27 Apr – 5th Day at Sea

---

Hello from the Azores. Well, not actually the real Azores but just their time zone. We are still somewhere out at sea. We entered this time zone when the clocks were advanced once again today at noon. However, we had much better weather today with comparatively smooth seas, mostly sunny skies, reasonably warm temperatures, but still with a bit of a breeze blowing.



Our morning routine was pretty much the same as the past few days. We got up, had breakfast, went to knitting and exercise, and then met up for lunch at Noon/1:00.



There is a scale just inside the door of the Fitness Center. As the ship rocks slightly it makes the scales flash a series of different choices for your weight (like you couldn’t stand still on the scale). Eventually it gives up and picks a number after having given you so many choices. Anyway today David walked 3 miles on the treadmill and then weighed again afterward. This time it picked a number half a pound heavier than before. This just proves that all the weight people gain on a cruise ship must come from the extensive walking they do and not from the food!



At 1:00 there was an ice carving demonstration at poolside. In about 30 minutes two carvers had changed two blocks of ice into a carving of a horse head and of an angelfish. It was pretty impressive to watch them work, using only hand chisels. During/after the carving we had lunch from the Trident Grill (also at poolside).



After lunch David changed and went back to the pool for a short swim. The water was nice and warm, and there weren’t many waves in the pool today. It was a little chilly when he got out and stood in the wind to dry, but soon the sunshine warmed him up again.



At 3:30 we went down to the main piazza to listen to the stringed quartet play. Unfortunately we could only find seats in the rear of the room and there were people down there eating a late lunch and just chatting between themselves. It was kind of distracting – next time David will go early and get us some better seats,



This evening for dinner we had our usual 6-some. Janet had Game & Mushroom Pate as an appetizer. David had Fruit Salad and a Corn Chowder Soup. We each had the Surf & Turf entrée and we each had a couple of scoops of ice cream for dessert. We discovered that one of the couples we’ve been intruding upon (Jim and Bonnie) will be leaving at the end of the first cruise, but the other couple (Jerry and Joyce) will continue. We have arranged to be matched up as tablemates for that continuing cruise with them, so we should be able to count on more dinner conversations in the future.



After dinner we were invited to the Captain’s Reception for returning Princess Passengers. They said that 87%!o(MISSING)f the 3600 passengers were previous sailors with Princess sometime in the past. It happens that there are 965 Elite travelers (more than 150 days of cruising with this line) and 1255 Platinum travelers (between 50 and 149 days). We are still in the Platinum category, but gradually working our way closer to Elite. They gave bottles of champagne to the 3 passengers with the most total days on Princess Cruise Lines. The winner had a total of 1315 days (3.6 years) on Princess. There was also a couple getting their 75^th anniversary certificate (75 cruises with Princess). We will never win any of these awards.



After the reception we opted out of going to the Princess Theater because it is a show which will certainly appear again on our 2^nd cruise in a couple of weeks. Instead we decided to go out in the good weather tonight and we went up to watch the Movie Under the Stars on deck-16. The movie is “Bridge of Spies”. So we will try to send the blog early before we go get our popcorn for the movie. Good night.

---