At Sea

The storm between Rio and Buenos Aires must have been quite something. Everything on our balcony had a thick layer of salt on it, making it rather nasty. They had cleaned the balcony in Santarem, so I don’t expect we will get another cleaning for quite some time.

It was lovely to sleep in our comfy bed again, and get back into the routine of heading up to the Lido for breakfast – Marmite on brown toast and orange juice. Yum.

We had a full schedule ahead of us today – first Dr Mike Gibson gave an excellent talk called “Beagling round South America” which covered the second survey voyage of HMS Beagle, with a focus on how come Darwin got chosen to go on the voyage, and how the South American part of the journey covered much the same route as we are taking.

The next talk was by the always-entertaining Maureen Ryan, discussing how she ended up going to sea, and her experiences on Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth. I always enjoy her talks, and this was no exception. I love hearing about the Queen Elizabeth, I have such fond memories of my Transatlantic crossing on her with my parents in 1962. Unfortunately all of their photos of the crossing were lost in one of their many moves. My favorite photo was that of Mum and I standing on deck with the Statue of Liberty behind us. The day before, on 5^th Avenue, my parents had bought me a beautiful blue wool coat with a white fur collar and white fur muff. I am wearing them for the first time, and feeling like I am a princess.

The final talk of the morning was from Richard Cowley, and was entitled “Secrets, Mystery and Lies – The Drama of the Battle of the River Plate”. Also very topical as we had just been in Montevideo. He was a very entertaining speaker, and although the subject manner could have seemed a bit dry, he made it fascinating. I look forward to his other talks.

After lunch I went to the Queens Room to listen to a guitarist named Dimitris Dekavallas. He played Spanish music, and was very good. I was tempted to buy one of his CDs, but had to rush off to our next engagement, and there was a long queue of people buying them. He is to give another concert so hopefully I will be able to buy one then.

It was time for the wine tasting. It was a bit disappointing because yet again all of the wines were bin ends, and not on the wine list. They have a wonderfully extensive wine list, and I would love it if they had a wine tasting where we get to find out more about the wines that are actually on the wine menu. At least I didn’t get admonished for drinking rather than just tasting the wine this time. Everyone in our group was knocking it back too.

We returned to the cabin watch the film Evita on our TV, and there was a notice that they would be cleaning the balconies this evening. I was very impressed that they were wasting no time getting all of the salt off of the balconies and windows.

Again, it was just the 4 of us at our table for dinner. I had roast beef with Yorkshire pudding, and sticky toffee pudding, so it was like Sunday lunch at the pub, only better.

The entertainer tonight was Marc Paul. He is a mind reader, and his show was incredible, and we all left saying, how did he do it? There was a lot of audience participation, so it was unlikely that all of those people had been in cahoots with him. It really did appear that he was reading people’s minds. Very interesting.

There was a deck party with Synergy at the Lido Pool, but it felt a bit cool and windy outside so we gave it a miss, and headed back to the cabin.