Day 3 - Still at sea!

We crossed into a new time zone, so we got an extra hour of sleep – we didn’t wake up until about quarter of eight, which was really quarter of 9! It was still gray and cloudy out, but noticeably warmer than yesterday. We headed down to breakfast where we sat with a nice couple named Dennis and Dorothy, who told us the exciting story of getting to their first cruise – broken planes, no available gates, and coming on at the last minute via the gangway where they load the last of the cargo. Needless to say, they arrive early the day before now. Service was unusually slow, and unfortunately my oatmeal didn’t arrive before I needed to leave for water aerobics. My stewed prunes (yes, I love stewed prunes – do you have a problem with that?) had come, and it was quite a serving – maybe 10-12 of them. I decided that restraint would be wise and only ate a couple – our room is nice but I don’t want to spend all day in there! I did eat half of Dave’s bagel and a piece of his salmon, then it was off to the midship pool on the Lido deck to meet with lifestylist Louise. It was not the best water aerobics I’ve ever done – certainly not as good as Bubby’s tape – but it did have one unusual feature. The ship has a wonderful slow side to side roll that’s great for sleeping, but it means that the water in the pool is very active. At one point we were resting our arms on the deck and lifting ourselves up and down, and I got a hit in the face with a big wave! Note to self: don’t close your eyes while you’re doing the aerobics.

After aerobics I sped back to the cabin to get changed, then up to the gym for boot camp, stopping at the lido restaurant for a carton of true moo chocolate milk for after. Yesterday all of us were kind of quiet and the two thin ladies were very serious, but this morning we were a team with one objective: make it through the next half hour. I moved my mat over next to Stephanie. It was harder today than yesterday, and we made the mistake of telling our instructor Mark (who used to be a fitness trainer for the British Army) that the only parts that weren’t sore were our calves and obliques. Let’s just say he took care of that over the next brutal 30 minutes. It was harder today (and is supposed to keep getting harder for the next 2 sessions), but it was more fun as we were doing much more laughing and complaining. I liked the part where he said “are you having fun?” and we all said “NO!” While we were in class it also started to rain.

By now I was completely exhausted but I had nagged Dave into a Cha-Cha class. When I’d gotten to the gym he was working out on the machines (look at that cute guy working on the machines, I told my boot camp buddies) and he’d gone back to the room to shower and change. I slammed down my True Moo (the first sip seemed awfully sweet, but my body was so thrilled for the protein and carbs it went down real easy) and headed upstairs. I got there a little late and had to separate Dave from his partner, a nice looking woman. Men are a little in short supply at cha-cha class. The lesson was half an hour and at the very end we started to feel like we might get it. It’s particularly hard given that neither of us likes to do things we’re not good at in public, so the big thing for us is to refuse to just give up. It turned out that our tablemates John and Carol were right next to us on the dance floor – they already know how to do it, they’d just come to dance. John gave me some very helpful pointers. Our tablemate Gus was there too, but we didn’t see Rita. By the end of class it had cleared up and was sunny and warm and beautiful, so we walked outside to the back of the ship, enjoying the beautiful day.

Time for a quick shower and off to lunch! We met Mama and Merna in the explorer’s lounge and went in. We got a table just the four of us and enjoyed catching up. Unfortunately the service was very slow again – we’re not sure why – and it was made worse because I was starving! It’s the first time I’d been hungry since before Ruth Chris in San Diego. After lunch I remembered that I wanted to go to the memory tips class, so Dave left me at the explorer’s lounge. The class was very well attended – lifestylist Louise was very pleased. She showed us a way of remembering lists of items by associating them with a list of other words that you’re supposed to memorize – it seems a little strange, like wouldn’t it just be easier to memorize the things you want to remember, rather than memorizing a random list of words (developed by Brian Tracy) and then memorizing things in relation to that list? But it actually seemed to work (Fay likes cauliflower, Ray eats potato chips) and it was a fun class. I told my joke about the woman who wanted ice cream with strawberries and it was very well received. Then back to the cabin and time for some relaxing before bingo at 4 and dinner.

Now we take a short break for some comments. The first is about lines. When I got to the Vista lounge where bingo is held, there was quite a line to buy cards (no, they’re not free – what were you thinking? The jackpot is made up of the income from selling the cards). When the dining rooms open, there’s quite a line to get in. One of the things we really liked about Holland America after our first cruise on Carnival is that there weren’t any lines – you don’t want the older folks having to stand in line, especially with the ship rolling from side to side. But I guess this ship is just so big and so full of older folks there’s no way to avoid it. And that leads to another musing on the demographics of this trip, so very different from our Christmas trip two years ago. We ran into the Club Hal coordinator on one of the decks, and she told us there were under 20 kids between the ages of 5-17 on board – contrast that with the 200 or so they regularly have on the Christmas cruise. And there aren’t that many middle-aged folks either. So you can easily get reservations with a personal trainer, or at the hands-on cooking demos, or for a massage, but the breakfast and lunch in the sit-down dining room are packed. And speaking of sit-down dining, the ship can be kind of confusing to get around – yesterday I thought I was on the right (aka starboard or odd numbered stateroom) side of the ship, but it turned out I was on the port side, and I walked half the length of the ship before I figured out that I was never going to get to my cabin if I kept going in that direction. Anyway, it makes me laugh that on the two floors where the dining room is in the very back of the ship, there are signs all the way forward directing you to it. These HAL folks know what’s important. And finally, a note about carpeting. When we were last on the ship, I had made some comments on the satisfaction survey about the ship looking run down, particularly the carpeting which was stained and old looking (and ugly, too, but I think I didn’t put that in there. If you’ve been to Las Vegas you know what I’m talking about). So as they were loading the ship we saw rolls of stuff that we could only imagine were carpeting , and in our stateroom there was a letter saying that last time we’d been on board we’d had some issues and they hoped we’d find they’d been addressed. Sure enough they are replacing the carpeting in the forward elevator lobbies. Every time we go by I feel like I should tell them I’m the one who asked for the new carpet.

