Day 64/138 2022/2023 Viking Neptune World Cruise. A sea day.
It was a warm and stormy day…as opposed to the classic line “It was a dark and stormy night!” The temperature today was 82F and the seas were 86F! Its been a bit of a foggy, rainy day all day, without much sunshine at all.
I spent a very lazy morning reading in bed. I just wanted to finish my book! I’ve been reading the Prince Harry book called “Spare” and I was so close to finishing the book, that I thought this morning when I had nothing much going on, would be a good day to finish my book. We have food in the cabin, so a couple of rice cakes topped with Hazelnut cocoa, cashew butter along with a couple of cups of ginger tea, was all I needed for my breakfast. I finished the book and all day long I’ve been thinking about the trials and tribulations that Prince Harry has been through in his life, without so much as a person to speak to about his life, because doing so was NOT the done thing for a Royal. Like or dislike Megan, (and I like her), Prince Harry once raised his voice to her and spoke to her in a disrespectful manner and she left the room for 15 minutes. Once he realized she was not coming back, the questions she asked him instead of being angry with him were “Where did you hear that kind of tone and language in your life to use it on me?” And “I will not tolerate that language, tone or behaviour in our relationship so we will need to find you help so that you do not repeat what just happened.“. And then finally Prince Harry got help. Help for the loss of his mother at age 12; help for the PTSD he had after being in Afghanistan as a helicopter pilot, killing 25 Taliban in the time he served for the British military; and frankly help from being a Royal who was raised to hide his emotions and keep a stiff upper lip. Richard always says there are 3 sides to every story “Yours, Mine and the Truth”, and I’m sure in the Autobiography of Prince Harry, there is some truth and some opinion too. Anyway, it was an interesting read and I’m glad I finally finished it today.
We fell short in team trivia yet again today. We are always close, but no cigar!
Lunch was interesting today with a Soup buffet set up at the back of the World Cafe with 3 soups to choose from: Clam Chowder in a Bread Bowl, Minestrone with pesto and Parmesan and Beef Barley. I had the Minestrone and I chose to have it in a bread bowl. It was good, but not as good as the minestrone soup that I make. I made a sandwich with some of the leftover bread bowl, as it seemed like such a waste to throw out some fresh, soft brown whole wheat bread!
In Calligraphy class today we were working on practising once again the saying we had chosen. I repeated my saying 3 times and the funny thing is that as I was so focused on getting the letters right, I would forget how to spell the word, or I would jump to the next word! YEESH! It really is such a precise process working with no room for error. If you make a mistake on one letter, your entire piece of writing is wrecked.
I had the instructor critique my work and she wants me to get the letters in my words closer together, so I will be working on that tomorrow. We also spent some time working on embellishing our work with primary colours.
Its is a work in progress….we’ve got 2 more sea days of classes to finalize our piece of writing. I’m glad I stuck with it, as the process is very zen, just focusing on writing each letter correctly. I’m up for some art again though, whenever the calligraphy is over with, but it has been a nice diversion.
Immediately after Calligraphy class it was back to our team ship building in Mike and Sharon’s cabin. We spent another 2 hours on the ship and our plan was to do a sea trial at 9pm in the main pool this evening since the competition is coming up soon in 2 days.
We met up for dinner this evening at The Restaurant. We were invited to a table of 8 people and thoroughly enjoyed meeting some new people who we had not met before. Dinner was nice as we each could each order individually off the menu. The conversation was delightful and I’m sure we will have lunch or dinner with some of these folk again while we are on the ship.
Our sea trials were scheduled for 9pm, but the main pool area was being set up for Sunday brunch by the staff. All the more reason for us not to be seen by anyone else who is also taking part in this competition. The ship looks amazing, but when we got it in the water we realized we had some problems. The trial did not go as anticipated, but that is why we did it tonight. We still have tomorrow to try and resolve the problems or as we used to call them when I was working “OPPORTUNITIES” and given we have 6 motivated individuals working on this project, I’m sure we’ll figure it out before the competition.
And now I’m off to do the write up on our ship. There really is not enough hours in the day when we are at sea, to get everything done!