Day 8: 20230930 Saturday September 30, 2023- At Sea LA to Hawaii
It’s starting to look and feel a little more like we’re going to Hawaii as the seas are getting calmer and the sun is coming out.
After a quick breakfast in the buffet we did the morning trivia with Sharon and missed winning by one point. The gym was pretty crowded today even though the promenade deck was open this morning. After working out, we spent some time relaxing and building our base tans on our balcony.
Lunch was in the dining room where we sat with Two couples from Australia and a couple from Toronto. One advantage to using the dining room is they do offer real gelato for dessert, which is better than the soft serve on the pool deck.
The afternoon included a crafts class in which we learned to braid ribbon Leis, and the progressive trivia. We were excited to see that we had moved up to second place tied with two other teams and one team 2 points above us in first place, but then we blew a 6 point question, which will probably cause our standing to plummet back down.
Dinner in the dining room was fairly uninspired with a turkey dinner and something described as Chorochet featuring smoked pork, sausage and sauer kraut which turned out to simply be ham, sausage and bacon on sauer kraut with a couple of potatoes. They did have Panko baked Alaskan cod on the menu, but there’s no telling what fish it might really have been. Ben was disappointed to have missed Udon at the buffet during lunch service, and even more so to see it wasn't in the buffet in the evening.
We attended Kevin Jordan’s second standup show which had different jokes including riffs on being married to a former police detective and bucket list items. This was in the Vista Lounge which is smaller and more intimate than the Princess theater. It was another entertaining show with lots of laughs. After that we dropped in on a “Who am I” trivia where clues are revealed at different point levels. For example, the first clue might be “I was born in 1926 in Los Angeles”. If you committed to an answer with just that clue, it was worth 5 points. However, you got zero if the answer is wrong as subsequent clues may reveal more about who it is. If you committed to answering with the second clue you could score a maximum of 2 points. And if you waited for a third clue, you’d get a maximum of 1 point. If you are aggressive and try to get the most points by guessing with only the first clues, it can backfire and you end up getting nothing if your first guess is wrong. It turned out to be pretty hard, and the strategy balancing points vs certainty of answer makes it more complicated. Regardless, we didn’t come close to winning that.
We finished out the night with Tiki Dave’s Jukebox of Our Lives show in the Princess theater. He had been on our prior Hawaiian cruise from LA and does the Ukulele lessons on board. He was backed by the Princess band and did songs from the late 50’s to early 80’s. He did a decent show but had a small audience for the second show of the night, and didn’t do his show a service by chasing people sneaking out of the theater during the show.
Clocks go back another hour tonight, putting us on Honolulu time even though we still have another 2 days at sea before we arrive. Tomorrow is likely to be a repeat of today’s activities, although we hope to have the opportunity to redeem our progressive trivia performance of today.
