Wednesday, August 31, 2016

Voyage of the Vikings Cruise - Cruise Day 3: At Sea

WE slept in today and again had our breakfast in the Neptune Lounge.  Today was the Cruise Critic Roll Call Meet and Greet so after breakfast we headed off to that.  Cruise Critic is a web site devoted to cruising and has a number of forums with general tropics as well as some devoted to a particular cruise line.  They also have what they call roll calls, where people booked on the same cruise can communicate.  It allows you to get to know your fellow cruisers, plan private excursions for ports and just chat about the upcoming cruise.  We have planned several private tours with people from our roll call; yesterday in Bar Harbor was an example of that.

This was a very large roll call and over 160 people attended the meet and greet.  It was very well organized by roll call member Eddie and I have to say that he went above and beyond the call of duty.  There were name tags for everyone as well as a small gift.  The ship's Cruise Director and Hotel Manager showed up representing Holland America and overall it was a very nice meet and greet.

After the meet and greet we headed to the showroom to see a presentation by the ship’s location guide.  She talked about our upcoming Canadian ports and gave background information on each stop.  After that presentation, it was time for lunch so Val and I headed off to the Lido.  We got our lunches and found a place to sit down that turned out to be right next to some people we had met at the Meet and Greet earlier.  We had an interesting talk with them as they had traveled to many places in the world and had done the world cruise three times.

After lunch, Val was off to trivia which doesn’t interest me so I went back to the room to download our pictures from yesterday and work on the blog.  I have not posted any blog pages since we left and am trying to at least get the train trip portion published, but with so many ports, it’s difficult to get it done.

We had seen in the daily guide that one of the guest lecturers for the cruise was Tommie Sue Montgomery who had been on our Inca Empire cruise.  We really liked her and saw she was talking today on the US / Canada connection so when Val was through with trivia we went to that.  It was a good lecture and it was followed by a talk on the Boston Tea Party, but we were tired so decided to skip it and go back to the room for a nap.

Tonight is the first formal night (or Gala Night as the call it now) and we had reservations at the Pinnacle Grill which is the upscale restaurant on the ship.  There is usually a surcharge for the Pinnacle Grill, but our travel agent had paid for our dinner, which we were taking advantage of tonight; thank you Maureen.  It was an excellent dinner and we enjoyed all from the appetizers to the dessert.

After dinner it was back to the casino where I had a much better night and actually left with some of my daily allotment still in my pocket.  All in all, a good day, but we’re back in port tomorrow in Sydney, Nova Scotia.

No comments:

Post a Comment