January 20, 2017

We are at sea today  and we also had a sea day on Wednesday.  Yesterday (Thursday) we were supposed to be at Cabo San Lucas but when the captain makes an announcement at close to 6 PM before a scheduled port day, you know it is not a good sign.  Usually he only makes one announcement at noon each day.  He reported that there is bad weather all along the Pacific coast and we could not go to port there, so it was another sea day.  The prediction for tonight is heavy gale force winds which we dodged by missing Cabo, and 15 – 20 foot seas.  One of the crew from our last cruise is on another Oceania ship in French Polynesia and she said they had 4 days of very rough seas.  It is quite chilly too so you don’t see many people out, although we did do our 4 miles on the deck this morning.

First I wanted to post a shot from Nicaragua – where the McDonalds is one of the loveliest buildings in town!

On Wednesday evening we had a special dinner for the world cruise passengers. They closed both Polo and Toscana restaurants and just hosted us, there are about 160 doing the around the world, as I mentioned.  It was a lovely evening, our table of 12 was hosted by Tricia and Steve, the Around the World Ambassadors, who live in the U.K.  Here’s the menu:

And here is the amazing dessert:

In case you can’t read the menu (it’s pretty small), this was a spiky ice macadamia bomb with a coffee brownie.  Sort of like a small baked Alaska, brownie on the bottom, macadamia ice cream and then this wonderful spiky meringue.  They must have worked very hard in the kitchen to make these!  I just had to have pictures.  They make all their ice cream on board and it is awesome!

Last night we had the Oceania Club cocktail party.  We learned that there are 362 passengers from the US, the most from any country which is pretty typical.  Second is Canada, third, UK, but fourth and fifth were surprising…… Germany and Switzerland.  There is one passenger who has sailed more than 800 days with the cruise line.  She is one of the people working on the quilt project and I have gotten to know her – will do some tours with her.

On sea days they have a lot of activities.  One was the ‘Officers Challenge’ where the officers try to beat the guests in table tennis and other games.  They put these flags out on the pool deck on the days of the games.

I have been doing the art classes on some sea days.  Today we worked on whales and sea, this is one I am working on.

And the good news is that I won the blackjack tournament today…$150.  I had been coming in just one off the money in most of the other  tournaments so this was a good one!

Tomorrow we are scheduled to arrive in San Diego at around 10.  We do have to go through US immigration face to face, which they do on the ship.  We are meeting a colleague, Jennifer and will have lunch with her.  Seems like the weather report is for rain which is very rare in San Diego.  Jenn texted me today to say that it is pouring there so we will see.  Many passengers are going to COSTCO and other stores to purchase things they forgot!  We just have a few things to do, but it will be nice to have cell service.  Norm got the T mobile plan which has good international coverage, my Verizon plan is usually turned off but it did get the travel pass and used it in Mexico.