Mon Oct 6, 2025
Hi Gang! We had a glorious sea day today and if you’ve been following along, you know we love our sea days. What’s not to love… sleep in, get educated, eat great food, have great service and watch great entertainment. Gotta love it!
We started off with the first lecture by Dr Jim Rowe on Whales. Where we’re at, off the coast of New England, is a prime place for humpback whales. Humpback whales can live to be over 130 years old and they know that due to their ear wax! Yuk!
Sperm Whales can hold their breath for over 2 hours to allow them to dive deep and look for large squid to eat. Blue whales, 110 feet long, are the largest whale. And the baby blue whale can put on 8 pounds of weight per hour. That’s almost as much as a cruise ship passenger! Lol
The next enrichment session was a Q&A between the two Pro Golfers, Bernard Gallacher and Larry Nelson. They emphasized how the Ryder Cup is a team sport vs an individual sport and that’s why the players love it so much. They also mentioned that
Europeans aren’t paid to play in the Ryder Cup but US players are paid a half a million dollars each! They felt that disparity won’t last long.
We then went to lunch at Marketside, the buffet restaurant, which had all Asian food. Wow, was it tasty!
We then went to our final educational speaker in the afternoon named Kenneth T Walsh. He discussed his latest book which is “Presidential Leadership in Crisis. Defining Moments of the Modern Presidents.” He talked about some of the presidents and how they dealt with various economic crisis, personal crisis, and political crisis. Here are some of them:
FDR and the Great Depression, Eisenhower dealing with World War II, JFK and the Bay of Pigs in Cuba, Lyndon Johnson and the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, Richard Nixon and Watergate, Jimmy Carter and the Iran Hostage crisis, Ronald Reagan’s assassination attempt, Bill Clinton and the Monica Lewinsky scandal, George Bush Jr and the 9/11 crisis, Obama and the financial crisis, and Trump with the Covid crisis. That’s a lot of crisis!!
We had dinner tonight at the last specialty restaurant we haven’t been to called Osteria d’Ovidio. It is fairly new on Crystal and is Italian cuisine from the Michelin-rated Alajmo Brothers (Max and Raf. It was a huge menu and the food was amazing!
I wanted to try everything but ended up ordering the Tuna Carpaccio and an appetizer portion of the Lasagne for my starters. The Lasagne was served in this cute little baking pan and I swear I didn’t eat the whole pan! For my main I had the Branzino. We finished dinner with this amazing Tiramisu that they made table side. Wow… what a great meal! Nice way to end the cruise.
After dinner we went to two shows they had. The first was Comedian Steve Caouette and he was hilarious! After him we went to the main Production Show called “Icons in Concert”. It’s described as “An Ultimate Music and Dance Tribute to Legends and Their Music”. It was a great show with great music.
After the shows we caught a little bit of the Monday Night Football game. Of course during the day we also had to do that dreaded four letter word task called P-A-C-K!!! Can’t believe this is our last night since it seemed to go by in a wink of an eye. We really enjoyed Crystal and I’ll summarize the whole cruise in the next day or so.
Hope everyone had a great Monday! Tomorrow we fly from LaGuardia to Charlotte and are praying all goes well (and that the government shutdown doesn’t impact us!).
PS: Believe it or not, there has been a Golden Retriever Service Dog on our cruise this week and we finally got to meet him, pet him and take a pic with him. I had a Golden for 14 years while the kids were young and they are special dogs! I have two very amazing “grand dogs” and one of them is a Golden. Life is good!
The Wandering Italian 