The Great Crossing Begins

Our last sight of land for 6 days

As usual I woke up before my alarm and headed up to the gym. It was Adriaan this morning, which is always nice – he has a little more variety and enthusiasm. Dave came up while we were doing abs and worked out as well. After class I asked Adriaan if it would disturb his spin class if I kept working out it the corner of the class area, and he mournfully told me that probably no-one would come to class anyway, and no-one did, so I had a nice time (well, ok, not really) working through day 4, chatting on and off with Adriaan about his day off. He’d gone for a run, and lost track of time, and suddenly realized he was 50 minutes from the ship and needed to hustle to get back. So he was a little sore. He’s also a second degree black belt in some form of martial arts. I got confirmation from Christine that Nia is moving to 10, so I can do the boot camp starting tomorrow.

I went to breakfast in the dining room, but they put me at a table by myself so I figured I might as well go up to the Lido; I can get the same breakfast there but it’s quicker. After breakfast we put on our rain jackets and took the tender over to Horta. It was raining lightly when we left, and more heavily when we arrived. We had our picture taken with pirates, which was the whole point of getting off the ship, walked out of the terminal onto the black-and-white patterned street, and the went back into the terminal and back onto the tender and back to the ship, where we read in our room for a while and I had a giant nap.

We had lunch with a very nice couple from Quebec who started out by apologizing for their English, which was very, very good. I never know quite how to respond when people apologize for not having perfect English, because they always have way more of it than I have of their language, and I think it’s brave and impressive that they even try, much less do that well. They are veteran cruisers and say that Holland America (all the old pros just call it Holland) has the best food, staff, and dining room presentation of any of the cruise lines, but that the Cunard ships are nicer. The problem is once you’ve given your loyalty to one line, it’s very hard to give up the perks to go on another. Our waiter was our own Yuda, which was very comfortable, especially since I wanted to order one of the main dishes as an appetizer and another as a main.

When we’d gone to shore there were free wifi signs everywhere, so after lunch I took Arnold and headed back there to try to get the Macon photos uploaded to facebook. Unfortunately both Arnold and my phone refused to connect, so I came back to the ship. It was fun choosing the pictures for the Macon album out of the almost 350 that we have – kind of like reliving the wonderful adventure. There’s another island very near this one that is a volcano, and but it didn’t clear up enough to see the top before we headed out. At 4 we went to the culinary demo. Chef Daniel is very earnest, but I found your culinary host Ashley somewhat lacking. After the culinary demo we watched the last tender come in and get hoisted up, which was fun, and then headed back to the room until dinner. We waved goodbye to land as we pulled away from Horta – next time we see land will be in Ft Lauderdale, about 2,500 miles from here. Our heading is 247 degrees, and my guess is that heading will land us right in Ft Lauderdale – a straight line, accounting for the curve of the earth and the various ocean currents.

Dinner was fun as usual, although there was a sad part. One of our tablemates, Pam, is quite overweight. She explained the first night that her thyroid is bad and that she has some sort of metabolic disorder, and we all nodded. Tonight she started talking about it again, saying how her parents had even offered to send her to a special clinic in Switzerland because “they’re ashamed of having a fat daughter who isn’t beautiful”. She repeated it several times – “I’m not beautiful.” I don’t think she was saying it just so we’d all disagree – she seemed to really believe it, and it breaks my heart and infuriates me at the same time – because she is beautiful. She needs Nia! How dumb is it that she’s judging herself so harshly?

Anyway, after dinner we went to the show Devlin the Matador of Magic – which was a pretty average magic show. (Unlike last night’s BB King show, which everybody is still talking about how good it was) One thing is they did the changing your outfit in a small space trick, which I don’t think I’d ever seen before this cruise but which has been a staple of at least 2 and possibly 3 of the acts. Also he did a floating table trick which looked totally fake, but I still couldn’t figure out how he did it.

After that we went for a brief walk around deck 11, and then Dave went back to the room for a nap while I went to the crows nest to watch your party host Saul do name that tune. He has a real knack for making things as unexciting as possible, but I do love his Scottish accent. Tonight is the Filipino crew show at 11, but for some reason they’re showing a movie in the Queen’s lounge rather than having music, so I’m  not sure quite what we’re going to do until then. I’m going to go ahead and post the blog before the show, although we do get another hour tonight.

Tonight’s towel animal: teddy bear, another new one for us. Unfortunately the seas are a little rougher than they’ve been and his head keeps rolling off.