Thursday, December 23, 2021- At Sea

 Thursday, December 23, 2021

At Sea; We managed to get our family and Tom up for a 9am breakfast.  The weather has improved with temperatures in the 80’s and partly cloudy skies for most of the day.  At one point during the day, Janet and I were having lunch on our balcony when we spotted a pod of porpoises jumping out of the water within several hundred yards of the ship.  They were headed towards the ship, but we passed in front of them before our paths intersected.  There is also a fair amount of floating rafts of vegetation with the water looking more green than the more usual Caribbean blue.  We were passing Haiti in the morning on our way south to Aruba.

The kids participated in a Gingerbread house competition in the morning.  The ship had purchased a pile of Gingerbread house kits from Target stores as they Target bags were evident.  The kids had fun and got sticky with frosting.  There were a few very creative teams that had created ship-like gingerbread houses with the Princess Cruises logo.  Surprisingly, the winning teams got $100 on board ship credit and a bag of the usual Princess loot.  

Ben’s morning trivia team “The Internationals” tied for first, but lost the tie breaker.  Ben walked in on the last 2 questions, correcting the team on the number of animals in the Chinese Zodiac.  The tie breaker was how many weeks did Roger Federer hold the top title for the Association of Tennis Professionals.  Answer 237 consecutive weeks and 310 total.  They had missed “Sekt” on a German wine bottle means “Sparkling”. 

The kids were busy on their own, exercising, spending time in the pools, the ship’s casino, and even in an art auction.  There was a contest to guess the weight of a sculpture.  Price missed by just 0.1kg.

We attended an afternoon “Guess the Destination” game where pictures of 6 destinations were put up and if you correctly identified 3, you got 3 raffle tickets.  The prizes were again surprisingly $100 on board spending credit for 3 drawing winners.  Unfortunately, none of us ended up with a winning ticket.

We used half of our specialty dining certificate to have dinner at the Crown Grill.  The food was excellent, but it took 3 hours to get through the dinner.  We missed the 7PM Logos Trivia, which we stood a pretty good chance of winning on.  We stepped into the end of the vocalist’s performance in the Princess Theatre- a Tom Jones styled vocal program, and decided we didn’t need to watch the later show.  We finished our night with a Holiday Trivia Quiz. The winning team managed to beat us by a single point.  

We arrive in Aruba at 8am tomorrow.  We have the kids booked on a UTV excursion, which we have done twice in Aruba before and found to be a lot of fun.  We will relax and maybe walk around town.  We heard in the news that the Royal Caribbean Odessey of the Sea cruise ship was turned away from Aruba and Curaçao.  They will have to loiter at Royal Caribbean’s private cay or at sea until it returns to Fort Lauderdale on December 26 because 55 covid cases broke out, despite the ship being 95% vaccinated.  Our ship has a total passenger capacity of around 3600, but I ran into the captain who said we had 1900 passengers on board, so we are at restricted capacity.  The Odessey of the Sea had over 5100 passengers and crew on board, so it had a 1.1% infection rate.  There were no reports of serious or critical illness.  Royal Caribbean’s Symphony of the Seas had returned to Miami last week with 48 positive crew and passengers. Since there haven’t been an overhead announcement so far, we’re hoping our ship is still Covid free.  We’ll have to keep our fingers crossed. There has been no mandatory arbitrary screening testing on this ship, so testing will only be done if someone presents with Covid-like symptoms.