. As we learned last night, there are virtually no Chinese on the ship now, but in several months there will probably be almost no native English folks aboard.
We got some sad news today from our friends Ken & Ruth Richardson. Ken’s dad had passed away a little more than a month ago, but his mother passed away on Thursday. That is quite a severe loss for the Richardson’s and we will be thinking about them.
This weekend should have been a busy time back at home. Stephanie’s note said that Ron and Alex are going on a camping trip and letting Stephanie and Abigail have a “girl’s weekend” at home. Stephanie has been leading a project at the library and could use a little break. Janet had given Valerie and Elizabeth play tickets for a show at the Fox Theater since she obviously could not go – hopefully they enjoyed it. Elizabeth had written that she and Mike were going to try to get a truck to do moving of their larger furniture into their new house – David sure is sorry he missed that opportunity to help. And of course Valerie and Dave have had their hands full with Tessa’s arm. How did we get permission from all the kids for us to be away on a cruise at this time???
We stayed in the cabin until 5:00 when we went to the Skywalker’s Lounge (previously called Stargazer). We had some cheese & crackers with assorted other snacks. Janet had a Cherry Blossom cocktail and David had a John Smith beer (English brand). We chatted with a nice couple across from us about our week in London. Then at 5:45 we went down to dinner. Tonight was the first of our Formal Dress Nights and we were both in our fancy dress clothes. The question soon came to whether the formal nights are more rigorous on the QM2 and the answer is definitely YES. One of the guys at our table this evening would not have been admitted on that cruise but he got in here tonight.
For our dinner we both had the French Onion Soup and then the Beef Medallions. Both were very good but Janet is concerned that our waiter (Rolly) is upset with her because the portions are too large for her to eat everything so she leaves some food on her plate. For dessert Janet had Bananas Foster and David had NY Cheesecake with strawberries. After dinner was the Champagne Waterfall in the Piazza where there is a tall pyramid of glasses and the Captain pours champagne from the top and it trickles down and gradually fills the glasses. Of course the captain encourages all the ladies to come up on the platform with him to have their pictures taken pouring the champagne.
We skipped that event and went to the theater instead. It has tended to fill up pretty quickly both nights. The show tonight was called Born to be Wild but it wasn’t very wild (not a lot of energy) since there was a big Cadillac parked in the middle of the stage the whole show. There were only 11 dancers which is possibly the smallest troupe we’ve seen on a Princess ship. And worst is that the singers weren’t very strong and one of them was off-key many times. We may think twice before going to another production show.
Afterwards we went back to the cabin for the evening. Tonight we must advance the clocks by one hour since we will be landing on the continent tomorrow. With that “short night” in mind, we will wrap things up here. Have a good night.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.258s; Tpl: 0.01s; cc: 9; qc: 48; dbt: 0.0482s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb