20240510 Friday May 10, 2024; At Sea
After so many sea days, we have established a pretty comfortable routine which keeps us quite busy from sunrise to bedtime consisting of lots of trivia, eating, shows and walking around the ship. These transoceanic cruises are like camp for grown ups.
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After a quick breakfast in the buffet, our trivia team had its best performance yet on the 10am warm up trivia, missing just 1 out of 20, but there was a team that outscored us with a perfect score.
After the morning trivia there is now usually a destination lecture, but those are so crowded that we watch recorded versions on our stateroom TV’s. Janet has enjoyed a true crime series of lectures by a retired detective from the Hollywood beat who likes to revel in the messy details of celebrity crimes. It is also a good time to put in laps around the promenade deck. On this ship, you can go all the way around the ship on the promenade deck, although you have to ascend two flights of stairs to get to the open area in the bow which has a panoramic view, but frequently gets swept with high winds. Today the winds were coming across our starboard side, so the winds at the bow were not nearly as strong as if they were blowing into the bow. 2.7 laps is one mile. It’s also not too difficult to get 10,000 steps in if you attend many activities because the ship is over 1000’ long. Our stateroom is close to the forward staircase and elevators, and only one floor above the promenade deck where the Princess Theater and venues where Trivia are held, so we only bother to take the elevators up if we’re going to the Buffet, which is 6 decks above.
We watched the destination lectures on Ponta Delgada in the Azores and Cork (Cobh) Ireland, and also finished the movie “The Boys in the Boat”, chronicling the 1936 Olympics and the underdog University of Washington Junior Varsity boat that overcame the odds and won the gold medal in Berlin.
There was a reveal of the Progressive Trivia scores after the 5th session, which showed we had a commanding lead of 10 points over the second place team. Today’s quiz went OK for us, so we think our Progressive Trivia lead is safe.
Next was a Queen music trivia which combined name that tune with Queen band trivia questions. We teamed up with Mike and also Emily from Indiana, who had joined us on an earlier trivia. We learned she just completed her ARNP and is taking this trip to celebrate. We get off in Southampton, but she is continuing on for another 10 days to Copenhagen, Oslo, Rostock (Berlin) and other European ports of call. This is her first time visiting Europe, and it looks like she will be getting a grand introduction. We ended up winning the Queen trivia and coasters.
After a promenade break, we then wrapped up the afternoon with the 4PM general trivia with Mike and Emily. We managed to win that trivia as well, and donated our coasters to Emily so she would have a full set for souvenirs. It’s too bad they don’t have too many other prizes on this cruise besides the coasters.
After dinner we did a Close Ups Trivia which shows macro photos of common objects. We sat with Mike and invited another woman who was playing solo. Jenny is from Florida, but was originally from the UK and has spent the last 25 years first in Connecticut and then Florida. She’s traveling back to the UK on this particular cruise to join a big family gathering. It turned out that she was the one who won the 50’s and 60’s trivia last night playing solo. She explained she grew up in the 50’s and 60’s in the UK where all the music action was- after all, it was the British Invasion. So she has a standing invitation to join us on any future music trivia games. Despite this not being a music trivia, we won the Close Ups trivia.
The Princess Theater Show was a second performance by Mikey Voltano, who put on another energetic show with vocals and saxophone riffs from the 60’s and beyond.
We finished up the evening with a dessert run and watching Freaky Friday on the TV. Tomorrow we arrive in the Azores for our first port of call, so we’ll be shaking up our sea day routine for a change.
