Grippy Toes, grippy toes

 Our new mantra is grippy toes, grippy toes and we discovered this in the bathroom this morning as the ship does its crazy rock and roll thing down the Bay of Biscay as we head toward the port of Vigo in Spain.  It’s good to have bare feet in the bathroom in the morning as  they are far grippier than socks and you don’t spend all your time sliding backwards and forwards along the floor.  So grippy toes are good, in fact we could do with toes like bush-babies have. 

As you can probably tell we are in a “moderate swell” which has proven uncomfortable for a number of passengers, so many in fact that tonight’s Captain’s Reception has been postponed until Sunday – rather sad that for I was looking forward to meeting him and his crew.  We still have to dress up of course because it is a formal night and will give me an opportunity to see how tight the dress suit trousers are – having already had kippers with mushrooms for breakfast, a very large prawn sandwich for lunch and just now a small éclair plus a small fruit basket with custard I am beginning to wonder how long my luck (and my waistband will hold.  We have already seen some huge girths on board and one of our breakfast dining companions – breakfast is free seating so not one of our regulars – was positively spilling all over his belt, he must have a waist in the high 40” if not 50’s.  I have vowed that I will never get that big.  The swell doesn’t seem to have affected his appetite (nor mine come to that but I have had a couple of Dramamine tablets and I am wearing my sea bands).  Hilary is toughing it out, but her appetite is good and I know that she enjoyed our first lecturer this afternoon who will be talking about forensic science and especially fingerprinting.

We had a good night relatively speaking, although I tossed and turned a lot so I expect Hilary did not get much sleep and I will admit to falling asleep in the tour lecture about Lisbon -  but even so Hilary didn’t see much in the way of tours to make us change our minds to book one.  So as it stands at the moment we are winging our way through Vigo, Lisbon and Messina before we start on the pre-paid tours.

Thank you for your comments, the way the blog is set up I seem to have to moderate them first, but I will go into Settings and see if I can change that.  I also seem to be having a problem with pictures this time, although they uploaded I couldn’t see them before they did so and I have to write this offline and add the pictures afterwards.  If today’s picture comes through it is a photo of the photo they took as we finished the port processing procedure.  The original looks good and you can see it when we meet again.

OK so first part of today’s epistle is over, we will be going to Chaplin’s Theatre in a while to see a guy talk about Shakespeare and Elizabethan times, then it’s dress for dinner and go to see a comedian in the Theatre.  We had planned to also go to some of the later night things, but so far we have been too exhausted to do so.  The captain has promised us improving weather overnight and an easy transfer into Vigo and if we can rouse ourselves up at 6.30am we might even catch the ship going under the bridge (very similar to the Golden Gate in San Francisco) and slipping into the harbour itself.  But don’t hold your breath….

This will not be a regular occurrence but we have just come from my birthday dinner, excellent as usual, Hilary had the plaice and I had the salmon and that together with prawn cocktail starters plus figgy ginger pudding for afterwards was just about enough to keep body and soul together until breakfast tomorrow.  Our new dining companions on Table 51 are Peter and Kay 88 and 86 respectively – Peter was in the grocery business for 50 years and they seem to be pretty seasoned cruisers, only 4 of us on the table so the jollity of Table 58 will not be repeated.  Hiilary has wimped out and gone to bed while I up in the Cyberstudy bashing out works in Word.

The sea is a bit lumpy and we have been promised 5 feet swells tomorrow so we will be rocked to sleep tonight while we plan our day at sea for tomorrow.

Last time I blogged I could not upload the two pictures that I have taken so I will have one more go and then abandon it until next time.  The cost of the internet hasn’t changed too much but at 35 pence a minute it doesn’t pay to spend too much time on line, I have entered a competition to win 250 minutes free which would be a huge bonus.

Thank you and goodnight.

Day One - open sea

OK we are off a little earlier than scheduled and with not quite so much luggage as last time.  We had a nice easy drive up with Colin, chatting to him the whole way; we seem to have made a new contact and when he offered to let us stay in his apartment in Cyprus for a small fee we may just see more of him.

We arrived in Southampton to very long queues for check in but we were through quite quickly and on board by 1.00pm, we had an hour to wait before we could go to the cabin so managed to grab lunch in a very crowded Conservatory restaurant – nice veggie tacos for me and fish for Hilary then we were off to the races.  Unpacking is an art form on a cruise ship but we divided the wardrobe up simply, 1/3^rd for me and the rest for Hilary, trogged off to do the mandatory “In case we sink drill” then out to listen to the sailaway band.  And now here we are sipping hot chocolate and tea up in the bow of the Crow’s Nest as we head away from Southampton into the channel.  We are on a table of four for dinner so later on this evening we will meet our dining companions, but at least we did get our request for the Peninsula Restaurant at 6.30pm, all we have to do now is to get Hilary’s soya milk delivered to the cabin and for me to get hooked up to the internet.

End of first chapter.

Packed and ready to go.

Hilary climbed into the attic today and brought down our "Cruise Suitcases", now why are these different from our "Airline Suitcases" you may ask? Apart from being very old, battered and with enough duct tape to make up a whole reel patching them, it is the fact that they are reasonably low profile and stack one inside the other. We used them on our Round the World and realised that we were one of the few cabins who could stick them under the bed after all the clothes were hung in the wardrobes. Not much of a big deal you may think, but believe me at the end of the cruise it is a huge advantage to have your suitcases in your cabin instead of having to wait on a crew member to bring them up from the hold before you can pack them. We go for speedy checkouts when we can!

I listened to Hilary talking to Samantha on Skype today and if I had wondered why she needed a bigger suitcase than me it was all summed up in the statement, "I never know what I may need so I just take everything...." And there was me wondering if I needed more than three shirts and two pairs of trousers. My biggest concern (other than fitting into my dinner suit, is how to get my video camera and netbook safely on-board But basically we are packed and ready to leave in just over 2 days time - can't wait for the limo to pick us up. With all the 'good' clothes packed we will just have to be scruffs for a little while.

These past two weeks have been busy with starting the build of the garden water feature so we are looking forward to some rest and relaxation, we just hope that the great weather we have had over the past two weeks will continue with us for the duration of the holiday. Our first port of call is Vigo in Spain (assuming we don't all die crossing the dreaded Bay of Biscay) and for that we will be relying on the guidance of the tour director as to which tour would suit us best. The practise on the last cruise was to hold a talk and slide show in the Theatre the day before the tour so we are expecting that to be the norm again this time, anyway we haven't booked for Vigo or Lisbon and so far have only committed ourselves to the Parthenon, Acropolis and Ephesus tours, the others we will decide on while cruising.

Don't expect a blog every day, that will be most unlikely but we will try and post something together with some pictures as often as we can. Last time we always blogged around 9.00pm after the evening show and consequently missed out on some of the later night, on deck, entertainment. This time we hope to be a bit more adventurous and take advantage of all the ship's facilities.

Keep watching!