Dear Cruise Diary — Day 9, April 29, 2013

Dear Cruise Diary

Day 9– At Sea in the Atlantic Ocean

April 29, 2013

 

I slept in again, after a pretty restless night. I kept waking up thinking it should be morning, but it would be just 2-something, then 4-something. I think the combination of changing time and eating later than usual has taken its toll. At home I usually blame restless nights on the cats sleeping with me. I did miss them.

After my typical breakfast of bagels and lox with fruit in the Windjammer, I headed back to the stateroom to write the last of my pending work assignments. By the time I finished, it was 11:30 am and time to spring forward to 12:30 pm. Thank goodness this is the last of the time changes for a while!

I really don’t mind spending some time working on a cruise, but when I finally didn’t have any assignments pending, it was a great relief, if only for the moment. No assignments for too long always makes me anxious — after all, the work does pay the bills.

For the first time since leaving Nassau we were not moving the clocks ahead just before noon. I wandered through the several buffets at the Windjammer and didn’t see a single thing I wanted to eat. I had grown a little weary of salad, and they didn’t have anything like grilled chicken or tuna to put on top for a bit of protein. The burgers were precooked and sitting on a steamer tray, looking unappetizing. There were usually several choices of main dishes and vegetables, but that looked more like dinner than lunch to me.

I missed some of the options that Holland America has on its buffet, such as custom-made sandwiches and paninis, sushi and hamburgers just off the grill. Because of the large number of Asian passengers heading for Singapore on this cruise, we had quite a selection of Asian food, but it was more like what you would find in China than in the United States, and I hadn’t found something on that buffet that I really liked yet. I thought part of it was the aroma, which wasn’t too familiar and thus not overly appetizing to me.

For the first time in days, I actually took the elevator – this time to Deck 3 from Deck 11 so I could have lunch in the main dining room before it closed. The appetizer portion of the caesar salad came with grilled chicken, so I ordered it and then went to the salad bar to add more to make it a meal. Alas, the chicken was pretty dry; I’m sure it was sitting on a warming tray for quite a while. Maybe I was just getting too picky.

Next up was a table on the promenade (notice a trend here?) to work on photos. I had downloaded all the photos I had taken so long on this trip, but wanted to go through them to pick the best. I usually rate the pictures using iPhoto’s star system. I learned not to delete the bad ones, because the next time you download from the camera, it would put them right back into iPhoto. I always left my downloaded pictures on the camera disk so I would have a backup. It was surprising how many pictures I took of the same thing, hoping one will be great. I guessed that was a holdover from the days I shot photos for newspapers – when you rolled your own film and developed it yourself, it cost very little to include more shots.

I was sitting across from the stairs that led down to the casino, which was opening that night, and people were entering the raffle for prizes, (which ended up being very small trinkets with the ship’s logo). But the raffle was helping to build excitement for the opening, and as things got busier I moved to my stateroom to catch up on blogging. Then I caught up on the coverage of last weekend’s White House Correspondents Dinner via daily emails from Politico.

The wind had died down and the seas were smoother than the previous day, so it was a good late afternoon for walking on the jogging track. Because my hip had started bothering me last time I walked, I slowed my pace slightly and finished 15 laps – 3 miles – with no problem. The final stair flight tally for the day ended up being 20. Another thing to add to the to-do list: create some new playlists for walking.

On the way to dinner I joined Larry and Meg to listen to some jazz on the promenade. The dinner table was a fun group: Hoyt and Ron from a previous dinner, Hans from Germany but now living in Houston, and Helen and Robin from Sydney, Australia. We were almost the last to leave the dining room.

I decided to check out the reopened casino and immediately upon entering was hit by a cloud of cigarette smoke. There were very few places to smoke on the ship, so the casino got a lot of smokers. The crew was drawing raffle tickets for the trinkets, and the slot machines were all full with people also waiting to play. I didn’t have any cash with me, anyway, so once I had worked my way through to the exit at the other end, I headed to my stateroom.

Again I wasn’t too sleepy, so rather than watch some drivel on the TV, I set up my laptop with the small external speakers I brought and watched “Senna,” a movie I brought about a Formula 1 champion from Brazil. I am missing F1 races while on this cruise so it gave me a little fix.

Tomorrow: Day 10 – At Sea in the Atlantic Ocean