Saturday Jan 6, 2024
Hi All! Today’s word is Girl Power! Not only is this ship beautiful but it is run by beautiful women! The Captain is female, the Cruise Director is female and one of the main speakers is female (and is a combat helicopter pilot)! Is that girl power or what??
Today was a nice relaxing sea day but we did a lot of fun stuff. I let Kathy sleep in and went down to the indoor whirlpool/sauna that looks out over the ocean. That really put me in what Explora likes to call the “Ocean State of Mind”!
They offered a class in smartphone photography that we went to and learned lots of good tips and tricks for taking better pictures. Very informative!
We then attended the speaker series on How to Thrive under Fire (given by the female combat helicopter pilot). Lots of good fundamental tools of focusing on your task at hand and working as a team. All good life skills stuff.
We then went to trivia and teamed up with three other people (three other really smart people!) and tied for first place! But we lost the tiebreaker. Who knew how many miles it was between Sydney, Australia and Chicago?? They did! 9,287 miles!
We had lunch, which was amazing again and then Kathy did a little sunning (yes, it was sunny and 80 degrees here – sorry for you snowbirds!) and I did a little chillin’. Then we went to listen to another guest speaker talk about the islands of the Caribbean in both their geological formation as well as their human evolution. Did you know that 25 million visitors (half from the US) visited here last year? Crazy! And we even snuck in afternoon tea service and all its goodies!
After getting cleaned up we went to dinner at Sakura, the Pan-Asian restaurant. The name is the National flower of Japan, the cherry blossom, and they were all around the restaurant. The food was probably one of the best cruise restaurants we’ve gone to. We both got this amazing lobster roll (of course!), several other appetizers, the Miso cod and some yummy scallops. And who would have thought the Asian restaurant would have the best chocolate dessert!
After dinner we went to the show which was a female singer doing a Whitney Houston tribute. She was really good and I always admire anyone with the guts to do Whitney since she was such a powerful singer.
After that we pulled a few slots and found our late night piano player and listened to that. Tomorrow is another sea day and we put our clocks ahead one hour tonight so we’ll need to sleep in to get the hour back!
Hope everyone survived the crazy winter weather!
PS: The free wifi on this ship is awesome! We were even able to stream the Steelers game and watch them beat the Ravens! Woo Hoo!
The Wandering Italian 