Tuesday, November 19, 2019
Today, we have a first for us- our first piracy at sea drill. We slept in late and grabbed some pastries at the International Cafe before attending the morning enrichment lecture on the history of modern passenger ships from the 1800’s to the start of WWII. We had gotten to the late 1920’s when our lecture was disrupted by the announcement over the ship’s PA that the piracy drill was beginning, and that all passengers had to vacate the Promenade deck. Then the crew was scrambled to respond to an attack on the port side, including a simulated fire response in the crew’s cabin area, and relocation of the Medical Center to one of the central dining rooms. All guests then had to return to their cabins, close all balconies and draw shades on all windows and balconies. We were advised that in the event of an actual piracy attempt, the ship would maneuver at high speed with severe listing of the ship to create massive wakes and they would not want passengers mixing with furniture spilling all over the decks. Then we had to report to our muster stations, but this time, everyone had to form single file lines after scanning our cruise cards. It was hot and crowded. They made us listen to the taped “Welcome Aboard” muster drill where everything is sung to the sound of The Love Boat theme song. We were then dismissed by muster station to reduce crowding of the ship’s stairwells, which did reduce crowding, but required a bit more patience. Meanwhile, the crew members took the additional measures of manning the lifeboat embarkation stations.
After the chaos of the pirate drill, we convened our trivia team for the morning trivia, and finished in the top 3 with 18/20. The winners managed a perfect 20/20, but one of the questions was poorly written as “What body of water separates the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans?” The answer could have been several things correctly- Panama Canal, Southern Ocean, Arctic Ocean, The Straight of Magellan, and others. All are natural bodies of water that directly connect the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. The answer they were looking for was the Panama Canal, although technically, it’s not a body of water, but a man made waterway, complete with locks.
The weather today is quite a change from the last week. The sky has been clear, and brilliantly blue with intense sunshine driving the temperatures outside to over 107 degrees on our balcony. With the curtains drawn, we can get the temperature in our room down to 81 in the afternoon.
One of the benefits of our Elite status with Princess is we get a mini-bar set up with each cruise segment. Since we booked our cruise from Rome to Singapore, Princess broke it into two segments at Dubai, so we stopped at the Captain’s Circle desk to see if we should expect another set-up in Dubai. We don’t actually use the mini-bar, but can trade it for two espresso coffee cards, each good for 15 premium espresso drinks, and Ben’s card is down to it’s last few punches. He’ll end up drinking Janet’s as well, since she doesn’t drink coffee, and the premium coffee drinks are worth $4-5 each. When we got to the Captain’s Circle desk, Janet recognized the gal working as Monique, who had been on the Cruise Director’s staff on our 60 day South America Cruise. She had done trivia quizzes with us, and also taught belly dancing classes on that cruise. She then became a Captain’s Circle representative on her next contact, which happened to be on the Emerald Princess, which we had taken from Los Angeles to Hawaii earlier this year. She was also on that cruise, but we had no occasion to visit the Captain’s Circle desk during that cruise.
We played our first Progressive Trivia, but had to modify our team because Mary and Paul have time conflicts (Pop Choir and Bridge). We were able to recruit Pam and Jack from Ventura since they had wanted to join our team early in the cruise, and they are staying on through Singapore as well. We didn’t do too well though, scoring 12/20. Do you know how many definite suicides occur in all of Shakespeare’s plays? Well, we didn’t. There were a lot of hard questions like who was the first woman to lead the Russian delegation into the 2012 Olympics, , what crop was banned in France because it was thought to cause leprosy, and how long did the shortest battle in 1896 between the British and Zanzibar last- 38 seconds, 3 hours, 3 days or 3 weeks? We’ll see how we fared when the first progressive scores are posted tomorrow, but we’re probably below our usual #2 ranking at this point.
We had lunch in the dining room with Bob and Mary and met two sisters-in-law from Canada (BC and Alberta) who travel together. Their husbands are no more, but we never ascertained the story behind that odd circumstance.
We did a poolside music trivia, but really should have done it from in the pool because it was so hot outside. We could hardly wait to get back inside to the air conditioning of our cabin after that. We finished several points off the lead on that- we’re blaming the heat.
After a nap, it was time for afternoon trivia, which we managed a top 5 finish with multiple ties. There were two teams tied for first with a tie breaker question of how many different ways can you break a $100 bill using US bills.
We used a AAA voucher for free specialty dining tonight in the Sterling Steakhouse. On this particular boat, they don’t have a dedicated venue for this or the Crab Shack, but instead close the aft most portion of the buffet, put on nicer table linens, and prop up a sign. It seems like they should have used a nicer dining room like the Savoy for this sort of dual purpose specialty dining. The first table they seated us at experienced rather severe vibrations- it must have been at a unique resonance point for the ship’s propellers and ship’s mass. It seemed like our silverware was trying to walk itself off our table and onto the floor. Fortunately, the waiter noticed this, and offered to move us to a different table, and even though this table was less than 10’ from the original one, the vibrations were 90% less. We enjoyed a filet mignon and rib-eye with fresh asparagus and fancy salts. Toward the end of our meal, the captain came on the PA to announce another medical diversion to the Saudi Arabian port of Jeddah. Fortunately, he said it would not delay our scheduled arrival in Abu Dhabi since we have several days at sea with which to make up the time by pushing the throttle forward.
The Princess Theater featured a Cabaret performance by Martin Kaye who put on an incredibly high energy piano and singing show backed by the Sapphire Princess Band. The early shows are universally oversubscribed with only standing room up to 20 minutes before the shows, but on this ship, we have discovered that there are some odd empty spaces at the ends of several of the seating rows which weren’t wide enough to fit a proper seat in, but which is wide enough to sit comfortably in for the duration of these shows, despite the lack of cushioning. So we have been able to sneak in at the last minute and sit in these.
Since we have spent most of the day eating and playing trivia, we did hit the fitness center to get out Apple Watch activity and exercise rings closed. It may not be enough to offset the increased calorie intake associated with our usual cruise diet, but to be fair, we did manage nearly 20,000 steps on the day we were walking around Petra, so we like to think we can bank some of those for our less active sea days. It seems hard to imagine that being stuck on a ship 24 hours a day that it could be so hard to find an hour of free time for the fitness center or pools, but they do manage to keep us much busier than we would otherwise be at home this time of year.
This was the first of six full consecutive sea days that we have before we end up with our next port of call in Abu Dhabi, so hopefully we’ll be able to get in enough exercise that we won’t need to be wheeled off the ship in wheel barrows at the end of the cruise.
