4/4 Sailing towards Cabo San Lucas, Mexico

---

No time changes today but I was up until midnight last night sending off the Cartagena blog. We now have two back to back sea days before reaching Cabo San Lucas. I'm hoping to catch up on the blog. Although all of daily activities have been recorded, the pictures still need to be uploaded and the narrative reviewed prior to sending. Unfortunately, there's a "sitiation" brewing. First, it's after 9am. Second, we have a Captain's Reception and Luncheon to attend and finally, Karen wants to spend some time at the spa. She should. She spent $250 for two weeks of unlimited use and added me for another $150, despite my objections. She's been there twice and me once. I tried to tell her it would be difficult to optimize the value given all the other activities offered at no cost. As you know, no cost is my preference.

Breakfast time finds us at the Lido, of course. I have one Belgian waffle, prunes and coffee. Karen has something similar and we spend time visiting until almost 11am when we head over to the BB King Lounge for the Captain's Award Ceremony. Captain Mark is there to greet us. We receive nothing but free drinks, however, on a cruise ship where drinks run $10, I'm fine with that. I have a Mamosa and Mom, a Bloody Mary. I end up finishing both. They pass out the awards. We already have some and are not yet eligible for others. One person in the group has 1730 cruise days with Holland America. That's almost 5 years of continuous sailing.

Next we all walk down to the dining room for lunch. Again the Captain thanks everyone for being "Loyal Mariner's" as we are seated at a reserved table for 10 with all the big time cruisers and one of the ship's officers. We don't belong here but somehow we're here. We have a nice lunch and finally, at 1:30, we leave for our stateroom. Changing our clothes, Karen wants me to bring my swimsuit and just go to the spa with her. This is killing me as I was hoping to wrap up some more blogs with this free day. Ok. I'll do it but then I'm done with all that stuff.

With iPad and swimsuit in hand, we make the trek up to Deck 9. It's a nice treat as membership is limited so there's never a crowd. It's also nice to be separated from the common folk. They can only look in through the glass, hoping that someday fortune will find them enjoying these same luxuries reserved only for the elite, or those idiots that pay the $400 like us. We find only one lady in the big spa room and she doesn't last long with us. Next Karen wants to try the stone beds. The lounges are heated and look out over the ocean. They're very relaxing until the old man at the end starts snoring so loud, he drowns out the soothing music piped in over the sound system. I can't take too much relaxation anyway and I shower, change into into my shorts and journey one flight up to the Exploration Lounge to start writing.

We order some snacks and I begin today's journal and finish up yesterday's. I finally make some headway on writing but not much on preparing and dispersing the info to all my fans out there. Working until 5pm in the Exploration Lounge, it's time we return to our room and think about dinner. I know it seems that all we do is think about breakfast, worry about lunch and get ready for dinner. We try and eat healthy and the portions, when served are small. When we serve ourselves at the pool or buffet, we usually go for fruit, oatmeal, chicken or salad instead of bacon, sweet rolls, fries and milk shakes. We sample many items but in small quantities. All this talk of food has made me hungry. Let's eat.

We go to the dining room and the maitre d seats us upstairs at a table for two. It was nice. Just the two of us. Our Pinot Noir wine from the other night was brought to our table. The dinner was delicious too. Karen had Turkey Barley Soup and Panko-Pineapple Crusted Chicken with Ancient Grains while I had the Chilled Mixed Berry Soup and Caribbean Mahi-Mahi Curry. We both topped it off with Peach Crisp and coffee. We finished up around 7pm and returned to our room so I could complete my writing. Now let's watch a movie. We check out the options and choose the movie, "I, Tonya".

---