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….