Africa 2024

 It's really hard to believe that we are now starting our second to last day at sea on this 42 day voyage. And being a little repetitive, it started out like every other day on this trip. We were awake by seven to have breakfast and then attend the interdenominational devotional study led by Pastor Dan. Nick followed with his coffee chat. His guest this morning were the string trio: Alex, Alice and Ashly. We were fortunate to have dinner with them about a month ago and converse on a more intimate level. However, it was terrific to hear their stories of having come on board ships as part of the Lincoln Center stage program and when that went away, they were able to transition over to what they're doing now as a string trio. The major difference between playing for the Lincoln Center stage program and currently is that they have much more creative license as to what musical pieces they play and they get to compose their own programs. They also indicated that they will be on the w...

 We were up and going by 7 AM this morning to get ready for the daily interdenominational devotional time with Pastor Dan. Afterwards, Nick interviewed Metka, who is the executive housekeeper from Slovenia. She was the executive housekeeper on the Grand South America trip we were on last year on the sister ship the Zaandam. Her previous positions were in the Yugoslavian army, and she comes across as a military figure as she directs her "boys". In the Q&A session one passenger commented that her cabin steward gave high praise to her as a leader for the housekeeping group. Just before the following event, I received a alert from my alarm system on my pick up truck that it had received a blow. So I activated my security camera and determined that a 12" tree had blown over at a little after 5 AM local time in Seattle. It didn't appear that there was any damage, but I had my our son check it out later in the day and he confirmed that there was no damage and that if he...

 It was nice to have a calm ride overnight. As is our custom we were up early to get ready for the daily interdenominational devotional time. Nick's coffee chat guest was the future cruise consultant, Melane who is from South Africa.  Ida then gave a talk on Columbus and the Pinzon Brothers. After lunch Captain Adams gave his Ask The Captain presentation which was quite unlike any we have previously seen.  He opened by answering a few questions which had been previously deposited in his question box at the front desk.  He then spoke about how the ship was used to house over 1,500 Ukrainian refugees (primarily women & children) in the spring and summer of 2023 in Rotterdam.  We had a cruise cancelled because of the ship being chartered out for that humanitarian event.  He also spoke more about the drydock and indicated that $20,000,000 was expended on the repairs and maintenance.  This likely means that the ship, which is 25 years old, will be in se...

This day didn't go as planned. We got up at our regular time to attend the 8am interdenominational devotional time and then the coffee chat with Nick. Today his guests were three cadet officers from the bridge. They were an interesting group and two of them were in their second cadet experience on board. The other was only 19 and in his first round of practical experiences on the sea.  One cadet commented that his least favorite job was creating the power presentations of the ship maneuvers which are shown to us in the captain's briefings. The 10 AM lecture series was Bradley Jacobson speaking on the use of AI in every day life. He totally engaged with the audience and they fed him suggestions about things they would like to know about like what is the best hybrid automobile or what is the highest yielding CD in the US or Canada and much more. The audience was quite large and I'm expecting that it'll continue to get larger. This class is very popular and is scratching w...

It felt good to sleep in a bit today as our denominational church service is not until 9am in the Wajang  Theater.  It was very well attended and Pastor Dan gave a good Christmas message out of Luke chapter 2. Ida cote, then gave her historical lecture on Al-Andalus which was essentially the capture and occupation of Spain by the Moors.  She also gave a brief historical peace on the history of the formation of Islam and how it led to the occupation of what is now Spain. Nick followed with the Holland America origin story. However, we did not attend it as we have seen it many times. I use the time to continue my back up process of my pictures. That took about an additional hour to complete. But I'm glad that I've done it and I could now relax a bit knowing my pictures from this trip are backed up  After lunch, we went to the showroom for the third session in the artificial intelligence lectures by Bradley Jacobson. This one was on the use of artificial intelligence to...

 It was nice to wake up after another restful night of sleep. In fact, I have to say on this voyage that I have slept better than I have slept in a long, long time. