Day 5: 20230926 Wednesday, September 27, 2023- At Sea to Los Angeles
Things are looking a bit brighter today. Although the seas are still moderately heavy (winds 30mph, seas 6-8’, Beaufort 6) there are cloudless blue skies above with only scattered clouds on the horizon to the south. Ben also discovered that the crew has brought out Janet’s favorite Bigelow Earl Grey tea to the buffet self serve beverage stations, a big step up from Lipton tea bags. We haven’t found out how many passengers we currently have on board but our room steward reports he now has 16 cabins to clean, which is more than before. We must have taken on a significant number of passengers for the San Francisco to Hawaii leg. We had also learned that Ben’s brother in law Tony, who we had just seen in San Francisco, will be flying to Honolulu to help out his parents on Monday. We will be arriving on Tuesday, so we might be seeing Tony again if the ship is on time and our afternoon excursion schedule holds.
The morning’s activities following a sit down breakfast started with Speed Sudoku, which is timed, but there are no prizes awarded. Then there was the morning general trivia. Our partners from last night didn’t attend so we played solo. No win this morning for us. We could have used some Aussies on our team, who would have know Australia’s first female Prime Minister was Julia Gillard. There were 4 teams with a top score of 16/20, and all got prize tickets, but they did have a tie breaker question of how many pieces are in the retired Lego Tower Bridge set. 4295!
Ben then hit the gym while Janet went to learn how to draw. However, the drawing lessons were in the Crown Grill and the instructor was not amplified so Janet ended up joining Ben in the gym. Lunch from the poolside Salty Dog grill featured a decent pulled pork sandwich with Cole slaw for Ben and BLT hamburger with extra T for Janet, enjoyed in the comfort of our balcony. Even though the winds were blowing at 30+ mph, our balcony was well sheltered and comfortable. The temperature is a perfect 66˚F. As the afternoon progressed, the winds and seas calmed considerably.
There is a progressive trivia for this leg of the cruise, but when we showed up, Dave and Carolyn were not to be found. We did have Sharon from St Louis and Maxine from New Zealand join us at the last minute. The questions were really hard. We only managed 11/20.
Dinner was back to the same menu we had on the earlier cruise segment from Vancouver to San Francisco, but since there are a couple entrees to choose from, we didn’t have to repeat, unless we wanted to. Janet’s all time Princess favorite is the French Onion soup.
The evening was musical in nature starting with a mixed bag music trivia where we tied with 3 other teams for first. But they did have a tie breaker question of how many music genres are there. We guessed 15 while another group guessed 18. The answer was apparently 130. I guess it depends on what you define as a genre.
We closed out the night with a showtime presentation by Doug Cameron, a pop violinist who put on an entertaining show with his blue violin backed by the Princess band on stage. There was a lot of canned video and sound in addition to the band, so some parts seemed a bit like lip syncing on a violin, but he did do quite a bit of improvisation and interacting with the first couple rows of the audience. One of the videos he played was with him doing a pops concert with the Manhattan symphony- Manhattan, Kansas, that is. Not Manhattan New York. But it was a decent show.
The ship pulled into the port of Los Angeles at San Pedro, only to embark some divers and support crew. The ship will move out to anchor later tonight and the divers will do their thing tomorrow. We were scheduled to have a deluxe balcony breakfast in our stateroom tomorrow morning, but we received notice that our balcony will be undergoing maintenance work from 8am to 11:30am, so we rescheduled the breakfast. Hopefully, we won’t have to vacate our stateroom while they do the maintenance work. I imagine a lot of people will be spending tomorrow on the pool deck.
