Some of our readers aren’t receiving our daily emails. It appears there are extensive updates that our web company must complete, and until they are, you may not receive the emails. In the interim, if you can create a bookmark or icon on your phone or device, you will be notified of the new post at about the same time each day.
To bookmark or create a desktop item, please use the usual process on your device by adding:
Each time I upload a new post, it will automatically appear under the link above.
It is a labor-intensive process to handle all these updates, and the web company will need my help daily. I’d prefer not to spend the entire time we’re cruising to work on this. Once we are settled in New Zealand in mid-December, we’ll begin the process. Our site will remain available each day while I continue to upload new posts with photos.
I will keep you updated on this process as it’s completed through the end of the year. Once completed, those who haven’t been receiving the email will find it in their inbox once again. Otherwise, nothing will change in the interim. Our site is huge with almost 5000 posts. It’s a process. Thank you for your patience and understanding.
The past few sea days on the ship have been rather enjoyable. We continue to meet more people and have fun conversations. It’s incredible how most cruisers are frequent travelers — although not necessarily nomads like us — homeowners who travel as often as they can.
We’ve attended several lectures in the Star Lounge during the days and played countless trivia games in various bars and venues throughout the ship. It’s been delightful having busy days and nights, doing precisely what we feel like doing, unrushed and at our own pace.
Finally, I’m getting some decent meals (dinners) in the main dining room. The chef hasn’t been very creative in planning dishes for me as we’ve experienced on past cruises, so now I suggest how they make a dish, and they follow suit. Last night I had spaghetti bolognese with zucchini instead of pasta, along with a crouton-free Caesar salad. It was my first enjoyable meal after a week of plain chicken breasts and dry salmon steaks.
Some days, we have breakfast; on others, we have lunch at the buffet, all based on how hungry we are in the morning. But, we don’t do both breakfast and lunch when that’s too much food, and we don’t want to gain back all the weight we’d lost in Spain. Tom quit eating donuts with his coffee in the mornings and dessert after dinner. We have dinner in the main dining room each evening, with a standing 7:00 pm reservation at a shared table.
Before heading to the dining room for dinner, we spend a few hours socializing in the Crown Lounge, a small, 50-person capacity room for Diamond-Plus and Pinnacle members only. It’s always so crowded, and we have to get there by 4:00 pm to get a seat. On other cruises, they had much larger areas for the early evening cocktail hour, but that’s changed since the pandemic.
That’s it for today, dear readers. We will be back with more tomorrow.
Be well.
Photo from ten years ago today, November 3, 2015:
