Goodbye to London ... for now

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We had a lovely breakfast brought to our room so that we could then be free to be up on deck for our sail out of London at 8:30. That didn’t happen - well, the breakfast did but the sailaway was postponed until 10:30 because it required two tugs due to the high winds, and our agent had only ordered one tug. We met a nice couple from Melbourne on deck - the only Aussies so far.

So at 10:30am the Tower Bridge was raised and we backed down the Thames for quite a ways. We had been turned around by the time we reached Greenwich. We saw a number of things along the way - the millennium dome, the east India wharf, canary wharf and the Thames Barrier (to help prevent flooding). We had a light lunch on the pool deck before I went to the spa and had my nails done. A lovely Slovakian girl name Jovanna did them - she’s only just left home and started working for Silversea.

It was announced that because of some bad weather expected in the next 24 hours, we would not be making our first stop tomorrow at Dartmouth, as it would be too dangerous taking the tenders ashore. We will just continue past, on our way to Ireland.

After that it was time for a nap. Then Tom went to the enrichment lecture and met up with me at the bar for trivia. We didn’t join any teams - there were five other teams with about 6 people in each, mostly Americans. We won. Much to everyone’s amazement.

Then it was time to dress for formal dinner. We decided to return to the bar for a pre-dinner drink and recognised the barman mixing our martinis - it was German who had been our barman on the Silver whisper in 2016! I asked him if he’d been on it, and he said yes and we high fived! He’s only just joined this ship, and he misses the Whisper. Then we were off to be presented to our captain at the reception before dinner - I used my high school Italian successfully, chatting to the captain (I said hello, how are you, responded that I was well thank you, and stopped short of asking him his name and his age!). Dinner in the restaurant was lovely - spanner crab as an entree and Maine lobster tail as a main! Yum.

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