April 19th

At Sea

I waited all day for the invitation to arrive requesting our presence at a hosted table for tomorrow night’s final formal evening of our voyage. The invitation never arrived. It was our last chance. Well maybe it will happen on our next cruise.

We had our day of relaxation yesterday. Today it was back to being educated.

The first talk of the morning was by Gavin Robinson, the Zimbabwean, on “Managing a Conservancy”. It was very informative and I loved his animal photos.

Next we had to choose between Asha de Vos’ talk on “Whales in a Changing Planet” and a talk on wildlife photography. As partial as we are to whales, the photography talk won. It was given by two of the onboard photographers, and was quite good, but I honestly thought that Brian could have given a much more practical and informative talk. That got us thinking. With our talk on safaris, and a talk on wildlife photography, maybe we could get a gig doing these talks on cruise ships sailing to Africa. Now that would be really cool! However, we still would need a third topic.

After the photography talk we went to Cally Oldershaw’s excellent talk on “Islands and Beaches”, where she discussed the formation of islands and “hot spots” in Iceland, Hawai’i, and Mauritius, Rodriguez, and Reunion, and she also talked about the differences in consistency and colors of sands in various locations. It was very educational, and I learned a lot about 2 of my favorite subjects, volcanoes and sandy beaches. She really brings a lot of life to her talks, and I could sit and listen to her all day.

However, after all of that education I was feeling hungry, so we decided to try out lunch in the Café Carinthia. They serve a meat platter, seafood platter, vegetable platter, and meat sandwich, together with pie or cake for dessert. The helpings aren’t large, but they are perfect for a light lunch, between breakfast and tea. Iain and Jane were there too, so the 4 of us had a great time eating, drinking and talking until late into the afternoon. Lunch there turned out to be perfect for a light lunch for me, and I would very happily go there again, except it wasn’t enough food for Brian, so we ended up in the Lido having another snack.

I do love stateroom soirees, they remind me of the very posh soirees my mother used to host on voyages in the good old days. However, I have not been organized enough to host one on this trip unfortunately. Luckily 2 of our friends decided to host cabin parties tonight. First we went to Dan and Irene’s where it was like a QV 2017 reunion as most of the guests had been on QV with us last year. Then we went to Ricki and David’s. Ricki and David had invited 15 guests, but it didn’t feel like too much of a squash, and both soirees were really excellent. We will definitely have to have one next time. At the end of the soirees we went down to dinner.

Our other tablemates weren’t there, so we though we were going to be dining in solitary splendor. However, Ricki and David asked us to join their table, as 2 of their tablemates weren’t there either, and we had a really lovely and lively evening at their table. You do get to meet the best people when you are cruising!

The show was the magician Philip Hitchcock again, and 2 lovely young violinists, String Idols. It was a great show, and at the end we declared we were too tired to go to the Commodore Club, and headed off to the cabin.

I realized that I had kept on thinking “maybe on our next cruise” all day. This is a bad sign, our current voyage must be coming to and end……………….