Fri, 2/28/25    At Sea

Day 54 - Friday, February 28th, 2025 – At Sea

I was not in the mood for breakfast, so Mary went down to seven. She brought me back an English muffin. I paid bills because it was the beginning of the month. Paying bills in the middle of the Indian Ocean is no different than paying bills on the kitchen table at home. They need to be paid. Being on the ship, our credit card bills are not as crazy. Because it's been cold and home the heat has been on so we've been paying the gas bill. I tried to knock it down as much as I could, but because they are redoing the tile in my bathroom, they needed to be at 75°. I turned it down to 65 and they turn it back up to 75. Hopefully now that they're done, I can leave it at 65. The electric bills are fixed to $30.00 because of the solar panels. Our water bill is about the same because we still need to water the grass occasionally. The one thing we are saving money on is food. I never thought about it much, but we are probably spending at least $250 a week on food. Maybe I don't want to think about it because it's one more thing I will have to look at to see if we can reduce it when we get home. That will go over well with Mary. So, let's not tell her. We have been talking about it but not doing anything about it – taxes. We are going to have to see if we can tackle much of that paperwork in these five days coming up before Cape Town. Right now, that is a tomorrow problem.

We hung around the cabin until about 2:00. We signed up for the international wine tasting. Yes, another wine tasting. You would think we would be tired of them, but no. It's another opportunity to expand our knowledge on different types of wine. This one was on six in the dining room we don't go too. There were about 20 people that signed up also. There are 6 tables - South Africa, France, Spain, US, Australia and Italy. Each table has a red wine and a white wine from the specific country. You walk from table to table. You are encouraged to try all of the whites from the six tables before trying all of the reds from the six tables. Between the reds and the whites is a table of finger food, for lack of a better term. They have chocolates, ham, prosciutto, different types of cheeses, etcetera. There is a sommelier at each table explaining the wine you were drinking. They tell you what the grapes are, region, and the fermentation type. It seems every time we go to one of the events we find something we like. Of all the wines we tasted, we really like the Italian white which use the soave grape. I'm sure we've had this type of wine before, but this one was especially good. It was not quite as spicy as a Sauvignon Blanc. I tend to like more earthy and this was that way. Even Mary agreed she liked it. When it came to the red, the Italian red was pretty good, but none of them stood out as being great. It was a fun event. We did run into another couple, whose names I now forget, and one of the guys we run into at breakfast. He's a Stanford machine engineering professor. He and his wife live right outside of Napa Valley and go there frequently. At the event where we were able to buy wine about a week ago or so this couple bought several of the $600.00 bottle wines. I want to spend more time with this guy.

After the wine tasting, I decided I still needed to push. I went out on 7. It was windy but not too cool. Mary found a spot inside to read her book. I was out there for about 45 minutes. I did not make much progress because of the wind and rocking. That's OK, I got out.

From there we decided to go up to 14 to get something to eat. Thankfully, they had a good soup. I ended up eating 2 bowls. It was bean based. I don't know what it is with beans lately, but they keep turning up. The real reason we went up there initially was they had chicken wings. This was probably our first negative experience with an employee. The lady at the chicken wing stand was surly for lack of a better term. “Which chicken wings do you want?” “Can I have 4 hot sauce wings?” “You could have the two that are in there. I'm waiting for more chicken.” Later, when Mary went up there, Mary asks for 4 parmesan wings. The lady somewhat nastily replied “You can only have two at a time”. We did not make a big deal out of it because we know people have bad days. Despite the lady being nasty, what was worse was the wings were not good. They were cool temperature wise and the sauces were gritty for lack of a better term. Almost like they were covered in sand. Thankfully, the soup was really good. Mary made herself a sandwich of some sort. She ate more fruit. So, the experience wasn't all bad. After this, we came back downstairs and did our thing until we went to bed.