Day 33 - Friday, February 7, 2025 – Bay of Islands, New Zealand

As I mentioned earlier, today is a tender stop. That means I can't get off the ship. Mary decided to go on a boat cruise excursion. It left at 8:00 so that means she had to get up and out by 7:45. This meant that we had to be up by about 6:00. We had breakfast delivered to the room. We wolfed it quickly and Mary was out the door. I spent the morning napping and watching a Netflix series called The Recruit. I did update the blog with a couple of days. I played poker for about an hour on poker stars. I continue to lose.

Hopefully you noticed that the website has changed. The home page was getting too busy. The approach by month should be better to navigate. It took me a couple of hours to do this. As I spend more time with Google sites, I'm getting better with it. I'm nowhere near an expert, but I'm learning as I go. If you have any other suggestions on how to make it better, let me know.

Mary came back from her excursion around 1:30. It was very successful. From the ship she got on a little boat which took her to shore. Then there was a bus ride to a catamaran dock. The entire boat ride was about 2 1/2 hours. In the picture of the map, if you expand it, she started way down in the lower left corner at #1 and they went all the way up to the upper right at #14. The main attraction was the hole in the rock. You can see from the pictures it's impressive. They ran underneath the rock through the hole. You can see that one picture where it shows them underneath the rock. The boat then made its way back to #2 in the lower left corner. There, she found a souvenir shop. She got refrigerator magnets, T-shirts, postcards and stamps. She then had to take two buses to get back to the cruise ship.

We got back on the ship she took a nap for a little while. We headed to dinner around 5:00. I call it my experimental dinner. For an appetizer they had oysters Rockefeller and another word. I don't remember what the other word was, but the dish was like escargot, but instead of snails they were oysters. It was different. I then had a normal salad. I then had two entrees. The first was breaded sole. It was pretty good, but it was like fish and chips without the chips. I guess it was a better-quality fish which made it pretty good. Then, for the weird dinner of the night I ordered frog legs. I don't know if I've ever had them in the past. The frog legs came in a chunky tomato sauce. Mary had to dig the legs out of the tomato sauce to even find the meat. She tore the meat out that she could find. There wasn't much. And the meat that was there was buried in tomato sauce, so you never really tasted the frog legs. I'm not sure I will order them in the future, but if they were served differently, I might be interested. For dessert I had mango sorbet. Mary had a double salad and a sirloin steak. We're learning that their steaks are not very good. We have to go to the actual steakhouse on the ship to get a real steak. We will do that soon. For desserts she had her vegan chocolate ice cream.

After dinner we walked past the explorer’s lounge. They were starting some game show where you had to name things in the category. For example, how many different types of birds can you name. It was fun and I could see where it would be challenging. How many different types of birds can you name in 30 seconds? How many different types of ice cream can you name in 30 seconds? We watched this for about 45 minutes. I ordered and drank a Manhattan. Mary had a hot chocolate with an amaretto shot. We walked upstairs and pretty much fell into bed.