Sunday 15/2/2015 – One sea day between South Pacific Islands to Fiji

Beautiful seas and skies, but so hot, best viewed from inside!  We haven’t felt inclined to be outside much today, apart from our essential walking after breakfast and dinner.  No swimming or hot-tubbing today, in fact there was even a decadent little afternoon nap in the cabin today.

Our quest to keep cool had also involved in-cabin telly, rewatching the captain’s slide show “life on the Bridge”, very informative and once again reminding us of how much there is to learn, and to stay mindful of what’s happening here and now, and not to take the work of the ship’s officers and crew for granted,  plus a documentary called “20 Feet from Stardom”, an insight into the work of Black American background singers over the last 50 years, all about Gospel roots, women’s issues, racial equality and much more.

Otherwise normal activities in air conditioned spaces like dance (today it was Samba) and art (a mountainous landscape) were comfortably achieved.  The landscape is quite complicated so we are going to take two sessions to finish.

Meal times are still just as interesting. I always start a new conversation as soon as someone says “Is anyone sitting here?”  There are a few retired nurses doing the whole circumnavigation. One of our table mates, Bea, is a nurse, and Bea incidentally only lives in Whitefield, then a lady we met at breakfast a few days ago who spent her nursing career at Pendlebury children’s hospital working with children with leukaemia, and today a former Barts nurse and midwife who later became a nurse manager in Southampton, who coincidentally knows someone from the Department of Health I remember doing a DANS when I was studying for my B.Nurs at Manchester in the early 1970’s. Some lovely unexpected yet vital nursey conversations.

Tomorrow we arrive in Suva in Fiji, we don’t have a tour booked this time, but Khachik has all the instructions he needs to find a haircut and we know that we won’t need a bus or taxi to get to the town centre, just a short walk from the port. We dearly hope that alongside visiting Paradise Island we can have some live chats with our loved ones tomorrow. Clocks go back one hour tonight so it might be possible.

Let’s see. Bye for now, time to get the black frock on for a formal dinner. xx 

Sunday 8/2/2015 Day 34 Pacific Bliss and Captain’s Coffee Morning for the World Cruisers!

I haven’t mentioned the cruise speakers recently, so this second of 5 sea days might be a good opportunity.  Nick Owen came on for about a week and spoke about his years presenting a.m. telly with Ann Diamond.  He also did an interview on the P and O chat show. We both enjoyed listening and found him more interesting than we had imagined, very open about the warts an’ all, and quite humble.

“Marlene” from Only Fools and Green Green Grass, spoke twice too once with her bio and a lot of clips from the various series she has performed in, and once just about Only Fools. We didn’t realise how much she’d achieved in her career, apart from Marlene.  There are other speakers we haven’t listened to because the promotional info sounded a bit tedious – e.g. one of the Queen’s former butlers talking about Royal food and life, someone else was more than “mentioning the war” actually detailing it every day for a week,  and Ken Joy was talking about entertainment in the last century.

As for passenger participation there’s a talent contest in the making, also a Strictly-style competition, and a brand new passenger choir. None of the above for us, for now at least ;)

You want to hear about yesterday’s art? Erm, so much laughter ++ it hurt. The monkey picture this sector is going to be like last sector’s koala bear for micky taking.  Strange faces and hair, sad looks, arrogant looks, interpretations quite unique and absolutely hilarious!!!!! Easa our art teacher said he’d go to his GP at the end of the cruise for a referral for counselling – he was only joking, at least I think he was. Next up a Pelican.

And dancing the Quickstep?  Not as bad as first time.  It’s all about the repetition. Maybe by sector 5 we’ll be able to do it without support, or maybe not.  We’ll enjoy watching P and O Strictly in any case on 18^th of this month.

