The Last Day

I forgot to mention that they closed off 9 forward last night. I’d suspected that the reason the secret door wasn’t blocked off was that the band they pull across to say it’s closed was broken, and sure enough last night there was a sign on the door asking people not to use it. Also during the night last night the seas started getting quite a bit rougher – the tossing of the ship woke us up several times. Hooray!

Because of the fitful sleep I slept right up until my alarm going off, then headed up to the gym. The ship is rolling to the point where it’s hard to even stand still up there, so Adriaan led the both classes on the floor. I particularly enjoyed the stretch class. At one point we all held towels and stretched our shoulders back, and of course I could drop the towel all the way behind my back, prompting Adriaan to mutter “there’s one in every class.” Afterwards Dave came up and took a picture of us, and then I had breakfast with three Canadians and one Dutch woman. Nothing in particular to report from there, just a nice breakfast.

The seas were rough enough and the wind strong enough that they had closed off the promenade deck and both pools, which was very disappointing! Dave ended up in the crow’s nest in one of the big comfy swivel chairs, watching the horizon move in circles. I went to the nightclub where Christine had come through with the informational papers. The sound guy got there shortly afterwards with the good microphone and the sound system was working well, so I was ready to go. It ended up being a very small class – I’m not sure why. I had a couple of new people come, and the class was just way fun. I’d put in Le Chant des Sirens and U R the Answer, and they got totally into it. One interesting advantage to teaching on a very unstable platform is it makes people much less self-conscious about whether or not they are doing the move right, because I’m putting in so many extra steps to compensate for the motion of the ship that it’s hard to tell what the correct moves are. I did find out that I can’t sing “15 men on a dead man’s chest” and still keep track of the steps and punches in “It’s Hot”. The Nia class turned out to be a completely good thing, and I’m so glad that I did it. I’m hoping some of the class members will find classes near them and continue dancing.

Dave also came at the end of Nia to get a photo of me with my small but fun class. Afterwards we walked around the ship enjoying the sunshine, the wind, and the waves. From the forward deck on 11 you can see the flagpole at the front of the ship, and it was really obvious that the ship is not just rolling forward and back, it’s also rolling side to side. After our tour we went back to the cabin so I could get a shower and then we headed up to the midships pool for the shipbuilding competition. It’s always interesting to me how many people enter it and how creative their ships are. Our favorite was the Australia, which had working fans on it, was very good looking, and took the 12 coke can cargo without any problem. Interestingly there was also a ship called the boodam/Zaandam which looked very similar to the Boodam we saw on our trip to Hawaii over Halloween in 2011. The ship builder looked familiar too. This version was much narrower, though, and although it was an amazing replica of a HAL ship it kept flopping over on its side, much like the Costa Concordia. We ended up not staying to find out who won, but found out at dinner that it was a family who had made an ok ship but used their 3 children to get the cute vote.

Lunch was sort of a disaster, although we had Yudha as our server which is always a treat. We ended up sitting with the unnamed woman with the food temperature fetish and Erika, originally from New York but now from Florida. It turned out they had been tablemates at a 6-top and everyone except Erika had deserted the table. Erika started complaining about it, and it was very uncomfortable. We tried to change the subject to more pleasant topics and were only moderately successful.

Another short break after lunch, and then Dave headed off to the last not-very-good lecture by Bill Bendel about Southern constellations, ancient civilizations, and the longitude. I went up to the crows nest to save us some seats for the navigation talk, which was very enjoyable and had diagrams and videos of how to use the azipods to steer the ship. It also had the requisite question about whether there is a morgue on the ship (there is), and Marco told a story, possibly apocryphal, about running out of morgue space on the Rotterdam and having to use the flower cooler. He’s a very good speaker.

Then it was time for more relaxing until dinner, our last one with our fun tablemates. I’m not sure we would be friends under other circumstances, but we all were determined to have a good time each night and we succeeded. They did the crew parade and Yudha lead the singing. His tables were the loudest and most enthusiastic cheerers. Then we came back to the cabin and somehow managed to stuff everything back into the suitcases, which was something of a miracle given the formal wear I purchased in Valencia. Packing is depressing and we tried with limited success not to let it make us crabby.

Our last event on the ship will be the dancing with the stars finale. There is no towel animal tonight, which means there’s no hanging monkey this cruise. Other than that, what an adventure we have had!