World Cruise - Day 2 - Jan 14 - At Sea

Today is our first sea day.  We are following a course southeast out of Florida and this morning we are following the coast of Cuba on our starboard (right) side.  I didn’t realize how many islands there are in Cuba until we passed by them in the distance.  They are barely visible by the naked eye, but with my binoculars I can see the buildings and even the trees onshore.  We will continue past Hispaniola (Haiti and Dominican Republic), then not sure if we will make a turn south before or after Puerto Rico.

We had coffee on the balcony using our new coffee card:

The coffee card provides for 15 specialty coffees and unlimited drip coffees while onboard.  For the coffee aficionados (I do not consider myself to be one, even though I’m from Seattle), the “normal” coffee you get onboard is pretty much undrinkable, since it is made with a coffee syrup, rather than coffee grounds.  Using the coffee card, you can get real live drip coffee from the coffee bar.  So Krissie and I both had a latte this morning and we will do the drip coffee other days during the week.  The specialty coffee will be our Sabbath treat.

Krissie has her painting supplies with her and is setup on the balcony.  She decided to start with the watercolors and will do acrylics and oils later.  Here is the moving background she will be painting:

She says all she needs to know about painting is contained in the song “Vincent,” where it says to “paint your palette blue and grey…”  So when she was getting setup, she found the blue paint, but she couldn’t find the grey.  “I think you’ll have to mix it.”  “Oh, that’s right, so just mix blue and white?”  “Um, that would be light blue.  I think you need to mix white and black.”  “Right.”

That said, she has already produced three paintings in one day!  Here they are:

Her first picture was of the sea and the clouds and sky.  She added a little boat on the horizon later.

This is her portrait of me.

And this is her third pic, I like this one the best.  She’s amazing how fast she paints and the pics don’t really do the paintings justice, they have wonderful colors and effects.  She is really good!  Although she already ran out of white watercolor, so she said she will likely do acrylics next.

We had our Cruise Critic Meet & Greet today.  There were about 50 people attending, nice crowd!

The Captain made an announcement today that we will not be stopping in Santa Marta, Colombia due to some recent violence there.  Instead, we will be stopping a day later in Cartagena, Colombia.  I’ve never been to Categena and Krissie has not been there since she was on a trip with her family when she was 10, so it will be pretty much new to both of us.