Day 59/138 2022/2023 Viking Neptune World Cruise. A sea day
A shorter blog today….the internet seems to be co-operating too.
I saw this quote online a few days ago and I thought to myself I wish my older self could have given my younger self this bit of advice! When we were in Sydney, I was interacting with someone younger than me and they asked me a very thought provoking question which was “What is your biggest regret?” I used to ask this question when I was doing final job interviews for hiring someone on my team. I first used to ask “What is your biggest success to date?” And then ask them the Regret question. So it was very intuitive of this young lady I was dealing with to ask that question I thought. Anyway, I responded by saying that I wished I had travelled more when I was younger. Not worried so much about buying that bigger home, or car, and instead set side time and money for travel. Perhaps even taken a sabbatical and travelled the world as we are doing now. There are many people I’ve known who have sold it all and packed up their families and lived a life of travel to educate their kids. It just wasn’t in my cards to do so, but I’m glad we are doing it now while we are healthy and young enough to be active wherever we go!
We had a lazy day today. When I say lazy I mean we slept in ’til 9:30am. After that it was full on busy with almost every hour of the day accounted for.
We both went to the gym around 10:15, me for an hour and 15 minutes and Richard for a bit less time. It felt good to really work hard in the gym after so many days of walking or golfing. We need to keep strengthening our muscles because the older we get the muscle mass disappears quickly if it is not used.
And stretching after working those muscles is so important. I found that there are less people in the gym around 10:30-11:30 and then in the late afternoon so it is a good time to go to the gym, especially since I want to use the recumbent bike to keep my legs strong and there are only two of the recumbent bikes in the gym..
Team Trivia was a bust again today...but we keep trying.
I decided to give Calligraphy class another go today. We spent all the time in class finishing the rest of the alphabet. I could only handle being in class from 1:45pm- 3pm because I find it very tedious. It is such a precise art and I’m not sure if I will ever use it, but I’m sticking with it. Next class we get smaller pens which should be easier to use instead of the big huge calligraphy pens we have been using. At least today the teacher let us start to use the natural angle that we draw a diagonal line as our guide for writing calligraphically instead of forcing us to use a 22 degree line which for me seemed very hard to keep my pen angle on that 22 degree line. Like I said, it is so precise….details…details…details…and I’m not really that neat a writer, but hopefully it picks up a bit and we can actually accomplish something other than writing the alphabet in the next class.
I was reading some of the comments that people had sent me on the blog. Thank you for your comments. I look forward to reading them and if I don’t respond, it’s probably because the internet was not good or I was just a bit busy with sea or land day activities. I do appreciate the comment from one person today who said that the bird I posted in my blog yesterday was the ‘masked plover’ or ‘masked lapwing’. Thank you for sharing that with me. It takes a long time to try and be the researcher, historian, photographer and blogger, so sometimes I do hope the blog readers will let me know what a bird or plant is!
Masked Plover or Masked Lapwing.
When we were catching up with Lyle and Linda today on their experiences golfing behind us with some locals yesterday they also talked about the different birds on the golf course, They heard a bird laughing at them and of course so did we. That bird we heard was a ‘Kookaburra’. I’m sure you know the children’s song that goes “Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree, eating all the gum drops he can see, Stop Kookaburra, Stop Kookaburra, Leave some there for me”. I’m sorry we actually didn’t see the Kookaburra but we definitely heard a bird that sounded like it was laughing at us while we were teeing off!
Kookaburra (image from the internet)
We had a shipbuilding team meeting in Sharon and Mike’s cabin this afternoon and our ship is really looking great! Details…details…details…I’m the finicky detail person on this project working on a lot of small detailed work. I don’t mind it actually since I don’t have a lot of experience with ships or boats, so doing what I’m doing is contributing in my own small way. Everyone has their role, and I think the ship will be beautiful for the competition on February 27th. We only work on the ship on sea days, so we are running out of days, but we will get it done because we are motivated!
Tomorrow we are in Whitsunday Islands (Airlie Beach) in the Coral Sea and near the Great Barrier Reef. The temperature is supposed to be 80F/26.6C but with a 90% chance of rain. The Airlie Beach population is around 1,200 people and has a very high number of residents working in tourism and hospitality and was one of the most likely Australian towns to suffer the longest from the economic downtown due to the recent pandemic. We had originally chosen the included excursion for tomorrow, but again, sitting on a bus for 3 hours to go somewhere just to say we’ve been on an included excursion to another close by small town didn’t thrill us, so we have bailed on the included excursion. Airlie Beach is a tender port with a 25 minute tender ride and we have to be back on board by 1pm, so we will probably bring some big Viking umbrellas with us to town and walk around the small town of Airlie Beach. We do need to look for some more supplies for our ship, so hopefully we can find a store that we need in town. We definitely won’t be up early to try and catch an early tender because most things probably won’t be open until at least 10am in town, but at least we get outside and off the ship by making an effort to go out in the rain!