Day 53 - Thursday, February 27th, 2025 – At Sea
I'm sure you can guess, the day starts with breakfast. Nowadays, about the only eventful thing that happens at breakfast is trying to find a table where the cold air does not pour on my head. We are on our 3rd or 4th table and still the cold air finds me. I know, I got real problems. Right? In reality, Mary and I have been trying different things. Mary switches between omelets, fruit plates, scrambled eggs, etcetera. I switched between oatmeal, bagel and lox, and now eggs Benedict. I've been trying to skip breakfast every other day or so. That has not worked out well yet, but that's the plan. Maybe tomorrow?
Mary and I have been talking about gratuities. We're on the ship for 116 days. The staff will be given gratuities. When we initially signed up for this cruise there was a gratuity package included. It is a fixed number for each of us. We know what the number is, but we weren't sure where it goes. For instance, how much does our steward get versus the waiters? That kind of thinking. As mentioned previously, we've been working with cruise specialists. They are travel agents. They have agents on board, and they have an open session every at sea day from 10 to 11 in the wheelhouse bar. The travel agents’ names are Kim and Deidre. Just for reference, Kim is male. There's miscellaneous discussion until we get to our question about the gratuities. I won't get into detail, because pretty much everything Kim told us ends up not being true. We need to go back down to him and explain what we really learned from the front desk a couple days later. Unless we misunderstood him, we cannot take the money out of the money we paid for the trip. It's part of the bigger package and you can't take a piece out of the package. Kim made it sound like we could take the money out in cash and give it to the various staff as we want. Again, the front desk said that's not going to work. So anyway, we spent about an hour or so with Kim and Deidra and three or four other couples also working with cruise specialists. We talked about all kinds of things. Unfortunately, for us it was misinformation. I'm sure they're not trying to deceive us. They just don't have the right information.
Because the weather is finally starting to change, I went out and pushed for a while. Mary had a hair appointment so I was outside for almost three hours. Unfortunately, my right hearing aid on my good set of hearing aids died for some reason. Thankfully, we have a backup set or two, but I cannot listen to my book with one hearing aid from one set and another hearing aid from a different set. I fix this a couple of days later by putting in the same older set in both ears. I still haven't figured it out 100%, but I'm getting closer. So, I'm out there for three hours without my book. This was not a complaint, just an observation. Out on the 7th deck you can go about 75% of the way around. They built cabins on the 7th floor which use the walkway for their balconies. I tend to stay on the one side and just go back and forth. From one end to the other is about 400 pushes. Depending upon the rocking of the ship and the wind I can do that in about 10 minutes. I could go to 75% of the way around, but when it gets to the front of the ship the passageway is real narrow and there are a lot of people out there so it becomes a real bottleneck. It's just easier to stay on the one side. So anyway, I'm out there for about 3 hours. I probably got in 3000 pushes. That's the other thing period because of the rocking of the ship and how I push my watch is not calculating the correct number of pushes. Because the ship is constantly rocking back and forth and up and down, I do not use both hands to push with every push sometimes I use my one hand and sometimes I use two and sometimes I use the other. The watch simply cannot calculate the number of pushes based on this variability anyway, that's what I'm thinking be it right or wrong.
Mary came back from her hair appointment and said that I had a 1:30 appointment to get my nose hair waxed. Yes, I know this is probably the highlight of my trip. Who else in the world can say they got their nose hair waxed in the middle of the Indian Ocean? I'll bet you it ain't many. Trust me, when I say it needs to be done. Mary tried to use the scissors to cut some of it out, but she ended up nicking the inside of my nose so there was blood for a little while. Thankfully, it coagulated. If the hair got much longer, it would get stuck in the wheels. Get the picture? So we went up to 14. Within about 7 minutes I had hair free nose. I tend to think of it as being aerodynamic.
Because we were on 14 and we had decided we were going to eat dinner later we decided to go and get a burger. The burgers were on 15 so we had to go up one more level, but we sat outside and had a burger and fries. The burgers were good. The fries were good too. We sat up there for a little while before going back down to the room.
It was a formal night, so we hung around until about 5:30 or so. Mary got dressed in a fancy blue-green dress. I was already in my black pants, so I put on a gray shirt. It is not very formal for me, but it is what it is. We left the room and headed for the picture stations. I don't remember how many there were, but I would say five. We hit all five of them. Again, one of them was up the stairs so Mary went up there by herself. I would guess we had another 20 or so pictures to our pile. Mary has been looking at them and said some of them are turning out nice. I haven't looked at them yet. It's on my To Do List.
The real reason we wanted to go to dinner a little later was because there was a slot machine tournament at 7:00. They have eight slot machines. You go in sets of eight. We were in the second set. I had 260,000 points which was pretty good. You were told to come back at 9:00 to see if you made it in the top eight. Mary did not do very well. So it was about 7:15 or so and we were headed to dinner. We would have to come back at 9:00 because my score was pretty high, but not very high. There's really no strategy involved. You just press the button as often as you can for one minute. You hope that this machine pays out big for you.
We made our way over to five for dinner. For appetizers we both had the bruschetta. If you're familiar with bruschetta, it comes on a piece of toasted bread. Thankfully, dinner was after pictures because the bread that the bruschetta was on broke into a million pieces and much of the tomato mixture ended up on the sleeve of my shirt. It would have been a disaster had it been before pictures, so disaster averted. It tasted good. I had the trout almondine which was really good. It was a tiny piece of fish which was good because I had the burger earlier. The two-by-two square tasted really good. Of course, Mary had salad times 2 and the chicken dish. I don't remember the specifics. I'm not complaining. She likes chicken. Let her go. As I write this, I do not remember what we had for dessert. It was a nice dinner.
After dinner, we made our way back to the casino. I did make the final piece spot to do the second round of slot machine. Unfortunately, the second round for me was terrible. I only made 100,000. I did not win. Not a big deal. We had it up to the room and called it a night. Another successful day.