Our first sea day is upon us, so we’re up and dressed by 08:00 and on deck nine doing laps. The temperature is a bracing 6 degrees, we have jeans and layers.
We clock up a third of our target, noticing that the Patio Grill is getting ready to start service, so break to be first in the queue for breakfast. Predictably we have fresh fruit, followed by burrito and tagine two of our regular favourites – if it ain’t broken don’t fix it!
Immediately after breakfast we take our laps up to the 8km / 5 mile stage which is enough for today. Hubby does his Spanish whilst I’m busy with a client’s post-code problem. With 1.8 million postcodes in Britain it gets quite complicated to calculate pallet delivery charges when the post-code is split within the sector, and I’ve got a problem with Guildford, Falkirk and Inverness in particular and a few others too. The traditional tables will not cope and I’m having to write some intriguing code.
Sitting outside under the heaters we are just about warm enough but it’s a close call, made all the better with hot chocolate and a lovely catch-up with friends from our Pacific transit 18 months ago.
That takes us right up to 13:00 where we join the Bridge Tour. Of course we have done these before but it’s been a while so we spend a lovely hour looking but not touching all the fabulous screens and buttons needed to drive a modern ship. The steering wheel is still there just in case the five other methods all fail at the same time! Second officer Brian gives some fantastic detail and is most engaging.
After lunch we remain under our heaters to complete postcodes and blogging, before heading to the galley at 16:00 for the next tour – we’re really acting like newbies today. Exec Chef Christophe is highly entertaining, explaining lots of detail about how our food is prepared. He shares some alarming disaster scenarios and keeps us for nearly 90 minutes of fun and education, before he suddenly realises he’s got about 350 for dinner and must go!
Tonight is Formal so we dress as one should and, after our customary Patio Bar drinkies head to MDR for formal Chef’s Signature Dinner. It’s a six course menu with only the main having a choice, we go for the Venison Wellington. Almost every course is excellent, only the pudding is weak, and so agreeing with Craig RH if it is not perfect it cannot have full marks, I rate dinner as 4.5 stars, but it’s a close call. Our servers are excellent, we must return to this station.
Tonight’s showtime is SilverScreen, celebrating cinema and theatre across the decades. We miss out on front row so the photos are a bit sparse, but the show is very entertaining.
