Day at Sea - Pride of America
Bob was woken up about 7:30am by what he *thinks* was the sound of the anchor chain being raised. The waves were quite large outside the balcony although the ship wasn't rocking *too* much. Shortly after that an announcement came on - due to high weather conditions of winds over 40 knots, it simply was not safe to send people on tenders through the waves to get to shore. Apparently the waves were so high that they were crashing OVER the pier. This definitely sounds like an unsafe situation to me! The captain was having to move the ship to a safer location to ride out the wind and waves. They made several announcements about this to try to make sure people who slept through the first one understood what was going on.A note about this. The cabin we're in is marked as a "hearing impaired" cabin. We had just purchased a guaranteed cheap balcony so they upgraded us into this one, which was extremely lucky for us, as it has a gorgeous aft balcony that is HUGE. But we simply could not hear any announcement being made without going ot the door and opening it, to hear what was being said in the hallway. It might be that it was because of our hearing impaired cabin location - that they didn't put a speaker in here because people in here couldn't hear anyway. I.e. maybe if a real deaf person was in here, a steward would run by for each important announcement and convey the information in another manner. I'll have to ask other passengers if they can hear these announcements from their room. But Bob was off getting food during one of these announcements and he said from the back buffet area where he was eating, he couldn't tell what they were saying. So it would seem that they should have more speakers around the ship so people know what is going on.
Anyway, apparently the safe spot they found was in the Lahaina Basin - i.e. not somewhere that we could go on shore. As we began moving, we got into some typhoon like giant raindrop rainstorms. Again, the ship wasn't moving wildly or anything - a few vibrations, with either a gentle rocking or a corkscrewing. Sometimes the rocking was front to back. But clearly this was not weather you wanted to be out on a little launch in, or I imagine going around an island in.
They announced several times that they were going to have additional activities on board to keep us entertained - more movies, more activities, and the main restaurant would be open for lunchtime so we'd have a wider variety of choices for eating. I was actually planning on staying on the ship today anyway, to finish healing up from the cold and to enjoy the ship. Poor Bob was going to play golf, but if the weather was this rough that wasn't going to happen anyway.
Bob went to fetch us some breakfast. They had Cream of Wheat, which I love, on the menu today - but it was made with water rather than milk, which is not what I love :) Ah well, I'm sure some people are the water-lovers so you can't please everyone. The melons and such were tasty as usual. I had my orange tea and then we took a nap for a while. Around 11am Bob headed off to explore the ship for a while and I stayed in the cabin to recoup and fold up some more origami items for tonight. I'm enjoying the towel animal menagerie around me :) Bob came back after 11 and checked the GPS - we'd taken a curly route to avoid the storm and were now pointing in towards Lahaina.
I took a nap for a few hours, then came online to update my notes and get my mail caught up and downloaded.
We went up to the Aloha Cafe (buffet) for lunch, to sit by the window and look for whales. The salad bar seemed a little more choice-filled than before but still did not have a lot of items on it. Nothing else that was out really struck my fancy. There is the deli bar area, the warm food area with a few large pots of items (a pot of rice, a pot of veggies etc). The pasta station had pasta that was very dry and rubbery. I wanted oatmeal raisin cookies, but the cookies are stacked in a basket and the ones that looked oatmeally were at the bottom and I didn't want to paw through other peoples' cookies to get to the ones I wanted :) I just wasn't in the mood for pizza, either, or burgers. So I ended up not eating much here. I suppose what I wanted was comfort food - mashed potatoes with gravy, that sort of thing. So maybe we should have gone back to the Cadillac Diner and braved the loud 90s music :)
Photos from the day at sea
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