New firsts…

Day 28/138 2022/2023 Viking Neptune World Cruise Day 2 of 6 sea days

Warning! The internet is not good today. I’m going to write a very short blog because it took me 30 minutes just to sign into the Wix website to try to access the blog. Grrr! We received the following in our ‘Viking Daily’ tonight “Due to our geographic location over the next few days, the Internet and Live TV signal may be intermittent. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.” We knew the internet was spotty all day, but I guess this is going to be a few days of spotty internet service. Oh well….its not like there is nothing else to do!

The following are the regularly scheduled Daily Group Meet Ups: Mahjong, Writers Group, Veterans Get Together, Social Bridge & Card Play, Crafters Corner, Friends of Bill W., and Solo Traveller's Get Together. Today there were also 2 Art Classes, The Viking Choir rehearsal, Walk a Mile with the Senior Officers (at 6:30am!), Morning Body Stretch, Coffee Chat with Cruise Director Bruce, Bridge Lesson for Beginners, Baggo Tournament, Chair Yoga, Team Trivia, Needle Felting Workshop, and that does not even include the 3 lectures with the guest lecturers as well as the evening‘s entertainment at 9pm. Plus there are puzzles on board, games like Chess, Scrabble, and electronic games like Memory, BlackJack and Air Hockey. Of course there are also the two pools, hot tubs, the Nordic Spa and the fitness centre. PHEW!!! Talk about a busy life onboard a cruise ship. There are not enough hours in the day to fit everything in when we also have to find time for 3 square meals each day! So if you think that sea days are boring, then I’m not sure why you would think that way?!!

Our new Chef Willy Moon had promised that today we would enjoy special Belgium waffles for breakfast, so when we went to the World Cafe this morning, we were looking for the waffles on the buffet, but instead there was a special buffet set up at the back of the World Cafe especially to create these little treats. The waffles were very small, about 1/2 the size of an English muffin, and about the same height. The toppings available for these pillowy delights, were: blueberry sauce, strawberry sauce, whipped cream and maple syrup. I had mine without the whipped cream, but tried one of each with the fruit sauces. As I said before the internet is horrible tonight. I just spent 20 minutes trying to upload a photo of the beautiful Belgium waffles made from a dough similar to Choux pastry dough, (think chocolate eclairs and they are made with Choux pastry), but the internet crashed on me, so if I want to write today’s blog, sorry there will not be any photos. I will try again tomorrow and maybe throw in some of today’s photos tomorrow, if the internet co-operates.

Richard and me spent about an hour and a half this morning working on a little proof of concept document for a project we are consulting on. We went to the Business Centre to access a desk top computer so we could do a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) on the concept and then we could not get the document we had created emailed from the desktop, so we tried many different ways to get the document over to my Hotmail account, and finally we saved the document to the desk top, I signed in to my web version of my Hotmail account, and we used the mouse to copy the document and then pasted it into an email to myself. A bit of a convoluted process, but it got us a soft copy of the document to continue working with it.

Team Trivia saw us once again fall 3 questions shy of winning. We are not great with movies, tv shows or Broadway musicals it would seem, and those are recurring themes of questions. Better luck tomorrow I guess!

At Art Class today I found out that we would be changing our Class time for tomorrow to 3pm because we are crossing the Equator at 2pm tomorrow, which conflicts with Art Class. We will be having a very special ceremony tomorrow which everyone is buzzing about. For the guests for whom it will be their 1st to cross the Equator, can participate in a special ’Crossing the Line’ ceremony tomorrow. I will be participating in that ceremony, and Richard will not, as he has been in a ship before crossing the Equator. I feel like we are going to have a lot more ‘FIRSTS’ now as we go further away from the lands that we are familiar with; to those we are not, as we continue cruising along on this World Cruise in the Viking Neptune. Even the stars and constellations we will see in the night sky will be different than what we are used to in the Northern Hemisphere. So many firsts to look forward to!

We arrived back to our Stateroom this evening to find a shore excursion selection form for a date in March when we are in Columbo, Sri Lanka. There had been no shore excursions offered for this date in March, but now we have many choices, and we have signed up for an optional Walking Tour with a local guide. The included excursion was sitting on a bus viewing the sights, so we have opted for a more strenuous, optional excursion to try and experience more of the ‘vibe’ of the City. We also have a golf game booked for one day we are Colombo, out of the 3 days we are in this port.

This evening we also received a Guest Comment card from the General Manager of the Neptune on what comments we had for areas of improvement. I believe the staff and crew are providing an excellent cruise experience, but there are a few small things we would like to see added like a gluten free oatmeal at breakfast for example and an ongoing pasta station with different sauces such as red sauce, pesto sauce and a cream sauce for dinner in the World Cafe and some healthy afternoon snacks like air popped popcorn. We need something light and fun to have in the afternoon which tides us over from our 1pm lunch to 7pm dinner. I have filled out our comment form and we will be dropping both the comment card and the excursion request at Guest Services sometime tomorrow.

We had pretty wet weather all day today and we also saw our first fog bank of the cruise around 6pm this evening. We know the closest Island was about 400 miles away from us at noon today, so having fog and rain, makes deck walking impossible and it is pretty creepy, not being able to see any sky, or sea around us. Hopefully this weather will improve and by the time we get to French Polynesia, we will enjoy beautiful warm, sunny days, with mild ocean breezes!

Hopefully the internet improves too, so I can add some photos so you don’t have to sit and read an essay, but can look at the pretty pictures too! I think this is the First Blog ever I’ve done with No Photos. Not a First I was hoping for!