Tuesday, March 5, 2019. At Sea with Rescue at Sea En Route to St. Thomas, US Virgin Islands

Tuesday, March 5, 2019.  At Sea en route to St. Thomas, US Virgin Islands

It was hard to believe that it was 9:15AM when we squinted at the brilliant sunlight coming in through the curtains to our balcony.  Our clocks were turned forward last night, but we were plenty tired still.  We barely made it to the dining room in time for a nice sit down breakfast.  Janet went to check out a new activity called Quilling, which was a paper craft activity for making post cards, while Ben got on an elliptical in the fitness center.  We rendezvoused at Trivia at 11:30AM, where we teamed up with Jeff, from Minneapolis.  This ended up a pretty hard trivia for us.  We scored only 17/29, but the winning team had managed 28/29.  There are many people on this cruise who are doing serial cruises, so they may be recycling some of these trivia quizzes on this ship in the Caribbean.

An announcement was made during the Trivia that the ship was being detoured to take part in a rescue.  Apparently, a small plane went down, and two people were in the water.  We were just north of the Dominican Republic and east of Turks and Caicos at the time.  A US Coast Guard C-130 was orbiting the crash site and there were two men in a life raft.  Janet and I were in Alfredo’s having lunch when the ship came to a stop and launched a rescue boat.  Ben was able to watch it bring the two men from the life raft back to the ship.  They appeared to be in pretty good condition, although one of the men looked a bit sea-sick.  They were transferred to the ship’s medical center through a boarding door near the waterline.  That must be where they transfer pilots during ship to ship transfers as well.  The rescue boat then ran back out to the life raft and towed it back to the ship, so that it wouldn’t be left as pollution.  This rescue made the national news that night.  

For afternoon trivia, we were joined by the two lawyers we had been seated with for our first dinner, and we were also joined by an older single woman, who happened to have been on the winning team during the morning trivia, although at the time, we didn’t know that.  We ended up pulling off a win with 19/22. There were bonus points for the model of Tesla that was launched into space (Roadster) and for the name of the astronaut mannequin (Starman).  That was good for Princess string bags.

Tonight was our first formal night, so we got dressed up and headed to the main dining room where we were seated on a 2 top without waiting.  Janet went for prawns while Ben had leg of lamb.  Both were good, and the Chocolate Journey Hazelnut bar was dessert.  We finished up with time to spare so we changed into casual clothes and participated in the 7:00PM “Where in the World Am I” trivia, which we won after teaming up with two Canadian couples, Bob and Sher from Vancouver, and Ed and Mary from New Foundland.  That was good for a shared bottle of champagne, which was consumed while waiting for the next Trivia, which was Movie Posters.  We didn’t do nearly as well, scoring 11/20 with the winning team getting 15/20.  We didn’t do well with identifying the titles of several of the serial movies with multiple sequels.  For that, we teamed up with Ed and Mary, as well as Mike and Jamie from North Carolina.

The Liar’s club was next.  In this game show, 4 words are presented and audience teams present cards to vote for who gives the most convincing definition for the unusual words.  However, the winner is now simply the Cruise Director Staff member who gets the most votes.  There is no audience winning team, and no prize awarded for getting the words correct.  We managed to guess 3 out of 4 correctly, although we really only knew one word for sure, which was fartlek (Swedish for “Speed Play”, but used to describe interval training in athletic training).  The other words were Gink (a consistently annoying person), Bumclock (a junebug), and Futtock (the ribs of a wooden boat).  The most memorable line from the show was a joke: How do you get an old lady to say the “F” word?  Get another old lady to say “BINGO!”

We finished up the night with the Princess Theater production show “Born to Dance”.  We had seen this before on our Baltic cruise, and it was excellent.  Unlike most other shows that show case the lead singers, this one featured the dancers up front, and explored the culture and history of Broadway dancers and choreography.  Each of the Princess Dancers actually was given title credit at the end of the show, which was a very nice touch.  

The Beatlemaniacs were featured in the Piazza, which was crowded like we have never seen a Princess Cruise after 10PM.  This itinerary seems to have managed to attract a slightly younger and more active demographic that doesn’t mind staying up late.  We watched a bit as we grabbed a snack at the International Cafe before retiring for the night.  

We arrive at St. Thomas in the US Virgin Islands tomorrow after breakfast, that is if we can get up early enough to have breakfast.