Saturday June 8 – At Sea

When I did my daily walk around the deck this afternoon, there were about 50 passengers using binoculars to watch for pirates.  “I think that’s a pirate ship over there” said one of them.  “No”, replied his companion,” it doesn’t have a skull and crossbones on the flag.”

When a large number of dogs are herded together in kennels, they often develop kennel cough.  This is what has happened to the passengers on the Sea Princess.  People are coughing their lungs out all around the ship and then more passengers are becoming sick.  So far Bill and I have escaped, but the three other women on our table have all developed the cough and flu like symptoms.

We learnt the Waltz today with our new teacher, Jody.  She has an interesting way of teaching this dance, using a love story as she puts it.  First you get a box from your lover, so we do the box step.  Then you open the box and inside is a diamond.  This suggests the diamond step or the turn to the four corners of the diamond.  After this you walk down the aisle, which we do by continuing the waltz in one direction.  It helps us to remember a sequence of moves.

Unfortunately, the TV’s on board this ship are not receiving any external signals and so we were not able to see Geelong’s huge win over Richmond.  We did get the results, however, through the App on our phones.  We would also have liked to have seen Ash Barty win the French Open. To recompense us for a lack of TV, Princess has given every passenger $100.  The fault should be fixed when we reach Malta. 

We had a talk on Aqaba and Petra today.  Petra sounds an interesting place, but the speaker kept emphasising that it will be very hot and the walk will be very rough and extremely long.  He suggests that we not take the carriages pulled by donkeys as these animals are worked very hard and driven very fast, so often fall over and we could end up with broken legs, hips etc.!!!

Tonight was formal (except for the odd Australian who thinks that shorts and a pair of thongs constitutes dressing up!) and we were entertained by Donny Ray Evins who performed a tribute to Nat King Cole. He sounded very like the original and it was amazing to hear the number of well known songs that Cole did. Paper Moon is one of Bill’s favourites as he remembers his mother and father singing it together in the car as the full Easter moon was rising.