Travel Blog December 24-25 2013

Travel Blog   December 24-25 2013

At sea, the Atlantic Ocean north of Puerto Rico

Merry Christmas to all

We awoke feeling more rested on Christmas Eve day, after our 3 hour sleep before embarkation in Florida.  Today was our first of many shows that we are scheduled to present for all of the guests. With this being the first morning on board and also with a time change we expected a very small turn out at our 9:45am show but were pleasantly surprised at the amount of other early risers. We had approximately 100 guests attending our show covering the first three ports of call in the Caribbean: St Martin, St Lucia, and Tobago. The show was very well received and we enjoyed explaining the ports of call that we enjoy visiting.

After our show and questioning period, we had a nice relaxing day on board ship. We purchased an internet card so we were able to send and receive emails. The most important reason for doing this was to be able to keep in contact with Kari and Jim. We Skyped them in the afternoon from our stateroom on deck 3 so we were excited to see that we will be able to talk to them “in person” as we continue this 28 day journey.

Christmas Eve was the first formal night and we attended the captain’s cocktail reception before dinner. We still needed to catch up with our sleep so we decided not to go to the evening production show but opted to go to bed soon after dinner. We have been assigned late seating which means that our dinner doesn’t start until 8:15. The show on Christmas Eve didn’t start until 10:15 and we were sure we would embarrass ourselves by falling asleep in the show.

On Christmas morning the sun was shining but it was windy. This made a challenge to get our daily deck walk accomplished as we had to push against head-on breezes as we rounded the track. The ship was bucking the winds all day which made for a very rocky experience.

The daily program called the Princess Patter listed us three times on the 25th. Our port show from Christmas Eve was rebroadcast continuous on the stateroom TV’s so we watched and critiqued our performance in our room. We normally tend to be overly critical or maybe nit-picky when we watch ourselves on TV but we thought that it looked pretty good. Our background music was not picked up on the theater’s audio feed so we know we will have to correct that with the staff for our next shows.

Ho, ho, ho and a bottle of rum!

On Christmas, there were religious services and a variety of activities throughout the ship. We presented one of our favorite shows on Pirates to a large crowd in the afternoon. The show lounge was almost filled. We enjoy giving this show and by the comments we received from the guests, we knew that they enjoyed it also. After the show, the cruise director had listed that we would be available near the excursion desk for an hour to answer questions from the guests. We had a few people stop by with questions.

We wanted one more night to catch up on sleep so we decided to eat an earlier dinner and go to the early show. We ate our dinner in the Panorama Buffet and then attend the special Christmas variety show at 8:15. The turkey dinner was quite good with many traditional foods for the holiday. We were in bed by 10:00. Tomorrow we have our first port in St. Martin so we will be refreshed and ready to hit the shore with renewed energy.

We hope all of you had a wonderful holiday and that 2014 will be a great year you.