Tuesday, February 27, 2018- Cruise Day 35; At Sea

Tuesday, February 27, 2018- Cruise Day 35; At Sea

We awoke to calm seas and clear weather.  We are cruising north off the west coast of Chile with land on the horizon.  Ben was watching albatrosses skimming inches above the water when all of a sudden a group of sea lions began porpoising out of the water just as an albatross passed over them.  With the ship’s movement, they quickly slipped out of sight.  We had a leisurely breakfast in the dining room and attended the morning trivia.  Our team seems to be in a rut as we did pretty poorly, scoring just 11/20.  the winners had scored 16/20.  We later learned that Kathy’s sister-in-law had passed away yesterday after a long struggle with Huntington’s Chorea and some more recent respiratory complications.  Kathy and her husband had considered leaving the cruise in Punta Arenas to fly back to the States, but her family did not want them to fly back.  It was a sad thing to hear about, and it’s hard to know exactly what to do in a circumstance like this other than to express our condolences.  

We watched some of The Blind Side on TV. Funny how that movies makes us tear up in spots.  We had lunch in the dining room and then hit the fitness center in the early afternoon for guilt reduction.  Janet watched some of another Effy Trivia, and learned some more gemstone trivia.  We attended the afternoon trivia scoring 13/20, with the winning team actually scoring 19/20.  We were pretty amazed that the winning team had scored so high because the questions seemed quite hard to us.  

We attended the early Showtime in the Princess Theatre featuring Guitarist & Vocalist Rick Steel, who was billed as a country singer.  He did do a Johnny Cash song, but spent a lot of time talking about himself and the pick-up on his guitar made it sound very tinny.  He did put in a lot of energy into the show, which many people really seemed to enjoy, but it didn’t score as one of the better shows we have seen on this cruise.

We had dinner in the dining room and met a couple who were originally from Bogota Columbia, but who subsequently moved to Queens, and then more recently became snowbirds moving to Florida.  They spend their summers in Bogota because the climate there is quite temperate July through September when it is hot and humid in Florida.  

We then went to the Princess Theatre to watch a Ben Stiller movie called “Brad’s Status”, which ended up being a terrible movie about Stiller’s character obsessing about how successful his old college buddies were, while devaluating his own life.  It just underscored that you will only end up miserable if you constantly measure your own life against others, rather than considering it’s intrinsic value. Glad we’re not on that life trajectory.  

Tomorrow we have another tender port of call in Puerto Montt, Chile.  We have an excursion booked to tour the city and then visit a local ranch where the local huasos (Chilean cowboys) will give us a taste of their local culture and lifestyle.