Day 59: 20231121 Tuesday, November 21, 2023- Last Sea Day on the Coral Princess
Sadly, we spent most of the morning packing up our suitcases. There is one saving grace to the fact that we are just going ashore for a few days before starting an overland segment of our next Princess cruise tour, and that is that we don’t have to worry so much about the weight of our suitcases and getting items sorted for TSA carry on compatible vs checked luggage only. We will have to worry about those details at the end of the next cruise on the Royal Princess after we have gone around New Zealand with two of our adult children in mid December.
All around the ship, there are farewells going on. This nearly month long itinerary has created lots of new friendships and acquaintances, not only amongst the passengers, but also with many of the ship’s staff including our room steward, the bar tenders, waiters and servers who have come to know us by names and what our favorites are. This ship is small enough, with fewer than 1900 passengers, for it to have an intimate feel and experience. We have gifted many of our trivia trinkets to staff who don’t receive any ship swag, and appreciate having something they can easily take home as a souvenir of their contract.
Instead of a morning trivia, they had a cooking demonstration in the Universe lounge. We have seen these before, and they tend to be more humorous than instructive, but it also gave them an opportunity to introduce more of the cooking, housekeeping and wait staff to the passengers. We certainly have been well fed.
Today at the lunch buffet, they had a dessert extravaganza featuring some really nice desserts. We especially enjoyed the fresh cannoli and Lamington cakes.
The Pop Choir had their concert today, and it was enjoyable to watch fellow passengers perform. One of our trivia team members, who was indispensable for music questions, was not surprisingly a member of the Pop Choir. They were directed by Jed, who has also done many trivia quizzes over the duration of the cruise, and he was assisted by a mysterious cruise staffer named Emily, who usually is incognito as the character Fortuna Luck, who hosts the bingo games and other Casino activities. Since we don’t gamble, we hadn’t really seen her except while waiting for Bingo to finish in the afternoons since the afternoon Trivia is held in the same venue. She is a talented singer and dancer, it turns out.
The afternoon trivia started with a brief awards ceremony for the Progressive Trivia. There were 13 sessions over the course of the cruise and we did manage to hold on to our lead throughout the cruise, extending it to 15 points at the end. There was an extremely tight race for second and third places. And interestingly, Tamás awarded a prize to the lowest scoring team that stuck it out for the full 13 sessions with perfect attendance. That was awfully nice. Since winning teams at each individual session got prizes, we had collected a fair number of string bags, coasters, luggage tags and such over the course of the cruise. The prize for the Progressive Trivia turned out to be a string bag containing 6 Coral Princess ball point pens, a deck of playing cards, a Coral Princess Key Chain, and a pencil sharpener. If you didn’t bring a ball point pen, the pencil sharpener would be a great prize for sharpening those stubby golf pencils for frequent trivia players. The pens were easy enough to distribute among the team mates. The rest were up for grabs. There was a normal trivia session that followed which we were happy wasn’t part of the progressive series. We had only scored 19 while one team had some how scored 25, so their cruise trivia ended on a high note as well.
There was a 70’s music trivia that Janet and I played mostly just to hear the music. It’s surprising sometimes all the songs you hear that trigger memories that are fun to hear, even if you can’t come up with the title or artist. We got outscored by 10 points on that trivia, so we’re certainly no experts on 70’s music.
The final Princess theater presentation for the cruise was a variety show featuring encore performances by Jed, Sarah, the Scared Weird Little Guys and Paul Tabono, as well as a short number by the production singers and dancers. Interestingly, one of the female lead singers was missing from the cast. We hope she’s not too sick because Covid has been around the ship. They also took the opportunity to bring a lot of the ship’s crew from housekeeping, kitchen, restaurants and other departments through the theater waving flags while the party band singer did a rendition of Tina Turner’s Simply the Best. It was a fitting way to finish up the cruise.
We made our last soup run after the show and sat with the New Zealanders whom we had played Logos trivia with early in the cruise, and who have been very pleasant and friendly to see in in passing through out the cruise. We exchanged contact information. You never know when paths will cross again, but amongst world travelers, it does seem to happen with unexpected frequency.
