Day 12 – Thursday, January 16th, 2025 - At Sea

Today, I can confidently say we ate our through the day. We got up. There was a 9:00 meeting that discussed several aspects of the trip after LA. The only thing I got out of it was that we have to get off the ship in LA no matter what. Not a big deal, because we were still working on an LA trip but interesting nonetheless. We later learned that the United States is the only country that demands this. Everyone must get off the ship. From there, we had breakfast. I had a bigger breakfast than I intended, but it was all good. I had oatmeal, a toasted bagel with salmon and two hash browns. Mary had a cheese omelet, toast, two hash browns and two sausages. That's how we started the day. I went outside and pushed for a couple of hours. Mary did some chasing around this ship. She went to eight to talk about excursions. She mentioned two or three other things, which I don't remember right now. Short term memory. We got great pictures of dolphins along side of the ship.

I haven't figured out the schedule, but Sabatini’s has pizza for lunch every so often. They started serving at 11:30, but we waited until 1:00. The service was slow, which we are getting used to. Not a complaint, just an observation. It was almost 130 by the time we got our pizza. The taste of the pizza was good. It had a real fire toasted crust and the tomato sauce was pretty good. It was spicy. The thing was it was very soupy. We probably did not let it sit long enough to set up. The flavors were good though.

We were supposed to have a wine tasting at 2:00 so we were cutting it a bit close. As it turns out, they moved the wine tasting out 15 minutes. We made our way down to the fifth floor where the wine tasting was. It was a different setup than previous wine tastings. They had 12 different wines from six countries, and you walked from station to station. I don't remember the exact order, but the first station had two wines from South Africa. They happen to be a red and a white. It was the same with the next station, but it had a red and white French wine. We made our way through all the stations. We tasted all 12 wines. We tasted a couple of wines twice. You don't get a full glass. You get maybe 1/3 of a glass at best, but when you have 12 third of a glass you're drinking 3 or 4 glasses of wine. Thankfully, with the pizza on board we had a base, so we did not get drunk. Across the 12 wines, I would say there were three that we both really liked. There were some we clearly didn't like. We should have been taking notes, but we didn't. Not a big deal there was another wine testing right around the corner. They had finger food like cheese, sausage, bruschetta - you know finger food, which we ate of course.

We were not drunk, but we sure were tired so we went back to the room. We did not pretend. We went straight to nap time. We both slept for a good hour. We had one more stop. We received an invitation a few days earlier to meet the officers. At 6:00 we left to go up to 15 to the sanctuary. Neither of us had been to the sanctuary so it took us a while to figure out where it was. It is at the front of the ship on the 15th floor. It happened to be just as the sun was setting so we got some incredible pictures. While we were up there for about an hour, we met the executive shelf, the hotel manager and a couple of other officers. We had interesting conversations with them. Of course there was food. Of course we ate the food. We made our way back to the room a little after 8:00. I wanted to go play poker, but I was just too tired and too cold. Yes, cold. I think I get too warm on the deck pushing so that anything after that seems cold. That and I am tired.

I worked on the log until bedtime.