April 2, 2022

Last night was the third of the Oceania Club cocktail parties. Some of the statistics we heard at all three:

There are 924 passengers onboard, the ship holds 1250. The passengers come from 17 different countries. Most of the passengers are from the US, second is Canada followed by UK, Germany and the Netherlands.  There are more than 725 crew who serve us so beautifully. More than 200 crew work in the culinary department and all breads, pastries, etc are baked on board with the exception of the English muffins and the bagels.

As I wrote before, we are missing the port of Marseille. It is a disappointment but the weather today is really something wild. We have 60 knot winds and huge waves. The water comes up over the front deck! And when you see the waves crest, often a small rainbow can be seen in them. So it is very understandable that the ship would have a hazardous time docking anywhere here. At this point, the Mediterranean is worse than the Atlantic.  We are lucky that we don’t mind the rocking. We are now at sea at the border of Spain and France at the Bay of Roses. We  just passed the meridian.

And here is how I had to dress for a walk on the deck. It is 45 degrees and extremely windy. I had just taken the windbreaker jacket off!  The walk was cut short at 30 minutes when they closed the deck because the winds were way too strong. So I went to dancercise class instead.

I try to do all of the blackjack tournaments and have come in first once and second once.  Today my new friend Laura won!  People say they think we are sisters.  Here we are in our favorite place.

We had our covid tests today as we are on the next segment of the cruise and needed a negative result to continue.  We were both negative.

Tomorrow is our last port in this segment, Monaco.  We  have not yet heard that we will have any problem docking there.  Fingers crossed.  Then on Monday we reach the port of Civitavecchia which is the  port closest to Rome.  It is the end of the first segment of the cruise and we know that about 330 passengers will continue on with us.  We do need to change rooms and will do that before getting off the ship.  We have a butler who will do all of the moving for us. We just need to personally take our valuables. We have been to Rome before so we plan to take a taxi to Civitavecchia, explore and have lunch.