"Treasures of Cruising the World" with Bill & Mary Ann: Report #54 Day at Sea February 23, 2018 Friday Partly cloudy & 81 degrees 78 Pictures

A boring day at sea? Never. Definitely warmer outside with choppy seas, but oddly, smooth sailing, it looks like our journey north will be a good one. For some reason, few folks were on the outside decks this morning. Perhaps their day spent in Freemantle and Perth had done them in. Or….they were busy attending lectures about what to see and do from Bali to Singapore. Alan Wright is still doing his talks on shadows in the sky, but we see there is a new guest chef by the name of Isabella Jakubiak. She will be conducting classes in America’s Test Kitchen. Later in the afternoon, the second lecturer, Kate Mead, spoke about artistic Indonesia. Speaking of Indonesia, we had a question regarding the current volcanic eruptions happening there. Many of the crew are from Indonesia, so we asked some of them if this might impact our visit there. Every one of them said it was too far away from Bali, and there were no changes in the plans to stop there for two days. Better not be changes now, or there may be a mutiny.

A select group of passengers were invited to a Heart of the House Tour, taking us down to decks A and B at 11am. Turned out that 170 guests were invited, and they included the suites and the President’s Club members. Going down the crew stairs from mid deck one, we toured in small groups seeing the store rooms, refrigerator, freezer, and thawing room. But first, we were offered sparkling wine or orange juice. Then we continued down to B deck to see the laundry facilities. Although we have seen these areas of the ship before, it still struck us how intolerably hot it was there. We will all appreciate the work the fellows do in this laundry facility even more now. Barb should be really glad, since she accidently leaned against a wall, and came up with a black grease stain in her very white jeans. Hopefully they will be able to clean them for her.

An Indonesian lunch followed the tour. The waiters were dressed in their native prints, and the ladies wore beautiful Indonesian dress clothes. We had teamed up for the tour with Barb, Susie and Woody, and continued to stay together so we could get a table in the upper dining room. Don McD joined us, making our table for six complete. This traditional meal was excellent, and ample to say the least. Red and white wine was served, except for those of us that preferred the soda. Soup and salad were the starters, followed by fried rice, beef Sumatra, curried prawns, sweet soy pork, chicken sate, and pickled vegetables. Woody took care of the shrimp crackers. Dessert was a glass full of banana in coconut milk, palm sugar, and vanilla ice cream.

We stayed until most all of the other guests had left the room. Crew guys were setting up tables for bridge, which would be starting next. So that was our clue to leave. And besides, Woody was saying he was losing important nap time. But before we left, we decided to take a look around the dining room on deck four for a possible change of table for next year. A round table for six would work out perfectly. There is no better way to find out how something will work until you try it. So it was decided that tonight, we would go to table 169, and dine there. Although Don has his permanent table upstairs, he agreed to be the sixth person for this evening. So that’s what we did, and it seemed to work just fine.

We have been invited to another gathering with our travel agent hosts next Wednesday in the King’s Room. Not sure if we will accept, since the dinner is at 6pm, and we do not like to dine that early. Oh well, we have time to think about it.

Our buddies Leta and Bill were back walking on deck three late this afternoon. Because of back and knee problems, they have not been exercising as much. It was fun catching up on recent news with them…..we must have talked about an hour. We will have to make another dinner date with them when we are all free without other obligations.

Since we have already described our dinner arrangements tonight, we’ll talk a bit about the entrée we had. It was Salisbury steak, which is really ground beef, but here it was more like meatloaf. In the shape of a mini-football. With gravy. Tasty, but not exactly as we remember it. Don and Barb had the clam chowder, saying it was too spicy. Seems that the chefs are doing some creative things in the kitchen this year. We did have one important suggestion to the chefs, and that was concerning salt. That is, using way too much of it. Believe us, swollen feet and ankles do not look good on anybody.

The show tonight was a familiar one….Patrick Murray with his sidekick, Jamaican Matilda. A comedy act, he usually has people rolling with laughter in the aisles. No exception tonight. He is good.

Bill & Mary Ann

Finally, a delivery of flowers