Our last sea day is decidedly bumpy. We have 15’ swells and 40kt crosswinds, meaning Captain has closed all the outside decks. Given the problems and appalling publicity TUI Marella have had this week I suppose quite rightly Captain van der Wal doesn’t relish the prospect of losing a customer today, especially on the last day! Imagine the paperwork!!
We start our walking inside, just on two and three, but it gets very tedious as we pass through the shops talking to the same sales staff every time, so we head down to deck one and start a circuit there. We walk every inch of each deck from one to nine, saying hello to every steward we come across, which is quite a few. When we reach nine we can go aft outside and notice that the stairs up to ten are not closed off, indeed there’s a man walking up there. So we head up and do our last 1.5 miles on ten. The wind is intense, and drags us around. We can understand why it should be closed, and probably still is, we just found a loophole.
Here’s a collection on photos from around the ship as we walked.
For lunch we try to recreate a Thomas Keller moment with lobster mac’n’cheese and Nicolas Feuillatte champagne. It’s an excellent and memorable success. Crème brûlée is the perfect pudding.
We have come across some delightful people this cruise. As well as those Ten Pound Pommes we met a few days ago and have since spoken to regularly, we have pre-dinner drinking friends who learned to dive with Jaques Cousteau’s children on Calypso, and yesterday we met with a Seargent Major who sailed back from the Falklands on SS Uganda, my first cruise ship. Today we’ve chatted with a fascinating infectious diseases consultant and his lovely wife, in a regular meeting place – the jacuzzi of course!
Our final dinner has to be lamb as we are unlikely to have any for a while, and it doesn’t disappoint. We take great pleasure in thanking all those wonderful Pinnacle staff who have served us over the last 28 days. Frans, the mâitre d’Hôtel, drags chef out to talk to us again, he’s a bit out of his comfort zone but we are genuinely appreciative with our compliments.
