1st Ship Day

Our location for the eclips

Today was a rough day for me, as sometimes happens even on a cruise. My cold had progressed to the part where my nose was completely stuffed and uncomfortable, and nothing was quite working the way I wanted it to (mostly the internet) and I was worried that I can’t be preparing for my training the weekend after we get back because there’s no Pilates reformer on board, and and and…. Read on to discover the magic bullet that turned my attitude around. Hint to Bubster – I should take my own advice!

We woke around 6:45, just before sunrise so Dave went topside to get pictures. I thought about going to abs class at 7 but didn’t feel like rushing, so I went to the 7:30 stretch class instead, which was jammed. New readers might not know that *all* of large the cruise lines use the same company – Elemis – for their spa and gym folks, so no matter if you’re on Cunard or Celebrity or Carnival, it’s the same classes, depending on how many trainers and the size of the gym. The stretch class was par for the course, with the instructor completely oblivious to the class, not offering any modifications or encouragement. So that was kind of discouraging.

Eclipse timing

Dave had breakfast while I was at stretch class, so I went to the Pantry ( called the Lido on HAL) and had some porridge (yay!) and yogurt. They haven’t done well with the scheduling, so our tour has an astronomy talk from 9-10 while the onboard astronomers give talks from 9:30 to 10:30. Dave went to the 9:00 talk where he got information about the scheduling for the eclipse, and then left early and joined me at the 9:30 talk, which was a young aboriginal woman astrophysicist (uh-huh, how cool is that?) talking about the aboriginals and the night sky, a very good talk. After the talk we walked around the ship doing our mapping until it was lunchtime. We went to the sit-down dining room (the Waterfront) and were seated at a 2-top. In the afternoon Dave went to more talks and I sat in our cabin and tried to do some Pilates homework and write blogs and mostly fight with the internet and feel snotty and crabby, and I think I tried to go do something but it was full or cancelled or whatever and the internet is just SO frustrating and I couldn’t get the pictures from my phone to the computer and and and… so I put on my workout clothes and went to the gym and ran through the mat pilates and did an hour of Nia and guess who felt much better>

I met Dave back at the room, he’d been to a lecture and found a place to have a beer and watch the waves, which is his favorite thing. He’d tried to get the bartender to talk about the beers but he didn’t speak much English. Fortunately there was a an Aussie at the bar who admitted to “preferring beer that tastes like Bud Light” but was able to give some helpful advice.

I showered and spent another frustrating time with the blogs, but eventually had success (I hope the audio came through on the grumbling raven) and eventually it was almost 8, time for dinner. We ended up sitting at a 6 top with Paula, Steve and Amit. Steve used to be the education director at the Smithsonian Air and Space museum, and he had a lot of interesting stories, as did his wife. He was deeply impressed to meet Dave once he realized his genealogy and got Dave to tell some stories of growing up Astro. It was a very fun dinner and we ended up laughing a lot and staying a little long, so we didn’t get up to the stargazing until about 9:30. They had turned off most of the lights on decks 10 and 11 aft, and there was a huge crowd of people. We saw the Emu and several other notable southern sky features, and Dave was able to mostly help me understand how it is that we can see upside-down Orion (it really is upside down!) and Scorpio from Oregon, but not the large magellanic cloud that lies between them. It has to do with the apparent rotation of the skies and the seasons, and I think I get it but I’m pretty sure I can’t explain it.

Maybe you can see the Southern Cross?

A bit of an aside for a moment – while we were on the Panama Canal cruise they were putting motion activated lights in all the cabins, which turned on whenever you got up in the night. Not good. We discovered you could stuff a towel in front of it. They have them on this ship too. One is in the hall which we like, but the other is in the bedroom to illuminate the step up to the bathroom, which is bad. We covered it with a washcloth but forgot to move it in the morning. We came back and the housekeeping staff had covered the sensor with masking tape,

Anyway, it turned into a good day after all and we both fell asleep quickly and slept well – I should say we believe we slept well, because as usual our fitbits misinterpret the motion of the ship and don’t actually know we’re sleeping.