First Sea Day

Monday – November 9, 2009-11-10

Today was a sea day avoiding hurricane Ida. We started the day with room service for coffee and our morning cereal. Then after putzing around the cabin we decided upon going to the cooking demonstration in the SS United States restaurant which was nice but we realllllly missed Owen who used to tell us about the really long names for vegetables while we were at the cooking demos on the Carnival Splendor earlier this year. Surprisingly Celebrity uses Owen’s favorite other food – butter - with most samplings. Celebrity only allowed the attendees to view not sample their preparations. We were then off to witness Wii sports for adults but were too late and they were playing baseball so we continued on to the check out the spa. Along the way Debbie and I had a shopping attack – they had a terrific sale on logo bags and of course we had to add to our already endless collection. Next was lunch in the dining room with 3 couples that had done extensive research on the canal and enjoyed the conversation and information but left the dining room unsatisfied – so we headed to the buffet and I stole grapes from the cheese display and we took them back to the cabin.

Next we started the dilemma of trying to post yesterdays events to the blog – after wasting 15 minutes of valuable internet time we could not do the simple task of copy and paste – damn………….. so, there we were frustrated and stomped off without finishing.

At 2:45 the naturalist on board, Milos Radakovich gave a terrific introduction to the sea animals as well as his own background. He was awesome, funny and excited to share his abundant information and knowledge with us. He will have talks on each sea day so he can explain what we will see before we see it. He says we don’t know what to look for………little does he know Debbie and I are professionals. It was a really great talk and he has a terrific sense of humor which made it equal to Dirk’s talks on the Splendor in South America. This will make the transit even better.

We left the talk and ran off to Elegant Tea which was OK but was disappointing from previous teas. Oh well………..back to the cabin to shower change into our formal clothes for tonight’s dinner. Once we got to our table we had found that the German couple had deserted us and had switched tables..we must be more boring than we thought.. So we ended up with a table for 2 – ahh 4………LOL. Debbie actually had beef and it was terrific, miracles do happen. Our wine steward (name to be mentioned later, Achem) is a very attentive young man that is quite funny and gay. We had a great meal and bottle of Jordan. We then headed to the theater to have a toast with the Captain - Capt. Michail Margatitis. I had another shopping attack and purchased Milos book he had mentioned during his talk. On the way into the theater we were offered champagne and a chocolate truffle – yum. We stayed for the production show Boogie Wonderland and it was really good, very high energy with great singers. The Vroom show on the Splendor is still the best I have seen on any ship.

We were off to the casino after the show. We had a chocolate martini which sent us over the top and decided to go to the buffet for our nightly cup of tea and call it a great day. We had a silly night laughing and we had Rachael again for our 3 card poker dealer who is really fun. Terrible storms all night with a lot of thunder and lightening but it was really cool to watch. Night all……..