Saturday, March 9, 2019. At Sea En Route to Fort Lauderdale

Saturday, March 9, 2019.  At Sea En Route to Fort Lauderdale

This was a more relaxed morning since there were no mandatory meetings to attend.  We met two nice couples at breakfast.  One was from New Jersey and the other was from Michigan.  Both were getting off the ship tomorrow in Fort Lauderdale, but both were envious that we were staying on for another week.  

We teamed up with David and Jackie from St. Louis, and Keith and Lila from Idaho for the morning Trivia.  Keith actually lived in Anacortes before they moved to Idaho.  We won that trivia, largely thanks to Keith knowing that the hundred folds in a head chef’s hat represent the hundred ways a head chef must know to prepare eggs.  Os did throw in a few trick questions including “on the Regal Princess, which side of the boat would you find lifeboat #20 on?  Correct answer= neither because the Regal Princess only has 16 life boats. One of the more obscure points of trivia was what auto maker is named after the Persian god of Light?  Mazda. We got Regal Princess silicone coasters as a prize.

Earlier in the cruise, we stopped by a seminar on Larimar, which is a semiprecious gemstone mined in the Dominican Republic with beautiful pale blue and white structure.  At the end of the seminar, we got a ticket to go to their shop to have free ear-rings made for us, so we stopped by and got to pick out small polished beads of Larimar that were then made into ear-rings as we watched.  Since neither of us has pierced ears, they will go into the gift file.  They also gave us coupons for free pendants at the Effy shop, so we picked up some pendants with tiny colored zirconium stones that the Effy shop was all to happy to upgrade to a larger stone for just $10.  We didn’t bite on that one.  

After lunch and a nap, we hit the afternoon trivia, where we teamed up with David and Jackie from St. Louis again, and the young lawyers Chas and Jenn again.  And after a false alarm, we ended up winning another trivia because the team that had thought they won, had an incorrectly totaled score.  That was good for a bottle of champagne, which nobody really wanted, but we ended up with it because Chas and Jenn had left, and we were going to be continuing another week.  

We had stopped by the customer service desk because we had noticed that our Ocean Medallions weren’t working very well.  When we first started this cruise, the medallions would be detected by our door about 20’ down the hall, and would unlock the door as we approached.  The detection range then steadily decreased to the point where we had to physically tap the medallion on the display plate on the doorway to open.  Then today, they stopped working altogether.  We learned that the medallions don’t simply contain a RFID chip, but actually have an internal battery, which sometimes gets depleted towards the end of a cruise, and since we had received our medallions a week or two in advance of the cruise, the desk clerk thought they simply needed new batteries.  However, replacing the batteries did not fix them. So we were stuck in our rooms, while they figured out the problem.  This gave us time to nap and get some reading done.  

Just in time for dinner, we got not only our Medallions back, but also old school printed key cards that can work with the door’s sensor by tapping it on the pad. The room cards still have a magnetic stripe, but they also appear to have an RFID chip imbedded as well.  

Dinner featured New York steaks and Baked Alaska- American themed night.  We participated in a “One Hit Wonders” music trivia, which we bombed.  There were several disco era and 80’s songs that we figured out like Play That Funky Music by Wild Cherry, and Ring My Bell by Anita Ward, but more that’s half of the songs were songs we have never listened to from the rap and grunge eras, or pop songs from the 70’s and 80’s that were truly one hit wonders where even if the song was familiar, the artist was obscure.  

The Princess Theater featured a second show by comedian Steve Caouette, and it was standing room only.  He was very entertaining, doing standup with sound effect impressions.  We watched a gameshow called Holly Would You?  They had two teams of 3 volunteers get up on stage and it was kind of like family feud where a trivia question would come up on the screen and each team had to sound a buzzer when they were ready to answer.  If they got the answer correct, they got a point, but if not, the question would be passed to the other team to try to answer.  There were several general movie trivia questions, followed by movie themes, and then a segment where each team had to pantomime a movie poster to have the audience guess what movie they were portraying.  

We arrived late to a game called “The Gift of Gab” where word jumbles are presented for you to try to guess the meaning.  For example Mile Hip Czars Healed= My Lips are Sealed.  It was very challenging and we were glad we weren’t in it to compete at this point.  

Most of the ship is disembarking tomorrow morning.  Earlier in the evening, we passed lots of suitcases lining the hallways on the way to our activities.  It always makes us a bit sad at the end of a cruise, but we get to stay on another week.  It’s too bad all of our good trivia partners are leaving the ship, just as we figured out who was good at what.  It will be interesting to see what it is like to be on the ship with only 350 other passengers during the day in Fort Lauderdale.