Day 38: 20231031 Tuesday, October 31, 2023- Halloween at Sea
Even though this is a sea day, we have remained within sight of land out our balcony, and have encountered freighters and other boat traffic. We are going around the York Peninsula, and although it is generally described as flat, it looks plenty hilly or even mountainous in places. There are many small islands that we are going past, and there are navigational buoys and fixed markers presumably mounted on reefs that are very numerous in this part of the Coral sea. The old timey navigators had to be experts, vigilant and lucky to sail these waters without wrecking on the many reefs. We could see several bush fires burning in the distance at various places around the York Peninsula. These are adding a lot of haze to the air.
The ship’s staff were busy last night decorating the ship with Halloween decorations in the lounges. There was a pumpkin carving demonstration which created some unusual pumpkins. There seems to be very few orange pumpkins around here. We learned that Halloween originated in Ireland and that the first Jack-O-Lanterns were carved from turnips and other root vegetables. When pumpkins arrived from the New World (Americas) it didn’t take long to switch to the much easier to carve pumpkins.
We slept in and had a quick bite to eat and coffee at the International cafe. The baked goods on the Coral Princess are consistently good and fresh. There was something definitely amiss with the Grand Princess’s baked goods. We then joined a couple from the UK for the morning general knowledge trivia. We got beat by one point. Fortunately, we were only playing for silly Princess “Winner” medals, which we wouldn’t care to take home. We have had one particular question on several trivia quizzes on both the Grand and Coral Princess since October that switches answers every time it comes up. The question is what is the most popular drink in the world that isn’t alcoholic and isn’t water. Half the times, the answer is coffee, while the other half the times, the answer is tea. We figure all the Chinese can’t be wrong, and even if there are a bazillion Starbucks outlets around the world, people drink all sorts of teas at home, work and while relaxing world wide. Google can’t seem to agree on one answer or the other. We think they should just toss that question.
It is getting noticably warmer outside with temperatures in the mid 80’s. It is generally sunny with patchy clouds. Despite our proximity to the Great Barrier Reef and the Australian land mass, there haven’t been a lot of birds or other wildlife around the ship. I did spot an unusual sight that I’m not sure what it was, but it looked like some sort of mother ship towing a string of 5 sizable motor boats of about 24’ each behind it like a string of pearls. There were also huge outriggers extending from either side of the mother ship with some sort of heavy lines dropping into the water. These were possibly some sort of stabilizers, but I’m interested to learn more about this unusual set up.
Our afternoon progressive Trivia went off OK. We managed to maintain our lead, but just barely. There is a team that is just 1.75 points behind us. The other teams are 3+ points behind us. We won today’s session and took home string bags.
The cruise director’s staff and some of the dining room and bar staff have dressed up in costumes, as have some of the passengers, but Halloween has just recently been adopted by Australians and New Zealanders. It’s not like in Japan where they are as much into Halloween decorations and parties as the US is.
The Princess Theater had a hypnotist Bill Wheeler who had 20 people come up on stage and volunteer to be hypnotized. It’s entertaining to see how susceptible people can be to the powers of suggestion and the process of hypnosis. The mind is a strange and poorly understood thing.
