Charlotte Amalie, Virgin Islands US
Friday, March 21st
Day at sea
This morning I popped right out of bed at 7 and was in the gym before 7:30. Don’t know what the deal with that was! I got on an elliptical planning to do 45-60 minutes. These ellipticals have their own little TV screen, so I plugged in my headphones and surfed for something to watch. There was a movie, “Letters from Juliet” just starting. It was the perfect workout movie! Romantic comedy and entertaining enough to make me forget about my knees. Two hours+ later when the movie ended, I got off and hobbled away.
Got back to the cabin just as Jeff was leaving for a class on photographic lighting. He went to the talk and I took my IPad to sit in a lovely seating area to write. There was a trivia contest going on in the lounge next to me and I did quite well. (It was the same contest they held last week.) Haha
Jeff said the first part of the talk was basically a commercial to book a photographic sitting, but the rest covered some basic light settings and options. He went up to the gym and worked out on the treadmill for an hour and did weights for another 30 minutes. I napped. 🙂 What a great day!
Tonight is the first formal night of this 10 day leg. We got dressed up (Sorry, no photos again!) this is the Captain’s Champagne waterfall night…free champagne. Hooray!
At dinner we shared the table with a couple from Vancouver and an older couple from Rochester, New York, Ray and Carol. The guy from Vancouver, Curt, was about 30 sheets to the wind and completely obnoxious. Jeff didn’t think he was that bad, but he wasn’t sitting next to him! It was awful. About 1/2 through dinner he ordered shots of Jagermeister for us all. In a different, say a less formal, rowdier environment that would have been a nice gesture. His wife was a little ticked, I think. He and she left dinner before dessert and none of us were unhappy to see them go. Ray and Carol were very interesting – as we discovered now that we could have a conversation. Ray is retired from Xerox and was telling us about the economic conditions in Rochester. With layoffs at Xerox, GM and HP, and even though their area lost 40k jobs they never had unemployment over 7.5% because of all the start up companies people began after losing their jobs. Good conversations.
After dinner we went back to our cabin. The stargazing is good now that the moon is waning and on the other side of the ship. So many stars; it is easy to see how they would have guided the sea faring sailors so long ago…