Thursday, April 4, 2019. At Sea

Thursday, April 4, 2019.  At Sea

Yet another day at sea.  We have left the great Pacific Gyrus and entered into the California current, as evidenced by a drop in temperature into the upper 60’s.  The seas have remained pretty calm, but the ship continues to gently rock with the long Pacific swells.  

Ben discovered at breakfast that if you order hot milk, they bring you foamed milk, just like from an espresso, so you can make yourself a cafe latte by adding the foamed milk to the coffee for free. After a quick breakfast, we joined our regular team for the morning trivia, but fell 2 points short of winning.  We didn’t know what Jiu-Jitsu translates to in English and guessed wrong on which comedian said “The Concorde is great.  You get 3 more hours to find your luggage.” We also got the wrong city hosting the 2024 Olympics.  

Ben got a workout in while Janet started on The Sisters Brothers- a Western movie.  After lunch, our progressive trivia team lost a couple of points on technicalities (forgot to scratch out a preliminary answer after writing out the correct answer, and wrote 1500’s (14th century) when the answer was 16th century.  It was frustrating that we did have the correct answers for two questions but missed out on the points.  The team grading our quiz was particularly strict. We’ll pick a different team to grade future quizzes. We did learn that Thomas Mapother IV’s alter ego is Tom Cruise. That might come in handy for future trivia games.

The time changes were catching up to us so we opted to take a nap instead of doing the afternoon trivia and watched the rest of Sisters and Brothers. Not a great western, but better than Alpha was.  

We had dinner in the dining room.  The best thing about having dinner in the dining room is you can get better desserts than you can in the buffet.  You can always get their home-made ice creams and gelatos with no extra charge.

We had the Captain’s Circle reception and the waitstaff was much more accessible than they were on the Regal Princess on our Caribbean cruise.  We were able to scam 3 cocktails out of them, but also learned that 3 cocktails is probably a bit too much for us, as we stumbled about for a few hours after that.  The cocktails did make the comedian’s show in the Princess theater much more entertaining.  Michael Wilson had been on the tonight show and was pretty funny.  He did some good impressions, including one of Minnie Ripperton singing Lovin’ You with it’s hypersonic top notes. 

After the comedian’s show, we walked to the Explorer’s lounge to watch Liar’s Club, learning a few new crazy words including Titinope, Kakkerlack, Zorrilla and Buffo.  This is a game show where three of the cruise director’s staff propose different definitions for each word, trying to convince the audience that they are telling the truth.  Then the audience votes for each definition before the true definition is revealed.  The team that votes for the most correct definitions wins, but there was standing room only in the lounge, so we just observed, rather than playing.  

We closed out the evening with a swing by the pizza and ice creamery, then retiring to our stateroom to watch “Venom”, a Marvel Comic movie about someone who get’s superpowers when he is symbionized by an alien lifeform.  Lots of crazy fight and chase sequences, but not a whole lot of meaningful plot.  What can you expect from a comic book, I guess.  That seems to be mostly what Hollywood is turning out now.

We continue to churn our way towards Ensenada Mexico.  While we enjoy sea days, we are just about ready to make landfall.  Too bad they can’t move Easter Island a few thousand miles north to position it exactly halfway between Hawaii and Los Angeles.