Jan 29th - Sea Day (sigh)

Up fairly early to ring Emily proper on her birthday. Whoever fixed the internet did a decent job as we managed to get a signal in our cabin for the first time. Was not strong but enough for a video call. We also caught up with Mark’s sister. The constant sea days and lack of comms, plus it being late Jan when we are usually in constant contact with the family, has made it a hard few days for us.

Feeling a little homesick but very happy to have done an ET and phoned home left us buoyant and we went for a nice breakfast and met up with out quiz partners for the morning trivia quiz. We should have won but we were half asleep and in fact Mark went back for a nap straight after.

While Mark was asleep Pam read in the cabin, she is going through many more books than usual.

After Mark woke up we headed to the Meridian restaurant for lunch for a change. We had a great  table at the aft of the ship with fantastic sea views but the waters were choppy and no sign of sealife. Amongst the food we hade, we both tried the crispy spinach & ricotta ravioli which was very strange. Beautiful food quickly put I a deep fat fryer to kill it apparently- the Italians would be fuming.

After a long late lunch Pam rested, showered , read and napped and Mark blogged and read. The Captain made his early evening announcement and the weather is going to be dicey from Midnight but maybe the 9metre swells previously mentioned will only be 4m. We shall see. There will also be lots of rain so basically everyone will all be inside tomorrow.

We had a buffet dinner. It’s Sunday and it was Roast Pork with all the trimmings including cauliflower cheese. Strange how excited you can get about cauliflower cheese when you haven’t had it for ages and are missing home. Sorry to say that although the pork was ok, the rest was abysmal and cauliflower cheese was more cauliflower milk. The buffet food quality is nowhere near the main restaurant but this was very poor and it turns out those in the restaurant had roast beef with Yorkshire Pudding and it was great. OK, they didn’t have cauliflower cheese but then again did we?

We went down to the Globe for Pulse’s 7:30 set on 70s music. Very good but we had to leave before it ended in order to get a seat in the theatre for comedian Foogie Flax’s 2nd show at 8:30. Although we arrived at 8:10 there were next to no seats left so we ended up down the front - always a risk with a comedian. We need to rethink our strategy and do the late 10:30 show - the passengers are mainly old on here so much catch the early show and go to bed I think.

Anyway, Foggie was very funny and very clever tonight. He is talented with voices as well as singing songs and playing guitar but his strength tonight was mimicking sounds (bikes, trains, doors, bells, whistles - you name it he could do it). Reminded me of the guy from the Police Academy film all those years ago.

We ended the evening with a couple of quizzes - we are cutting down on these after today - and went back to the globe to see the end of Pulse’s 11pm set. Surprisingly, we discovered that they played different songs for each of their 3 45min sets tonight.

We will leave you with another part of the ship. We have finished deck 2 and will walk up the stairs by the pub to deck 3 - Promenade deck. At this forward end of the ship we have the top level of the theatre that we have already shown you. Next along, probably above the casino, is Costa Coffee’s Cafe Vivvo where we had lunch yesterday.

Food, biscuits and drinks.

Getting a seat can be hard though.

Lovely selection.

That’s it for today. Just seeing that profiterole again (bottom row, 2nd from right) has made my mouth water.