Day 46 - Thursday, February 20th, 2025 - At Sea
We started this day in typical fashion, except we have a new adventure every morning. Because the ship is rocking pretty good, the transfers into the shower chair are almost circus like now. Thankfully, we've been able to do it, but not without some trepidation. We were up and out a little late. We made it to breakfast a little after 10:00. I'm back to my oatmeal and tomato juice. Mary has left the omelette behind and is now focused on fruit plates and a bagel. We were out of there and back into the cabin by 10:30. GeDe, our cabin steward, was still straightening up our room. He was done in about 10 minutes. He spends about 20 minutes each morning in here period then he comes by two or three times during the day to make sure everything is still good. Mary went to her desk and did whatever she was doing. I wanted to get a jump on some of the log entries because I'm three days behind again. Unfortunately, I ran into some inconsistencies between the website, the Word document and the spreadsheet that should all say the same day, date, where are we. For some reason, the Word document and website dates are wrong way back in Napier and Picton. So, I had to work myself forward from there and get everything back in sync. That took a good half hour. Mary is at her acupuncture appointment so I want to see what I can get accomplished in the earlier log entries. I'll come back here later.
I got caught up in a poker stars tournament. I was doing really well when I did not want to get out. We really did not have anything on the calendar so it wasn't that big of a deal, but I could tell Mary was not necessarily happy. Nonetheless, she let me finish out the tournament. I ended up six out of like 400 people. I made 69 million in fake money. I'm back to my overall high. We decided we were going to do some chasing before going to dinner. So we got cleaned up. What this means basically is I put a button down shirt over my T-shirt. Mary puts on a fancier top and long pants. That is our definition of smart casual.
Mary wanted to go to 8 to turn in the future cruises deposit form. Basically, this allows you to put a down payment on a future cruise for $100. I know Mary had been looking at future cruises because we still want to do Japan and China and other places in Asia. We got to the future cruises desk. The guy there his name was James. He took the form and Mary said that we were looking for Asia cruises. What follows was about an hour or more of head hurting and mind blowing numbers and options. At the top of it all was my thinking, “Welti are you batsh(x)t crazy?” You're not even halfway through your current cruise. You're nowhere near paying this cruise off. And now you're looking for another month or longer cruise in 2026? I keep thinking some how I have to make this Mary's fault. (But I'm at the desk nodding along thinking why couldn't today be another koala testing day?) So where we landed still needs a ton of work. I think it was my mother's father who used the say “This ain't no hill for a climber”. So, we put our future cruises deposit down on a 26 day cruise that starts in Seattle and ends in Singapore. So, we have to figure out how to get to Seattle with all of our necessary equipment. I guess that's no hill for a climber. And we go on the cruise for 26 days and we end up in Singapore. Now we have to figure out how we're getting home from Singapore. That to me sounds like a little bit more of a hill for any climber. That doesn't mean we're not gonna try. The one nice thing is that we don't have to really make any commitments until February or June of next year. You ask why February or June, to be honest I have no idea that's just the answer I'm giving. That has to do with one of the two dozen permutations that this effort can take in the coming months. You know they talk about those supercomputers that figure out weather patterns for years in advance? Well, we're going to borrow time on one of them to figure out the best permutation for this trip. As we left James, I said to him you know we will be back with a dozen new questions. He just shook his head.
We were off to dinner. If you've been following along you know what happens next. If you were thinking picture taking station, you are right. Thankfully there was only one, so I think we only added 5 or 6 pictures to our pile.
At dinner, I had a pinot noir which was not very good. A had a Sicilian fish Stew which was fish and the tomato base. The fish Stew was way better than that description. There's just something about fish Stew I like. Mary had the house salad times two. We both had the pasta option. Then we both had fried cod and French fries. The pasta was good because it was nice and spicy. The fish was OK. If you've ever fried fish the oil needs to be really hot otherwise it gets soggy and oily. So when you're doing fish for a dining room it's almost impossible to keep the oil hot enough. So our fish was soggy and oily. It was not uneatable, but it could have been better. We should have known that going in, but we will have to remember that lesson later. We both had strawberry sorbet for dessert. We shared a glass of amaretto. It was not one of our better dinners. As we walked our way back we passed the explorers lounge. They were doing a quiz show on buildings that were in TV shows or movies. They showed you a building and you had the guess what show or movie it was seen in. I don't think we knew any of the last 8 or 10 we saw. Because I was falling asleep, we came back to the cabin.
We did not go to bed right away. We're gaining another hour so it was too early to go to bed. We have a key with all the pictures that have been taken at the picture stations. Every time we update the key, they just Add all of the pictures taken to date. In some cases we have 3 or 4 of the same picture. They have different names. I'm trying to come up with a programmatic way to eliminate all the duplicates. In my mind, this should be pretty easy. Unfortunately, everything I’m trying is not working the way it should work in my mind. I spent about an hour trying to figure this out unsuccessfully. Between the whole future cruise discussion and this computer problem, my brain has had enough for one day. Another successful day at sea.