Day 9: 20231001 Sunday October 1, 2023- At Sea LA to Hawaii

 Day 9: 20231001 Sunday October 1, 2023- At Sea LA to Hawaii

Our balcony got closed again for more cleaning.  There was a lot of salt spray the previous day, and it looked like they hosed off the salt. 

The water is now a very deep blue color, quite different from our water in Puget Sound.  

Now that we’ve been at sea for a few days, a regular schedule is developing for us. Breakfast in the dining room, morning trivia and then exercise.  Lunch in the dining room followed by free time until the afternoon progressive trivia.  At progressive trivia, we found that we had only dropped to 4th place with 3 teams with higher scores, and the highest team is only 3 points above us, so there is still a chance we might come out on top.  However, the cruise staff announced they would wrap up the progressive trivia tomorrow before we arrive in Hawaii, and will start a new progressive game after Hawaii.  We felt we did better today, not blowing any of the multi point questions so we’ll see how we do when the scores are announced tomorrow.

Dinner featured an oxtail soup and rack of lamb.  One of our favorites on prior Princess cruises was a wagon wheel pasta with oxtail, but this oxtail soup was made with finely diced vegetables and tiny bits of diced meat that had a good taste, and was serve with with a pastry dome, but it not up to the wagon wheel pasta of the past.  The rack of lamb, however, was excellent.  

The Princess theater featured the violinist we had already seen during the Vancouver to San Francisco leg, so we ended up just relaxing and doing an ABBA trivia in the evening with most of our progressive trivia team.  We missed winning by just 1 point so we did OK.  

Ben started clearing his throat frequently and even had an occasional cough and sneeze but hasn’t had a fever or felt ill at all.  But to be safe, he started wearing a mask after dinner and did a Covid self test in the room.  Fortunately, the Covid test was negative, so this is just some other random upper respiratory virus.  We did get our updated Covid booster vaccinations just the day before we boarded the ship in Vancouver, so it would have been a disappointment if the test had come up positive.