SUMMARY Eating, walking + gym, drinking, reading, doing jigsaw puzzles on my iPad filled the day. Back to the steakhouse for dinner and actual steak (filet mignon) plus ginormous shrimp/prawns with chile and mango. Decadent, but thankfully tiny, chocolate lava cake for dessert. - Karen
DETAIL What’s that? What happened today? Well, likely just read yesterday’s writeup and today will probably be pretty much the same.
A few things that are the same that we’re thankful for are the blue skies, sunshine and calm seas. Here it’s 75° at 10 am. Back home in Austin it’s expected to get up to 106°, ugh. Thankfully it looks like Austin will get it out of it’s system about the time we get home.
The captain tells us we’re 112 miles from Sable Island, famous for the Sable Horses, the horse of Canada? Must look that one up. We’re 570 miles to Boston and 807 to New York. Behind us, we’re 2, 471 miles from Southampton. Karen and I agree that this is a great way to avoid jet lag, but certainly at a cost. Not sure we can do this every year. For sure it doesn’t have to be on the Queen Mary 2.
For meals we have our normal breakfast and then a light lunch in anticipation of another dinner at a special restaurant. Apparently we got a couple of packages and they include quite a few of these meals. We feel embarrassed doing this so often, but hey the food’s good.
Again a dip in the hot tub in the afternoon. We’re getting spoiled, it’s very relaxing. The room came with a 1/2 bottle of champagne, er, rather French sparkling wine. We still have it so we polish it off this afternoon.
Later in the day we start to see lots of passengers dressed for tonight’s Gala, the masquerade ball. Lot’s of people in very fancy duds and equally stylish masks. It’s a little hokey but it’s fun. Quite a few passengers have their kids or grand-kids with them, and it’s fun to see the young girls in sparkly gowns with a cat mask complete with whiskers. They appear to be really eating it up. We brought neither fancy clothes for the event nor masks. As we did swim in the Baltic a few times I could maybe see us with a skin diving mask, but that probably wouldn’t fit in.
Dinner is at the Verandah Steakhouse, the third time we’ve been here. It’s funny, each time we’ve good the same introduction “Hello, my name is Babu, I’m the head waiter in charge, if there’s anything I can do for you… “ He looks like someone out of central casting for Passage to India, and the uniform-looking garb they have him wear adds to that feeling. After three times I want to say “We know this already… Hi Babu!”
As so often is the case, Karen elects to hang in the room after dinner and I go to the big theater for tonight’s show. It’s “Broadway Rocks”, so they do lots of Broadway tunes and also a number of Rock classics. Something for everyone. Here, too, of course there are lots of people dressed for the masquerade gala, complete with mask. They wear they mask to look the part and quickly remove it and put on their glasses so they can see a damn thing. The songs are from South Pacific, Wicked, Lion King, Hair Spray, Carole (King), Tina (Turner) and others. Great fun.
Finally it’s time for bed. One more full day and then back to the real world.
Photos
Another beautiful day at sea. We were worried about how wild the ocean might be, for the crossing, but we got lucky (this time).
The map shows that we're getting closer and closer to New York. We passed the final resting place of the Titanic without experiencing a similar fate, thankfully.
In the Corinthia Lounge there's been a sculptor doing this clay sculpture the whole cruise. He's really good. As of this point there are some things still missing: reins and stirrups. Those will be added today or tomorrow. The rest of the horse, nah.
We've never passed a good reflection that we didn't want to use for a couple's selfie. Some work, some not so much.
Dinner at the Varrandah Steakhouse. We have actual beef this go-round. It's a filet mignon. It's thin but they did a good job. Lord knows we don't need any more excess calories.
A beautiful wife and beautiful sunset as we reflect on a great vacation.
At the evening's performance these two young ladies in front of me are dressed for the night's gala event, complete with masks for the masquarade.