Sunday, March 11, 2018- Cruise Day 47; At Sea

Sunday, March 11, 2018- Cruise Day 47; At Sea

The weather is definitely changing as we head towards the equator.  It was sunny with calm seas and 72 degrees outside this morning.  There is noticeable humidity building in the air.  We ended up sleeping in late to make up for our shortened last night in the Sacred Valley.  We had a quick breakfast and then joined our Santa’s Helpers trivia team for the second installment of the ship’s progressive trivia.  We ended up missing a few that we might have gotten right and scored 8/10.  Our team is still in second place after the scores were posted with the Motley Crew leading us by 3 points.  We’ve got some heavy lifting to do over the rest of the cruise if we’re going to pull ahead of them.

We heard the dreaded sound of the bells that comes before an announcement by the captain.  He explained that due to unfavorable tides, our Guayaquil Ecuador port of call was being canceled.  We will instead arrive a day early in Manta, and spend an extra day there.  Unfortunately, there’s not a whole lot to do in Manta.  The ship only offers 4 excursions there, while Guayaquil offered 12.  There was some audible grumbling through out the ship, but what can you do?  It’s odd that Princess cruises didn’t consult the tide tables when scheduling the Guayaquil port of call.

We visited the fitness center to work off some guilt and then watched the destination expert’s lecture on Salaverry on our TV while cooling down.  We grabbed a quick bite to eat for lunch in the buffet and it was time for afternoon trivia.  My how the time flys.

We didn’t win the afternoon trivia. There were two teams tied with 3 more points than us.  Their tie breaker was in what year was “Heard It Through The Grapevine” released.  The correct answer was 1968 and one team guessed it dead on.  

We did spend quite a bit of time visiting with people we had met on our Iguazu and Machu Picchu excursions in the halls, and also spent a bit of time discussing our Machu Picchu adventure to our trivia partners and other people we have come to know during the course of the cruise.  

After taking an early dinner in the dining room- skipping dessert, we hit the early Showtime presentation of Mark Preston, who was one of the singers in the group “The Lettermen”.  His show was enjoyable, mostly because he sang a lot of nostalgic and fun songs.  He has an excellent voice and the Island Princess band provided excellent backing.  He got a nice standing ovation, and surprisingly enough, he did not do an encore song, like virtually all the other singing acts have done.  

We then made our way to the 8:30PM Famous Quotes Trivia. Roger (Santa) was the only one from our usual team to show up, so we joined Howard and his wife from Perth, Australia, and another gentleman from England.  The quotes were unbelievably hard because although we had undoubtedly heard all the quotes before, we had no idea who the person who said them for the most part.  Ben had downloaded some famous quotes from the internet earlier in the day, and that gave us several answers that we could recall that evening, but for the majority of the quotes, we resorted to guesswork.  We ended up winning the trivia with only 8/20 correct answers. A lot of teams ended up scoring only 3-4 points, and fewer than 3 teams had more than 5 points.  We ended up with a bottle of champagne that nobody wanted, but we ended up putting it in our refrigerator.  We’ll use it to make mimosas on our last trivia day, or sooner if we end up with more before the cruise is over.

We arrive at Salaverry early tomorrow and have an excursion to visit some archeological sites.  It should be sunny and hot.