Smooth Sailing to Victoria

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We’ve pretty much abandoned the dining room for breakfast and have been exclusively heading to the Lido, a marked change from most of our cruises. We have this one final lazy sea day to start and get our heads back into the real world. I decided to change things up and went with the meat laden spicy omelet with cheese, onions, jalapeños and salsa, and added some Siracha-like sauce after the fact. It was quite good. Sharon had her scrambled eggs and not-so-crispy Turkey Bacon.

In today’s Sudoku challenge in the Exploration Lounge we had remembered to bring our pens, and glasses, and sat in a well-lit area, and there were no excuses I could imagine that Sharon might come up with today. As it turns out, she didn’t need to and won, beating me by about twenty seconds. I think I might have been getting a glare off of the glass tabletop we did the puzzles at. I did come back in the Hard puzzle beating Sharon by a few minutes.

We were attending the Mariner’s reception at 10:30, along with John and Leah our Trivia teammates, who were also getting their Bronze Medallions commemorating 100 actual sailing days on a Holland America Ship. They gave a very nice reception, and we sat with John and Leah. I had the shrimp hors d’ourves, mine and Sharon’s, and I had a glass of the red wine that they also provided. There were about 35 of us getting their bronze medallions, plus one silver (for 300 sailing days) and three gold (for 500 sailing days). The metals are quite large and shiny and are presented by the captain, and you get your picture taken with him as well! We were all escorted to the Mariner’s Luncheon in the Dining Room afterwards where I enjoyed the shrimp, a leak and shrimp soup, and the cod entree. Sharon had the boneless short ribs; which, she mostly was able to eat. Sharon ate more of the key lime pie with white chocolate topping than I did.

Still reeling from yesterday’s fiasco, where Sharon had even refused to take the score sheet up to Ross because of our dismal showing. We had to have Katrina (Irene's Grand-daughter) take the sheet up, so at least we got credit for those eight points that we did get (who knows, we may need them yet). Ross began with a series of questions of which we were quite confident, such as which Asian country has the largest Muslim population. We may have missed this the first time that we heard it, or perhaps our teammates then came through for us (I don’t remember), but the answer is Indonesia. One down, fourteen plus a bonus to go. Ross then announced he was switching to a computer question and Sharon and I both smiled at each other because on an earlier “computer question” our team was the only one that knew how many bits are in a byte. Ross said, “What does the acronym ‘CPU’ stand for in computer lingo?” Sharon wrote down her answer, which I looked at, and copied it onto our answer sheet, and asked, “Are you sure?” She laughed, and smiled, “That’s my answer.” Alright then. Next came red and green lights are used to illuminate either the port or starboard side of a vessel as a navigation aide. What color light is on the starboard side? Our team sided with green. We knew that the Cascades was the mountain range extending from Canada into California. And we knew what the maximum score is for a single throw in the game of darts (it isn’t the 50 point bull’s-eye). Irene immediately knew how many pounds are in a stone, and I copied down 14. I knew what actor had starred in a top box office movie from the mid-1960’s through to mid-1980’s. I had already written down Clint Eastwood; when, Ross added that he’s now directing movies. A lot of teams went with Robert Redford. Sharon knew that the only continent having no volcanos was Australia. Before the bonus question, I asked Sharon to look at the CPU answer, because I wasn’t comfortable with it, and she seemed to concur, “That’s my answer” tapping on her illegible scrawl. Okay then. Leah knew what the largest island in the West Indies is. I wrote it down, Cuba. The 2-point bonus question was what does “Kamikaze” mean. I should have come up with this one and drew a blank. All I could think of was “Rising Sun”. Some teams came up with “Divine Wind”. We made it to the tie-breaker, not winning outright because we got the “CPU” answer wrong. Sharon couldn’t believe it, because Central Processing Unit is what she wrote down. Unfortunately, it looked an awful lot like Control Processing Unit which I unfortunately wrote down. There was talk about me needing to walk the plank. The three team tie-breaker was, “How high is Mount Everest in feet?” I suggested 31,000. The other John wrote down 29,580; then circled the 580 and said he wasn’t sure about those. So that was the answer we went with. The actual answer was 29,035; which, would have been pretty good except for the team that had written down 28,800. We did appear to gain ground on our closest competition.

We had a busy day at sea, with our afternoon full of activities. At 2 PM we went to watch the Dancing with Stars at Sea, where the samba was being taught. Ross, the cruise director, is quite popular among the ladies at these dance sessions, and he had a new partner for the samba. Unlike the jive, there were quite a few different men dancing, as well as many women. At first everyone was stumbling through the routine; but, by the end of the hour most had mastered the basic steps and movements and were even smiling and having fun with the booty-bumps.

We stayed on in the Show Room to watch the Marriage Game. This is the show that Sharon had found positively hilarious on the Noordam. Usually, they pick a younger (recently married) couple, then a more middle aged couple, and then a couple that have been together 45 years or more. Ross apologized, saying, “Obviously we’re going to do something different on ‘this’ cruise. By recently married, we’re talking about in the past 25 years.” Ross had already picked out the couple celebrating their 51^st anniversary that very day. To choose the other two couples Ross identified couples that wanted to participate, after having gone over the rules. Rule 1 – you must be married (and then he clarified), to each other. Rule 2 – you both must want to participate. Rule 3 – you had to both be in the room. Many couples stood up. To decide, the audience would vote after a brief “kissing contest”. The couple in the back that we couldn’t see from the Level 7 seats had a large entourage, so they clearly were voted in. And the couple in the front won as his wife feverishly kissed and rubbed the top of his balding head. They were the couple that we’d first met when we were forming our Trivia Team, and they had first accepted, and then declined because others were coming (maybe). Sharon said later, after we watched this show, that it was a good thing that they weren’t on our team because we’d never be able to look them in the eyes again after some of their answers. The one that raised everyone’s eyes was when Ross asked the woman “Where was the most unusual place that you’ve ever made whoopee?” At first she asked, “Do I have to tell the truth?” Then she admitted “Well, that would be in the hot tub on Deck 11.” Ross did a double take, and asked “Of ‘this’ ship?” She nodded, continuing “Yesterday.” Okay, TMI.

After this came the $25,000 jackpot bingo. Sharon did stand during the first game, but that was as close as we came. There were a lot of people playing in this final game.

We then got ready for the formal night, and I was wearing my tuxedo. We arrived at about 5:30 and they sat us at a table for two. I had the jumbo shrimp cocktail. Tonight was the surf and turf night; where, I ordered the grilled sea bass. Sharon got the filet and the lobster tail for me. We both ordered the flourless chocolate torte. No Baked Alaska desserts were offered in the dining room tonight.



We went to the Show which started at 7 PM tonight (instead of 8 PM as usual). It featured the Holland America cast of singers starring in “The Starlight Lounge”, a tribute to Las Vegas and the rat pack. They were very good, singing tunes from the 1950’s and 1960’s with tunes like “My Way” and “Que Sera, Sera”.



I played blackjack for quite some time in the casino, but never managed to get very far ahead, before suffering one setback or another. I lost a couple of split hands which I thought that I was going to win. I did enjoy one modest winning streak of about six hands, and after finally losing that last hand I cashed in at the Casino cashier with a profit of $7. Sharon hadn’t won enough to feel like cashing out, so she played until she didn’t have to cash out. This is the final night on this cruise that the casino would be open, due the Canadian regulations.

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