We get high, but we don't like it

I forgot to say that another reason yesterday was so much better than the day before was that the wine steward started calling Dave “Sir David”, which is his official title.

I woke up before my alarm and headed up to the gym. Today was the other instructor, who has a little more personality in the stretch class but not enough for me to remember his name. Instead of abs they did something called total body conditioning, which was kind of like bodyfit at double speed – you start with 20 squats, then 20 squats plus 10 lunges with dumbbell curls on each side, the those two plus squats with overhead presses 10 each arm, and keep adding on – 20 mason twists, 10 pushups, 20 prone arm & leg raises. All at very fast speeds; we were done with the whole thing plus short warmup and cooldown in about 20 minutes. I kept up fine, and the woman behind me did too. As we went to put away our dumbbells she commented that she’d enjoyed the workout very much and it was her 80^th birthday. Guess I have to keep going.

I came back to the room and Dave was still asleep, so I went down to the dining room for breakfast. I see I never mentioned that our room is on the 8^th floor, so unless you’re going to the crows nest, the gym, the spa, or the lido deck it’s always down. Which is nice until you have to come back up, since we try to take the stairs unless I’m wearing heels. I sat with two very nice couples at breakfast. When I got back to the room Dave was back from getting breakfast at the Lido, so we prepared to head in to Cartagena.

The ship is docked pretty far from town but there’s a free shuttle into the touristy part, which has lots of museums. We started at the Roman Theatre, an excavated amphitheater from Roman times.  It’s big. Next stop was supposed to be the Augusteum, but when we got to the place we thought it should be there was nothing there. Across the street, though, was the Casa Fortunata, which was very well done – basically it’s an excavated Roman house, but the descriptions were interesting and just the right length so that you felt that you learned something without getting bored.

Then we went up to the castle, which you get to by going up a very tall elevator and then walking across an (enclosed but) very narrow bridge 10,000 feet in the air. Well, it probably wasn’t that high, but it freaked both of us out. The signage in the castle wasn’t very good, both in that you couldn’t figure out which way to go and that it didn’t tell you much about the castle. Also somewhere below the castle was supposed to be a civil war museum, which we paid for but never found.

By now it was very hot in the sun and we were hungry, so we went back to a street I’d seen earlier and had lunch. The restaurant turned out to be not very good, although my Andalusian gazpacho was very good, if not traditional for this region. We also both had possibly the weirdest food we’ve had on the trip  - huevos rellenos, or stuffed eggs. If you google it you will get recipes for deviled eggs, but what we got were hard boiled eggs (and I do mean hard boiled), cut in half, with a mound of tuna salad (complete with pickles) on top. Also the desserts deserve a mention – Dave had flan that was clearly made from a mix but was almost impossible to stop eating, and I had a bright white mousse that was very white.

We wandered through a few shops, and then headed back to the ship and took naps – me on the bed, and Dave on the couch where he could look out the verandah door as he fell asleep. The nap was very rejuvenating. When we woke up it was almost 4, so he headed up to the culinary center for the paella demonstration, and I took my phone & speaker to the nightclub and practiced teaching. Several people came through while I was teaching and must have thought I was crazy, because of course I was talking out loud to my imaginary class the whole time.

I got back to the table and showered for dinner, and we had another fun night with our tablemates. Pam and Jeff had been at the next table over at breakfast, and then we saw them at lunch in Cartagena, so that was funny. Jim used to work for Colgate-Palmolive, and encouraged us all to use Colgate Total. Keith told a story (because Diane made him) about going to the Big Lots and buying 100 expired (but just barely) sample sized tubes of toothpaste (Colgate, fortunately) for $4. And so on.

After dinner we went to the show, which was called Classical Graffiti and was a string quartet (2 violins, violas, cello). I’m not a big fan of stringed instruments generally, but these were the Canadian Brass of string players – not just very good, but also dancing and singing and getting the audience going as well. The cello player, Heidi, was also the one who did most of the talking. She had something sticking out of the neck of the cello that went behind her neck and somehow made the cello hang there while she danced around – it was quite a performance.

Then we went back to the Queen’s lounge for more of the BB King All-Star Blues Band, definitely our favorite place to be. We did lots of chair dancing and even standing dancing for one song. We do wonder if they were a band before they came on the ship, because they seemed a lot more comfortable with each other tonight than last night. We stayed for two sets and a very good time was had by all.

After that Dave went to do his nightly ship walkabout and I did my nightly visit to the nightclub. Unfortunately Saul, the DJ, is terrible – all he seems to know how to do it bring things to a screeching halt. So I danced for a couple of songs and then headed up to 9-forward for a brief view of things (including the Royal Caribbean ship that’s on the same schedule we are, at least so far) and then came back to the cabin. We have our first actual shore excursion tomorrow, a very long bus ride, so I figure I’ll catch up on my sleep then.

Tonight’s towel animal – dragonfly. We forgot to get a picture before we moved it, so the picture is a little cockeyed.