Day 55: 20231117 Friday, November 17, 2023- At Sea
It was surprisingly hard to get up this morning even though the clocks went forward just a half hour, but the good news is we are now on Melbourne and Sydney time, so we won’t have to do any more time changes until we head to New Zealand in a couple of weeks.
Even though our brains felt sluggish, we weren’t the only ones because we managed to win the morning trivia missing only one question- What is the world’s record for eating chicken nuggets in 60 seconds. The answer was a surprising 19. It seems like it should be higher but then again, we’ve never tried to swallow a handful of chicken nuggets all at once. We won the little Princess notebooks, which Sharon was over the moon happy about. That broke a long dry spell for trivia wins for us.
We had lunch in the restaurant, and although it took a long time to get through the meal, we across from an enormous model cruise ship that a passenger and his wife had constructed over the course of the cruise. It was nearly 4' long x 2' wide and 3' tall, and was sitting atop a catering cart. The ship has a ship building contest and this was obviously the clear winner. The guy even fitted it with dual propellers and a wireless remote control so he could drive it across the swimming pool. Not only that, but there are color pictures of over 100 Coral Princess staff people from all many departments looking out from over 100 portholes and windows on the model, including all the officers looking out from the bridge. Pretty insane. He said it took about 100hrs to build. I can't imagine he or his wife had time to do much else on the cruise over the last month.
There was an enrichment lecture on the history of passenger cruise ships that was interesting. Of the over 200 countries in the world, how many were never invaded by the British? The answer is a surprisingly low 22. The British Empire was certainly busy at its height. The first purpose built passenger cruise ship was the Prinzessin Victoria Luise, which sailed for the Hamburg-America Line in 1900. It had 120 all first class cabins and was about half the length an half the beam of the Coral Princess. She only sailed for 6 years before running around on a reef in the Caribbean. Her German captain committed suicide on the bridge after all the passengers and crew were safely rescued. That certainly wasn’t the way the captain of the Costa Concordia carried himself after running that ship aground and killing 33.
What’s a little frightening is the size of the latest cruise ships. At 236,857 gross tonnes, 1,187 feet in length and 210 feet in beam, the Royal Caribbean Wonder of the Seas is a monster with over 7000 passengers and 2369 crew. Princesses newest class of ships, the Sun Class, will hit the seas next year. They are 175,500 gross tonnes and 4300 passenger ships. The Royal Class is the current largest in the Princess Fleet. We will be boarding the Royal Princess Sydney in December and she is 142,000 gross tonnes with a 3600 passenger capacity. We do like the Coral Princess for her generous balconies, standard stateroom size, and lack of crowding in public spaces. She is only 91,627 gross tonnes with 1970 passengers. We think Viking has gone the opposite direction with their ocean cruise ships being 47,842 gross tonnes and carrying 930 passengers and 602 crew. But at that size there is definitely less entertainment staff to keep passengers amused on itineraries with lots of sea days.
The final progressive trivia session was today, and to give people a fighting chance to take on the leaders (us), they devised a final quiz with up to 36 possible points with four questions worth up to 4 points each. We suffered from not having expertise in comic books and got beat by 5 points on today’s session, but managed to hold our lead to win the progressive series by 15.25 points over second place and 17 points over 3rd place. The winners will be announced in an awards ceremony on the last sea day before we arrive in Sydney. It’ll be interesting to see what they come up with for a progressive prize that won’t overstuff our suitcases.
Tonight was another formal night so we dressed up for dinner one more time. The menu has been on rotation so we have seen most of it before, but Ben had tuna steaks that were quite good, and that was the first time he had tried that on the cruise. Janet had the Surf and Turf, but the surf part was shrimp dumplings, which were kind of like blenderized shumai instead of real prawns. It wasn’t quite the same, although the beef tenderloin was quite good. And the desserts were fancy, but we were pretty stuffed by the time they arrived.
The entertainment staff had one of the assistant cruise director staff put on a cabaret in the Princess Theater tonight where Jed, who has done many trivia quizzes for us, and also leads the pop choir, sung a number of broadway show tunes and pop songs. He is quite talented but was on the stage all by himself with canned accompaniment music, but everyone has gotten to know him through the cruise and cheered for him heartily.
Tomorrow we arrive in Melbourne, Victoria. Having spent some time there prior to our first New Zealand cruise, we have some familiarity with the area and didn’t book any organized excursions. We plan to take the trolley around the city center and perhaps see if we can hit Chinatown for dumplings and a hair cut.