OK, so, back to Bingo. I got in line to buy a card and was soon joined by the M sisters. The line moved fairly quickly – they all do, except the one for high tea – and soon we had our cards. It took a while to figure out how this worked – they play 4 games, so you get packs of 4 different colored cards – blue, orange, green, yellow. You can get as many sets as you want – they come in singles, threes, and sixes. Mama and I each bought a 3-pack. The cards are very clever, you just punch out the number as they’re called. They’re attached at the bottom, so you end up with a bunch of what the your DJ Brett, who is from Florida, delightedly called hanging chads. The games are more complicated than the bingo I played as a child – two of them involved making patterns, rather than just the lines we grew up with. They call the numbers, you make your chads, and when you only need 1 more number for a bingo you stand up and everybody moans. They take a very, very long time between numbers, so they have to fill it with bad jokes (why is N44 the star wars bingo ball? May the fours be with you). It made me long for the subway bingo of my childhood birthday parties. So I did get to stand up on the first card, but after that it was all downhill, especially the 4th card, where you had to have the entire card covered (or chadded) for a bingo. I didn’t have any of the first 3 or 4 numbers they called, and Mama was down to 5 on a card and I still had 7 or 8 on each. Then I started doing better, but my best card still had 4 on it when the first person stood up. Then I had 3, but more people stood up. They called the last 3 numbers and I had all of them… I stood up… I won!!! Well, I tied, so we split the $580 pot between us, but I cleared $260 counting what I paid for the card, and that wasn’t bad at all for a first timer. I’m calling it beginner’s luck and don’t think I’ll go again, but it was fun to win.

After giving them my room number so they put the money into our room account (you can get it as cash, but why? They don’t accept cash anywhere on the ship) I was a little late getting to sunset Tai Chi with your lifestylist Louise, and then I had to leave it a little early to get down to dinner, but that was ok because it wasn’t nearly as much fun as the Chair Chi we did at Passover a couple years ago. It was funny because I ended up standing next to Susan from boot camp, and at one point she leaned over and said “this is a little easier than boot camp, isn’t it?” and we both laughed. Or groaned, it was hard to tell. I am very, very sore.

Ok, off to dinner. We had a very spirited but ultimately useless discussion with our tablemates about how you tell if a song is a cha-cha. Dave is very musical, so I figured he’d get it, but he’s just as much at sea (if you’ll pardon the expression) as I am. Cha-cha is a 4 count: 1,2, 3 and 4; 1,2, 3 and 4, and he and I are able to make any song in 4/4 time a cha cha (yes, we can recognize a waltz). But our tablemates say that’s not so, and spent some time naming songs (Jimmy Buffets’ Margaritaville) that were cha chas and humming and drumming on the table, but then they brought in the rhumba, and honestly we were just as lost as when we started. But we made plans to meet in the Queen’s lounge at 9 and they said they’d come get us if there was a cha-cha. There was Notable Food at dinner – my appetizer, a seared ahi tuna carpaccio, would be a stand-out in any setting. We had a very pleasant dinner and headed out for our usual musical evening.

We started in the crow’s nest with Chris as we have every night, and tonight we did some singing along as he was playing some of our favorite Paul Simon tunes. On the other hand, there aren’t really any Paul Simon tunes that we aren’t favorites. He commented that he liked songs that tell stories, and we talked about how he mostly liked ones that told sad stories. So he said, “here’s one with a happy ending”, that ended up with a dead policeman, the male protagonist in the electric chair, and the female protagonist back at her old dead-end life, but now driving a Mercedes. “I realized about halfway through that it wasn’t really a happy ending,” Chris said.

At 8:45 we had to head down to the Queen’s lounge because that’s where all the dancer were going to be and we wanted to get good seats. We did get to see lots of dancing – I especially enjoyed watching Gus and Rita, who are wonderful dancing couple even though they move very slowly. Unfortunately the “lady in red” and her partner who danced so well last night weren’t there, and Vivienne continued to have issues with her high notes, so it wasn’t as much fun as it could have been – although John did come over and repeat his threat, I mean offer, to dance with us if they played a cha-cha. Fortunately they didn’t. When Viv & her HALcats took their break we moved forward to the Vista lounge for the show, Elliott Max, billed as “silly songs and jokes”.

Mama had told us at dinner that she wasn’t going to go to the show as they were often a little raunchy. Elliott wasn’t raunchy, but he did have a higher percentage of poop and fart jokes than I thought strictly necessary, although I did like the one about the 7 short blasts and the one long one. But much of what he did was not raunchy and very funny – he did a takeoff on “these boots are made for walking” which was about getting stuck behind a group of slow-moving folks in shorts and black socks that is in my head. I’ll be singing “old coots are out there walking” for some time.

When the show ended we were ready to call it a night. We’re cruising mostly to the west (and a little south), so in addition to it getting warmer, we hit a new time zone every day. So we gain another hour tonight (Don’t worry, says cruise director Dave, we’ll take them all back on the trip home). I’m loving the days at sea, even if I am still cramming way too much into them and am so sore from boot camp that sitting down is an adventure and standing up is a workout. Tonight’s towel animal: Octopus (or maybe a squid – it only has 4 tentacles, so we’re not sure).