Sunday, December 2, 2018- At Sea From Panama to Costa Rica’s West Coast

Sunday, December 2, 2018- At Sea From Panama to Costa Rica’s Pacific Coast We regained an hour of sleep as we set our clocks back last night, but shore excursion days always seem to take a lot out of us.  We have been trying to watch “Darkest Hour” on the TV, but it has taken several days to get through that Darkest hour because the dialog is so hard to understand with Winston Churchill’s mumbling British accent. We really miss having closed captions.  We did end up finishing the movie this morning though.  Gary Olden did win the Oscar for Best Actor for his portrayal of Winston Churchill.  He always had a Scotch and Cuban cigar in hand. The weather has turned overcast and we have thundershowers forecast for the next day or so.  It’s still 85 degrees outside on our veranda.  We now find our ship being followed by a small flock of brown boobies.  Watching them closely reveals that our wake does churn up occasional flying fish, which these birds feed on.  They seem to relish riding air currents around the bow of the ship.  We have seen these same birds, or their cousins in our prior journey around South America.

         

 

Janet attended a lecture on emeralds to learn how to spot fakes and the many ways that you can be taken for a ride when buying emeralds.  We had learned on our Baltic cruise that it can be similarly difficult to know what you are buying in amber as well. While Janet was learning about emeralds, Ben got his cardio rings closed on the treadmill. The Lion Kings scored another Trivia win today with a score of 13/15.  Second place teams scored 11/15, so we had a pretty solid win.  The two questions we missed were 1) By cumulative weight, what species of animals makes up 10% of the cumulative weight of land animals?  Ants.  2) How many children did the Jackson family have?  10 (we forgot to count Brandon, who died at birth and was Marlon’s twin).  We eeked out a close one with the definition of philophobia (fear of love- we wrote relationships and got credit) and Greg had written Ants on his scratch sheet, but didn’t put it forward as our answer.  An interesting question was “On average, men use 2000 of these per day, while women use 7000.  What are these?”.  Answer= Words. After lunch Dr. Carin did a talk on the Bats of Costa Rica- Evolution and Extremism. She said there are over 112 species of bats in Costa Rica alone, and that tropical environments tend to spawn greater diversity of species.  We also learned that there is a species of fruit bat in Australia that can weigh up to 30 pounds.  Can you imagine 30 pounds of bat flying around your head?  That’s a frightening thought.  It’s also interesting that very few species of bats are omnivorous. Most eat either insects or fruit.  Fewer eat blood, and the rarest are omnivorous.   Janet hit the thermal suite while Ben got a chance to take a dip in the infinity pool with nobody else in the water.  The water level is about 18” lower when the ship is underway to keep it all from sloshing overboard.  This gave him a chance to experiment with some unusual underwater photography.

   

We had dinner at Manfredi’s for our second time, and again, it was good.  Ben went for the rib-eye steak instead of the swordfish, while Janet had lobster spaghetti.  They still tried to smother everything with arugola, but they do serve a delicious side order of asparagus.

 

Tommy Proulx, the guest musician saxophonist put on a second show tonight.  We had missed his first show, and would have missed his second show as well if we had not skipped out on dessert.  While he was an excellent saxophonist and flautist, when they tried to do some jazz improvisation, the Viking band wasn’t quite up to snuff.  This young Filipino band does really well with written out scores, but may not have had enough exposure or experience with Jazz improvisation to be confident.  It seems like the old union white guys that Princess generally hires for their bands are much more comfortable with Jazz improvisation.

 

Tomorrow we arrive at Puntarenas (Puerto Caldera) Costa Rica.  It seems like we were just there- and we were in March at the end of our South American cruise.  We did a river raft trip then. This time, we’ll just do the included Viking excursion and walk around the town a bit.