Grand Africa Cruise - Sea Day

Cruise Day 36

Monday, November 14, 2022

“Live life with no excuses, travel with no regrets.”  -- Oscar Wilde

Today is a very welcome day at sea after four straight busy port days.  It is also the halfway point of the cruise; both in time and miles.  It’s hard to believe it has gone by so fast, but we have thirty-five days behind us and thirty-five days ahead of us.  The captain reported that this is the halfway point in miles traveled also.  The entire trip is just around 23,000 miles (almost the same as going around the world) and today marks 11,500 miles sailed.

We had two things we wanted to do this morning so we couldn’t sleep too late and were up by 8:30.  After breakfast in the Neptune lounge, it was off to the theater for Kate Ross’s lecture on Mozambique.  The lecture was as interesting as usual with particular interest to us as Mozambique is where we will get off the ship and start our safari.  After the lecture, Jeremey gave his talk on our next port, Madagascar.

It was almost noon before we returned to our room, so I worked on the blog before we went to lunch.  We came back from lunch and found our room cleaned and a gift of two Delft plates commemorating our Grand Africa Cruise, very nice.  We visited the Delft factory when we were in Rotterdam back in 2016 and Holland America is a Dutch company, so it was a nice gift.

We spent most of the afternoon relaxing, but we did have some things to catch up on, on our computers.  Tonight is a formal night so we took a little extra time getting ready and then headed off to dinner.  Dinner was excellent and after a bit of an uneven start of the cruise, the food has been very good.  Our visit to the casino tonight went surprisingly well.   

Val has a slot machine she likes and often does well at it.  Sometimes I play next to her on a similar machine, but I have had terrible luck with it.  Tonight that changed as I decided to play next to her again and did really, really well.  I had bonus after bonus and cashed out with a very nice profit.  While this was going on, Val’s usual good luck turned sour and she had no luck at all.  I guess that’s why they called it gambling.

Tomorrow is our first of two days in Madagascar, but we don’t arrive until eleven so there was no rush to get back to the room tonight, so we lingered around the ship a while and then headed off to our room.