World Cruise - Day 24 - Feb 5 - At Sea

So I kinda messed up on my sunrise photos this morning.  I was sitting on our balcony (starboard side, heading south) waiting for the sunrise and thought it would be peeking out below these clouds, given how they were lighting up:

Then I realized that it was already pretty light outside and then it occurred to me: starboard = right = ship heading south = west side of the ship.  Sunrise was on the other side of the ship.  So I went down to the promenade deck on 5 to get this photo, even though the sun had already been up for quite awhile at this point:

Sonia, you asked about Emmanuelle not having anyone else around to pay for her dolphin swim.  She was at the dolphin park by herself, so there wasn’t anyone with her who could assist.  I wish she had my phone number with her, perhaps she would have been able to call me and I could have given her my credit card information over the phone.  Not sure if that would have worked.  Anyway, thanks for the info on Atlantis Dubai, I will pass it along to her.  I’m pretty sure she will make this happen somewhere along the way on our trip.

Today is Super Bowl Sunday.  Every Sunday onboard there is always a special Sunday Brunch to start the day in the main dining room (Club Restaurant).  Then, shortly after will be the Super Bowl in the Cabaret Lounge (main show theater).  It starts just after noon and the kickoff is at 1:30, since we are on Hawaii time (2 hours earlier than Pacific and 5 hours earlier than Eastern).  Before then, we have Zumba, laundry, ping pong and trivia on the docket this morning.

I got a nice e-mail from Paige Jeffries, who is following the blog, since her Mom (Pamela) and her Mom’s friend (Gervais) are onboard.  Paige, I met up with you Mom and Gervais this morning and took this pic of them:

They send you their greetings!

I got second place in ping pong today.  Wei beat me in the finals, winning his first medal in ping pong onboard (and a gold one at that!).  That’s my last blog comment for awhile on ping pong unless something interesting and exciting happens there—I think I’ll refrain from the ping pong match comments going forward, since that’s probably not interesting to anyone other than those onboard playing ping pong.  I was also going to hold off on the trivia questions as well, but then Rebekah told us that Danny loves the questions and she went back through the blog reading all the questions to him.  So I guess I’ll still keep posting some of them and if it’s not of interest, just skip that paragraph?

I’m off to the WWII lecture on Carrier Warfare in the Pacific, then trivia, then Sunday Brunch. 

We won at trivia again this morning.  Our team will take off the afternoon for the Super Bowl.  Here are some of the harder questions: In what decade was instant coffee introduced? 1930s (1938 to be exact, we said 1940s).  What does SOB mean when written on a patient’s chart in a hospital?  Shortness of breath (we got that one right).  Who was introduced in Toy Story 2 as being 41 years old although she looked considerably younger?  Barbie (we put Annie).  What is the only country that beings with the letter Q?  Qatar (we got that one).  What side of the apple is the bite in Apple’s logo?  Right (we got that one, thanks Brandon).  What was the name of the sea that was crossed for the first time in July, 1969?  Sea of Tranquility (on the moon, we got that one as well).

I took a bunch of pics at Sunday Brunch last week, so not repeating those pics again, but here is a pic of the dessert table with some sugar flowers at the end that I thought were particularly interesting:

Yes, it is difficult to hold off when there are so many wonderful desserts.  So far, I think Krissie and I have pretty much held the line on our weight.  I even took in an extra belt notch a little while back.

Off to the Super Bowl party.  I think I’ll root for the NY Giants, since they’re the underdogs.

Just finished watching the Super Bowl:

Super exciting, right down to the last play of the game!  The crowd was pretty evenly split between Giants and Patriots.  We had to watch the game on ESPN (since the satellite reception only includes ESPN, not NBC), which was kind of a bummer, since we didn’t get to see any of the Super Bowl commercials.  All we saw were the same 5 or 6 ESPN commercials for rugby, soccer, basketball and baseball.  So if you saw a Super Bowl commercial that was really a good one, let me know in the comments and I will try to look it up while I’m online tomorrow.

Julie, they don’t do very many late night buffets, this might be the second one in 24 days so far.  Although they do have the I was actually surprised how well attended it was, since most people (including us) tend to go to bed early.  We were just on a huge Celebrity ship in November and December and I don’t remember them doing any late night buffets.  That said, when we first started cruising back in 1993, I think there was a midnight buffet every night.

Krissie painted another picture today, this one was using acrylics:

I didn’t compress that pic for the blog, since it tended to lose its colors when I do the compression, so you can click on it to see it larger.  I love her sense of color and flow!

The evening entertainer was mentalist Brent Webb.  He did the typical pick-a-number-out-of-the-phone-book-and-I-already-have-it-in-an-envelope routine.  Obviously sleight of hand, yet he was very difficult to figure out.

Tomorrow is sea day #2 of 5 on our way to Pago Pago, American Samoa.