Today is the start of our 4 days at sea. We have about 1800 miles to get from Nicaragua to San Diego with no stops. The entertainment staff have their work cut out for them to keep everyone happy for the four days we were supposed to be stopping in Mexico. The agenda for the day seems to be getting longer and longer.
Rick and I had been spending a lot of time in the Piano Bar with a new cruise singer, Diane Fast. Diane is from Seattle and this is her virgin cruise – both as a cruiser and as an onboard entertainer. She has been absolutely fantastic. The cruise director was looking for as many activities as could be fit into a day so Diane volunteered to do two new activities – a Songwriting Seminar and the Passenger Cabaret Class. Today was the first day for both. I was amazed at how many people came. So for the first day of sea, I now have homework to do on a new song and confirm the words to the song I’ll be singing in the cabaret. Rick’s homework is to get “Stupid Cruise Questions” together for a comedy bit. This should be good.
Captain Harris and his entertainment crew are a smart bunch. They decided that tonight there would be another Pool Party, with one major difference…..FREE DRINKS!!!! What a great marketing tool to get people to forget we are not going to Acapulco tomorrow. The Lido mid-ship pool was packed. Charlie and the HAL Cats played great music again and we had dancing, drinking and partying in the pool.
The bunch of people we had met at the Pub Crawl a few days ago met for a Pub Crawl reunion on our own. The bartenders were quite generous in their drink pours even though this was not a “sanctioned” event. We started at 7:30 and hit three bars until we got to the Pool Party for the free drinks. At that point we were ready for the pool. We managed to throw in DJ Dan and the Cruise Director Jimmy. We really wanted to throw them overboard instead of the pool but didn’t want to end up in the brig!!
While we were going through the Panama Canal, a correspondent working at the new canal saw our ship and took a couple of pictures. You can check out more information about the Panama Canal at: www.kleph.com
Here is Cliff’s email to me.
I am a correspondent for Engineering-News Record and I was at the Panama Canal yesterday doing photographs of the Third Lane Expansion project. (A slideshow I did for the magazine’s online site two years ago can be found here (Panama Slideshow)
While I was wai ting to take shots of a controlled blast in the expansion area I was also taking shots of ships going through the Miraflores locks and I have a couple of the cruise ship Westerdam.
I stumbled on your blog entry doing some of my research this evening and just put the two together. If you would like to send me an email, I’ll send it your way post haste.
I hope your trip is going well. It sounds like it from your blog entries.
Cliff
For the official version see CAA Niagara Travel
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