20240506 Monday May 6, 2024: At Sea

 20240506 Monday, May 6, 2024: At Sea

We have had very pleasant weather for the most part with temperatures in the 70’s and most blue sky overhead.  We did have a downpour last night which gave the pool deck a good wash down, and gave people watching Top Gun Maverick reason to duck under the eaves, but there was no sign of that kind of weather even on the horizon this morning.  The seas have also been pretty easy with swells no more than 1-2 meters.  

Getting our clocks adjusted took quite some doing because our iPhones kept saying we could not manually adjust time zones because of “device restrictions”.  Ben spent an hour on Apple support chat trying everything short of completely erasing the phone, but to no avail.  He finally gave up when they got to a point where you had to wait an hour for security because we weren’t geographically at our home and it was past 2:30am by the.  Ben was finally able to find a work around while trying to completely disable the Screen Time feature which most people use as a back up security measure in case someone steals your iPhone after memorizing your passcode.  While the Apple techs had Ben simply turn off the Screen Time features, Ben discovered that if you select the option to change the Screen Time passcode, on the next screen an option appears that allows complete removal of the passcode.  Well, that turned out to be the key.  Once the passcode was removed entirely, he was then able to manually adjust the time zones.  Apple will be getting some vociferous complaints on their feedback page about how crazy difficult it is to do something as simple as change a time zone manually for when you are somewhere with no cellular service, which is what is used to automatically set time zones.  Since we both have Apple Watches which sync to the iPhones, it wasn’t just the iPhones that displayed the wrong time. 

 
We decided to have a sit down breakfast in the same dining room we have dinner at.  It sounded like someone was chiseling off paint on the outside of the dining room, so that was distracting, but the service and food were all excellent and Janet got to get eggs Benedict with no fuss.  Ben had what was described as a country breakfast, but which was more of an English breakfast, complete with two poached eggs on toast, a grilled tomato and small rashers with beans and corned beef hash.  
We warmed up with our trivia team during the morning trivia where we could only manage 11/20, but the winning team’s score was 14.  There was a riddle that stumped us. What is the size of a biscuit, the depth of a cup, but an entire river can’t fill it.

  
After breakfast, we spent a relaxed morning napping, doing DuoLingo French lessons and getting caught up on emails.  The ship had a pub lunch in the Palm Dining room, but we have done enough of these to know the Bangers and Mash, and Fish and Chips just aren’t worth the crowd.  Butch and Jane spent 90 minutes getting lunch there.  We opted for the buffet instead.

  
The afternoon second Progressive trivia was pretty challenging, but also had its share of controversial questions including how many squares are on a Tic Tac Toe board?  Well technically, if you define a square to have 4 equal sides, there is really only one square in a typical hash tag Tic Tac Toe game.  The other 8 playing spaces have only 2 or 3 lines and are open on the outside. But his answer was 9.  We ended up with another score of 15/20, but have no idea how things are going relative to all the other teams.

 
This was the first formal night of this cruise. Since we will have to deal with our own luggage during our land tours in the UK and France we needed to minimize our luggage for our 2 month trip. This is the first time Ben decided not to pack a suit or sport coat for formal nights, instead packing a tie and a button down sport shirt and casual  slacks.  Ben also didn’t pack any dress shoes, but we were not given any friction to get into the dining room.  We both had the leg of lamb, which came out sliced and boneless.  We had imagined lamb shanks, but these turned out to be excellent and very tender.  The veggies and mash were also excellent.  For dessert, we had the hazelnut bars which came from the former chocolate journey menu.  We learned from our waiter that Princess Cruises had dropped the partnership with world famous chocolatier Norman Love but kept his dessert recipes, so they are no longer called Chocolate Journey desserts.  

The Princess Theater featured the production show “Bravo”, which features popular opera and theater numbers with the full cast of singers and dancers.  We have seen this show many times on many ships, but it never seems to get old.  The casts on the various ships each have their strengths and weaknesses, but this cast had mostly strengths with excellent vocals and dance performances.  One of the female leads was Ellora Lattin, who had done a solo matinee show yesterday (with Taylor Swift vibes).  It is impressive to see how diverse these singers can be.  They also had their guest soprano from Chicago who really belted out those operatic diva notes, not missing a single one.

  

We finished up the night with back to back trivia wins in I’ll Take Trivia for 100 where we teamed up with Patty and Matt from New York and Gwen from Ontario with a perfect score.  We won champagne which nobody wanted but which we will donate to our room steward.  Then we also won Movie Themes with Angela. Mike joined our team after he played on his own during I’ll Take Trivia for 100.  We had actually tied another team of 2 for the top score so we negotiated to give the couple the champagne, and we took coasters to add to our collection.

The clocks move forward another hour tonight.  Now that we have fixed the issue with device restrictions by eliminating the Screen Time app functions, we can more easily jump forward an hour.  Matt showed us how you can directly enter the time once it is off Automatic by selecting the shown date and time below, as opposed to trying to find a city in the time zone that is in Apple’s extremely limited list of choices.  It’s nice to have gotten that problem sorted.