Friday, January 26, 2018- At Sea

Friday, January 26, 2018- At Sea

We were able to get up before 7am with some effort and had breakfast in the Horizon Court buffet.  We attended the am Trivia, teaming up with John and Wyn from Chicago, and Roger (Santa Claus) from Arizona.  Roger is a professional Santa, and recently came from a convention of the International Brotherhood of Naturally Bearded Santas.  Yes, that is a real thing.  Can you imagine the Las Vegas strip over-run by drunk Santas?  We fared no better than yesterday, but made a decent showing, scoring 15/20.  The winners got 17, and won the wine bottle stoppers.  Ben hit the fitness center before lunch. We had a short morning as the ship jumped its clocks forward an hour from 11:59am to 1:00pm as we crossed into the Atlantic time zone.  We did the hamburger and brat stand along with the pizza bar for a quick lunch and then attended the afternoon trivia.  We teamed up new people, Fred and Jannine and Ken and Tam.  Fred and Ken both were a bit aggressive with answers they knew, but didn’t really, reversing our correct answers on 3 questions. We bombed that trivia pretty bad, scoring 11/20.  Guess we really miss Judy, Rick and Joanne.  We’ve got to get us some wine bottle stoppers before this cruise is over. 

This was the first formal evening.  We got dressed up and headed for the dining room right as it opened, and avoided the long lines.  Service was pretty slow, but the food was good.  Ben had leg of lamb and Janet had prawns.  The best part was a new raspberry Chocolate Journey dessert.  

The evening show featured Princess singers and dancers doing songs by Billy Joel, Barry Manilow and Elton John called “The Piano Man”.  It was a good show.  We had seen it on an earlier cruise.  The stage decor was slightly simplified as the last time we saw the show, there were a few digital screens suspended above the stage with stylized portraits of Billy Joel, Barry Manilow and Elton John.  These screens were omitted.  The dancing and singing were good.  It was notable that the dancers and singers were all racially diversified- not all tall blond Ukranian imports.  There were two black, two asian, and two caucasian female dancers.  The male dancers also looked quite diverse, although it was hard to exactly pinpoint their racial make-up because most appeared to have some mixed racial features.  The lead singers were two tall blond caucasians (male and female) and a pair of asian singers (tall male, very petite female- Princess must have had to invest in an entirely custom wardrobe for her because she was tiny).  

After the show we dropped in on a gameshow for just a little bit where the cruise staff put up a scenario, and then competing teams would write out answers and turn them in.  The answers would be tallied and the most common answer would be deemed correct and a point would be awarded.  The question we saw was “If your wife came home with a new hair style, what would be the worst thing you could say to her?”  The answers varied from “Did you get the license plate?” to “Don’t worry, it’ll grow back”.  The winning answer was along the lines of “what happened to your hair?”.  We didn’t stick around, opting to go just a little further astern to the fitness center to ease some of our guilt.  

Tomorrow we arrive in St. Maarten, our first port of call.  We have an ATV tour booked through the Shipmate App.  St. Maarten was 80% destroyed during the last hurricane season, and our ship is only the second to return to St. Maarten since then.  It’ll be interesting to see how the islanders have managed to get the cruise port opened, and to see if they’ve cleaned up the tourist sites.  One of the most popular destinations is a beach at the aproach of the international airport where jets swoop very low over the sandy beach to the delight of drunken tourists on the sand below.  After the Hurricane, much of the sand was gone and replaced with wrecked boats.  They say the islanders have worked tirelessly to get thing things back open for tourist business since that is the lifeblood of the local economy.  We’re hoping the ATV’s will allow us to get a closer look at what’s been fixed, and what’s still destroyed.