Now for the Captain’s Coffee morning…. The 500+ world cruisers got another chance to meet the Captain and senior officers over coffee and cookies.  We were also on something like a “blind date” – there’s a story if you would bear with us.  Last December we were on the Costa Pacifica to Rio and two of our then dinner mates, Pam and Domenic, also became good cruise mates. When we mentioned we were going on a world cruise next Pam said so were her sister and partner. We knew their names but nothing else, so we wrote them a letter, passed it to reception and waited for a reply. This morning there was a voicemail from them on our cabin phone – describing their clothes and distinguishing marks!  Success. I found the couple no problem at the coffee morning and made contact.  Still finding there are hundreds of faces I don’t feel I’ve seen before, and we’re already into the 5^th week, and have cruised 11,600 miles. 

With love until tomorrow from the Pacific, heading south west to Pago Pago, in American Samoa X

Wednesday 4/2/2015 Day 30 One day left at sea before Hawaii, calm sea and sun out.

Phew, the rain we had yesterday stopped overnight and now the sun is out, the waves are a lot smaller and the wind has dropped from force 8 to force 5. Temperature at 3.30 p.m was 27C.   Deck activity has started again, and the factor 30 has come back into play J.  We are back to all outside activities and feel good. We noticed “motion discomfort bags” had been strategically placed around the corridors overnight, but not a great deal of uptake. One of our dinner mates suffers terribly. I told her about covering one eye, and she is going to give it a whirl.

All is well as we approach Hawaii for our 2 day stay, one long day in Oahu from early a.m. until 11 p.m. tomorrow, then sailing overnight to the second island Maui for next day. We are going whale watching in Oahu on a catamaran, lunch out and then time for a good look around.

Today we have revisited the cha cha cha in our dance class and will be going out  again to the Retreat later to practice, after Cabaret.  This is a special venue set up like a night club with candles on the tables and hosted by the dance teachers for people like us, just getting up the courage to take the dances out. I have started to enjoy this.

And our art subject was a paradise island landscape with sun sea palm trees, rocks. I am not as proud of this as I was of yesterday’s whale, but it’s all good fun.

KHACHIK'S PALM TREES

So now it’s time for dinner, back again tomorrow. x

Day 27 Sunday 1st February 2015 Pacific Ocean to Hawaii

Everything went as planned on Sunday, the City highlights was such good fun and our tour pictures are already up on Facebook because we found a Starbucks for hi speed internet just before going back to the ship. Golden Gate Park, Golden Gate Bridge, look out points, Twin Peaks, Union Square, the cable cars, trams and buses  On one of our stops we tried the clam chowder – enough chunky and tasty food for a day in one bowl!

The jobs we had to do all got done too, paying bills and keeping our bank up to date with the countries we are using our account in.  We found a Fedex agent so we could send important documents to the UK, and a hairdresser for me so I could have another “haircut of the world”, and then spent the afternoon walking towards Union Square up Market Street, taking in the feel of a new city.  Lots of pop up craft stalls more street performers, places we recognised from movies. We made it back in time for dinner, and enjoyed the cabaret, and then were off to sleep in no time with very little waking up.  The clocks have stayed the same for 2 nights now.  I imagine they will start to go back again on the way to Hawaii.

On 13^th we are told we “miss a day” to bring us back to reality as we cross the international date line, otherwise we would be going back in time until we got home.

As it’s a sea day we have started our stretching, dance and art together again. In art we painted a penguin with chick, and were very happy.

Dance actually felt comfortable today. You know what, I am beginning to think I might even be able go to one of the dances on board without a “caller”! Steady on.   Today we worked on our rhythm foxtrot, which we are reassured we can resort to for anything in 4:4 time.  Time will tell.  Other sea day activities include sitting on the deck for coffee, doing brain training puzzles and chatting away.

We have attempted not to eat too much today, and we have maintained 9-10 laps of the Promenade Deck every sea day, so efforts are in place not to overdo it (too often ;) )It’s easy to eat very well as there’s so much choice, it’s also just as easy to add a slice of cake, chips, in fact ANYTHING your heart desires 24 hours a day.

Another sea day tomorrow, bye for now.