April 10th

At Sea

It was a bright and sunny day, but we had other things on our mind. Having rashly had the bright idea to give the Cruise Critic crowd a talk on safaris, we now had to work on it.

But first Brian went to the talk on an Introduction to Smart Home and IOT, and then we both went to Graham Jones talk on “The Cenotaph – Armistice Day”. Graham was excellent as usual, and has inspired us to extend our proposed trip to Europe later this year so that we can be in London for Remembrance Sunday.

During her noon announcement the captain apologized for the lack of internet over the past few days, and said that it was due to a glitch when the system had a Windows update. Maybe it is nothing more sinister than that. It does still seem very concerning how easy it is to incapacitate the whole fleet. Still, I am glad it is up and running again, and I think it is running faster than before. Yay!

We had a quick lunch in the Lido, then it was time to work on our safari talk, and by 3:45 we were good to go, so we headed to Connexions 3 and connected our computer to the big screen TV, rearranged the chairs to our liking, and we were ready to give our presentation.

We were very pleased by the turn out, and not too many people fell asleep, so I deemed it a success. It was great fun, and everyone was impressed with Brian’s photography, as they should be! It inspired me to get back to making plans for our 2019 safari. I am regretting that we are heading straight home from Cape Town, so no safari on this trip, but alas we do need to return to work.

It was another formal night – Night of the Raj, and there were some people all dressed up for the occasion. They looked great. However the majority of passengers were just in regular formal wear. There was not a pith helmet in sight.

We had another excellent meal – including one of my favorites, cherries jubilee. They didn’t flambé them at the table, but they still tasted very good, and were the perfect was to end another delicious meal.

Brian had to leave dinner at 10:00 as he was going to the single malt tasting. I declined to go to this, and so after dinner I headed up to the Commodore Club to wait for him. There must have been a lot of tasting going on as they didn’t finish until 11:30, but I was fine with that, enjoying listening to Clarolyn on the piano, and looking out to sea. When Brian emerged he declared the tasting a great success, but still likes Laphroig the best.

When we returned to our cabin we set about trying to adjust our watches and phones to the half hour time change that was occurring tonight. We never managed to get our watches to adjust to the half hour, but by setting our phones to Yekaterinburg we were in sync with the time change. I said to Brian that I have never heard of Yekaterinburg before, and he said neither had he before this evening, but that is where the wine steward doing the tasting was from. So now we know that when it is 10:07 PM Pacific Time back home, it is 10:07 AM the next day in Yekaterinburg.