March 17, At Sea

You have to love sea days. You can sleep in as late as you want because you don’t have to be on the pier for an early morning shore excursion departure. However, I neglected to completely close our curtains last night, so the bright sun streaming in our window woke us up at 6am. Which, as it turns out, was a good thing as our breakfast was delivered at 6:20. So far the nasty weather is holding to the West of us, and we are blessed with 4-7 foot seas which for mid-ocean isn’t bad at all. The Prinsendam does pitch a bit but it certainly is livable.

So it was on deck at 7:30 for my early morning mile while Sharon got ready for her 8am aerobics class. At 8:30 we both joined the Tai Chi and Qigong, followed at 9:30 by the add them up ring toss on the sport deck.

At 10 it was a shore excursions talk on Marseille, Monte Carlo, Livorno, Civitavecchia, and Naples. Today also started the five day Prinsendam Decathelon Event. Two different sport events each day for the next five days. We earn points for each event and at the end the top three men and women get special prizes.

There is also team trivia every day at 11:30. We tried it the first day and quickly found out that we had forgotten more stuff than we could remember so we haven’t been back. Besides, it interferes with lunch.

At noon the clocks were set forward one hour which actually was a pretty good time to change instead of at night. The little people were busy last night as most areas of the ship are decorated in greens and white, and shamrocks abound throughout. As I mentioned it’s another formal night tonight followed by the Green and White ball hosted by the Captain starting at 10pm.

The shows that we have seen so far have been good, and tonight was a pretty decent comedian, Mike Goddard. If you ever run into him on a cruise he is worth going to see.

As is a tradition on Grand Cruises (as I understand it), we have received a couple of gifts so far from HAL. At the first formal night we received very nice journal books, and tonight we received a folding ID holder. Both are a light tan in color with a map of the Med imprinted on them. They are quite nice actually. We also received a “order” form to indicate our jacket size for a cruise jacket that we will get Thursday night. Who knows what other goodies may come our way as the cruise progresses.

Photo's are not loading right now, so I am going to wait until we get into Barcelona. We are overnighting there and I can go back and upload the photo's then for each day.