Wanderung 19

Meandering the Mediterranean

Transatlantic Cruise

April - May 2009

Tuesday, April 7th, 2009, At Sea

Bob:

After breakfast and submitting my revised estimate in the Navigation Challenge, we took a long walk on the promenade deck. Monika walked with me for three miles, or about an hour, and then she cut off to chat with Phyllis and Lois over their breakfast while I kept on walking. Phyllis complained that their complimentary meal in the Pinnacle Grille had taken three hours. Knowing the type of relaxed dinning experience that seems to be true for France, Spain, and Italy, at least, I wasn't too surprised but apparently neither Phyllis nor Lois had expected anything nearly so long in duration. At least they liked the cuisine!

I continued walking until Monika finally popped out on the promenade deck to grab me for the presentation on Italy by Dr. Wulf. She did another thoroughly-prepared presentation chock full of interesting details. She had the same relaxed, low-key style that tended to lull some people, like the guy sitting behind me, to sleep, but I rather reveled in the wealth of information. The pictures, mostly taken by her husband, I believe, were very good and I would certainly not have minded having even more of those.

We returned to our cabin to enjoy our veranda again before lunch, and Monika read Patricia Cornwell's "Cause of Death" while I brought my journal up to date and pondered how to improve my predictions of the ship's noon position for the next day's competition. I resolved to try to use multiple fixes to better estimate the actual speed while taking into account the influence of current if my prediction turned out to be too far afield.

We attended a lecture on upcoming HAL cruises in the afternoon, after which Monika watched a tap dancing class (filled mostly with teeny boppers, of course!). At dinner we had a new couple at our 10-person table, Ralph and Joyce, who seemed very nice. I tried to control myself so that they would hopefully come back again because the other four people I had conversed with on our first night remained conspicuously absent, which I suspected was no coincidence!

Maria Holiday, a female vocalist, gave a good performance of popular tunes from the 30s to the 50s for the evening show. That period of tunes fit the age demographic of most of the passengers (old, older, and ancient!) very well so we all had a good time. The sound engineer on the Noordam later told me that he set the audio levels at set around 90 Db, and that he tried to make sure that it was just loud enough to ensure we could hear all the words but not so loud as to hurt our hearing. I explicitly thanked him for that because as the Gentle Reader knows we have repeatedly been chased out of theatrical performances on some other ships by unbearably high sound levels.

We capped off the evening by all congregating on our veranda and watching the sun set astern of the Noordam while sharing the complimentary bottle of champagne that Shannon Miller had sent us (Thank you, Shannon!). We remembered doing that on the Zuiderdam with Phyllis and Bill a couple years back, and although we missed Bill very much we were happy that the four of us could do another cruise. The Atlantic Ocean remained as calm as a mill pond, which is VERY unusual. The Captain later said he had never had this calm a crossing in his entire career of over 30 years, and a Navy guy I talked to said that in 8 years of being stationed in the North Atlantic he had never seen weather this calm either. So we counted ourselves quite lucky and just enjoyed the bubbling and frothing of the wake snaking its way out to the horizon.

Copyright 2009 by R. W. Holt and E. M. Holt
Index
Prolog Map of Transatlantic Cruise Map of Northern Italian Bus Trip Map of Eastern Mediterranean Cruise Epilog

April 2009
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5 6 7 8 9 10 11
12 13 14 15 16 17 18

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