Saturday's and Sunday's feeding and exercising

Saturday, May 4^th 2013

First impressions indicated that we were well below average age. Although maybe not to the same extent as on our previous cruise since today there were a few couples with babies and toddlers. I quite like the company of the older generation but if past experience was anything to go by the greatest challenge of sharing a ship where the mean, mode and median age of your fellow travellers is over 70 would be avoiding sharp elbows at the buffet and not getting too annoyed at disregard for queue etiquette.

Setting sail (or more technically powering
off with marine diesel) from Southampton

If you look hard enough you can spot
my Mum and Dad waving us off from the
garden of The Grove, Hythe.

              

  Sunday, May 5^th 2013

We did some dancing after dinner last night. This was not entirely successful as:

1) The dance floor was oval. We are used to a quadrilateral which provides helpful position markers for our moves

2) There was a lot of sequence dancing. We don’t don sequence dancing – it’s too regulated

3) Matt, my husband, was lacking his usual assertiveness in leading. He put this down to me having “drugged” him with sea-sickness tablets.

Despite all that I ended the evening with only 1 dancing related injury (a bit of a smashed up big toe nail) and had half learnt a Square Tango (from Paul the dance host while Matt was having some liquid refreshment). Matt kindly dealt with my toenail (which I suppose is only fair given that he is at least partially responsible for it) and I feel sure that our dancing will improve over the fortnight.

We ate dinner last night with a man from Wales, his Brazilian wife, their 5½ year old son (fluent in at least 3 languages, or as fluent as it’s possible for a 5½ year old to be) and her parents (her mother originally being from Japan). They spoke only Portuguese (and I suppose maybe Japanese but that was definitely not going to help) and despite my best efforts to combine French, Italian and Spanish (in descending order of competence) it was very difficult to converse with them. I did manage to deduce that Ida is very excited about going to Rome and Jose identified that Matt talks a lot and I am “silent” in comparison.

I had a remarkably good night’s sleep. This was despite Matt and me sharing a single bed. We had booked late and hence got an incredibly bargainous holiday but were allocated a “twin beds only” cabin. I took the outside of the bed as Matt was worried about falling out (I didn’t see this as a risk as long as the sea stayed calm). Unfortunately Matt didn’t sleep as well as me so we may have to take separate beds from tonight.

The plan for today, a full day at sea, was to do not very much, but to make the most of the day and take advantage of some of the on board facilities. Therefore I set an alarm on my mobile for 8am. This would facilitate an early morning swim but still give us time for a leisurely breakfast.

As we have an inside cabin there are no solar clues as to the hour of the day. I was shocked when I awoke and checked the time: it was 9.20am. I had clearly neglected the fact that my alarm doesn’t sound if I leave my phone on silent. (This wasn’t as bad as the time that I locked my phone with alarm set in a hotel safe overnight when I was in Greece with a friend. We didn’t hear it go off and overslept so badly that we missed an extensive boat trip that we had booked the previous day.

So, early morning swim and leisurely breakfast were off. Buffet breakfast and mid-morning snack was on. As well as the aforementioned risk of sharp elbows at the buffet, the other risk is of over-eating. We both showed extreme restraint on this, our first, visit – Matt having his usual of a bowl of porridge (bolstered with a side of blueberry smoothie) and me breakfasting on a bowl of fresh fruit plus one piece of toast with a few beans, mushrooms and tomatoes. Pleasingly they even had mini portions of my favourite yeast extract spread which enhances greatly such a toast based morning meal.

At breakfast we were joined by an older couple who had lived in Plymouth in the 1960s. They enjoyed reminiscing about some of their favourite haunts back then, many of which are still around now. I enjoyed listening to their stories – one of their daughters was born at the hospital that used to be on the site where I lived when I first moved to the city. I think that we might have persuaded them to take a holiday to Plymouth – I hope that they’re not disappointed! – but apparently it will be better than the Northern town in which they currently live (which shall remain nameless).

We swam in the adults’ only pool, which we had found during our explorations yesterday. It is deceptively located within the spa complex (which I had no intention of paying extra for) and at first I thought there was and additional charge to swim her. However we managed to ascertain from dandy Daniel (Matt’s choice of adjective) that this was not the case. It is apparently one of those pools with a current that you swim against but that didn’t seem to be working this morning and it was too short to swim lengths so I did laps. It was too late when I realised that persistently going round in the same direction would make me dizzy, and there was a bit of a swell picking up too which can’t have helped that sensation. I got out after about 20 minutes and, hilariously, one of the older “spectators” asked me if I was a channel swimmer because I “looked like one”. I took that as a compliment rather than a comment on my layers of body insulation.