After breakfast our laundry appeared – did I mention they
ended up doing it for free? – and I headed out for salsa dance class while Dave
went to another lecture. On the way I was able to stop in the shops and found
some sandals that work – I have the wrong shoes for this part of the trip, I
want my tevas and my mesh sneakers. Anyway, I got to class early and waited
around for half an hour after it was supposed to start, then finally gave up. I
did have a nice chat to Greg and Rachel, a couple currently living in Perth but
originally from Queensland. I stood in line at the internet desk for a while to
find out why the messages feature on our phones wasn’t working (log out and
back in and all will be well), then headed back to the cabin. On the way I
passed the salsa class location and it was going, but was almost done. Maybe
next time. I had time for some blogging before lunch. Meanwhile Dave went to a
wine tasting, which turned out to be well done. They tasted 6 wines in 50
minutes, and the wines were good to very good and all Aussie. Dave had a good
tablemate and enjoyed it very much.
I need to mention here that when we were at dinner with
Kelly, the senior editor at Sky & Tel, I mentioned something about using
the holes in Saltine crackers as pinhole viewers during an eclipse, and at two
different lectures he’s mentioned how someone on the trip (me! me!) told him
about using Ritz crackers (so he’s fancier than I am). I feel pretty proud to
have taught an expert a new trick. I also want to mention that while I was in
line at the internet desk I got some questions from Avery and Hannah via Ben
which I answered but will include here:1. Can we see a picture of the
mysterious door? I should have said that what’s mysterious that we didn’t know
where the door would lead – the door itself isn’t mysterious. 2. Can we see
pictures of the water slides? 3. Where does the slide dump you out? Into the
ocean? Are there sharks in the slides? The slide ends in a short flat section
on the ship, although the slide itself hangs out over the ocean a bit and there
are no sharks.
Lunch in the dining room was fun, we sat with a couple who
were originally from Scotland but now live in Perth. We had a nice chat,
although there were quite a few times when the combo accent just defeated us.
Then we split up for the afternoon, Dave to some lectures and me to do some
Pilates studying and attempting to blog. There’s not that much to write about, it’s
just nice being out here in the warm sunshine.
At 4 I went to Flashdance dance class, which was only about
15 minutes long but packed quite a punch. One of the cast members taught us some
moves to the song Maniac from flashdance, and we all had a good time trying to
keep up. I was looking forward to practicing my moves on the dancefloor
tonight. You may remember that Dave won $100 in the Spa raffle our first night
on board; he generously gave it to me and I had a wonderful 75 minute hot stone
massage that smoothed me out like kneading smooths out bread dough. Last time I
had a hot stone massage it was basically what you see in the pictures, the warm
stones lined up down your spine. This was some heavenly massage lotion that
made me feel like I was liquifying, and stones that looked like they were
Himalayan pink salt heated to just below too hot that she used to work out the
last bits of muscle tightness. It was heavenly.
After the massage I ran into Dave coming in from outside
(what are the chances) where he’d been watching the sunset, and we both went
out and watched some more as the high clouds put on a wonderful light show. We
had a little time before it was time to go for dinner, so I copied some
pictures from our phones to my computer (by connecting them with a USB cable,
how quaint!) in the hopes of posting a blog. We were hoping to be one of the
lucky 36 to get in on the 7:30 reservation at Angelo’s, the no-extra-fee
Italian restaurant, and we were. They’d set aside a private area for our group,
and it was only about 2/3 full – we think that most folks are just going to eat
when they feel like it, free wine notwithstanding. We sat with Normandy (another
nurse) and Brian (a community college math and computer science teacher) and
had an enjoyable evening. The desserts have been meh so far, but tonight’s
flourless chocolate cake (Dave) and Tiramisu (me) were very nice.
Brian’s alarm went off at 8:50 telling us it was time to get
ready to go outside for the star viewing. We stopped at the cabin to rug up, as
they say here, but it turns out we’ve gone far enough North that it’s warm
outside even at 9. The lights were still on when we got out there and Greg
Redfern was talking about the plan for tomorrow and answering questions.
Eventually the lights went off, but it was cloudier and hazier than last night
so I went in. I thought there was going to be dance music from 9-11, but it
turns out I was mistaken, and there is nowhere to dance at all on this ship. So
that was a little disappointing. I came back to the cabin to continue to fight
with the internet – I think it’s something to do with my computer, because I
can get slow internet on my phone.
I finally figured out my internet problems! I have the
laptop set up so that some of the directories are uploaded to the cloud
automatically. When I’m home this is great, because it means that things are
available on my laptop, my phone, and my desktop without any effort on my part.
One of the directories that is automatically updated is the pictures directory,
where I download all the photos so I can upload them to the blog. Then my
laptop was trying to upload them to the cloud, which used up all the bandwidth.
I’ve made it so the photo directory won’t back up any more, so blogs should get
more timely.
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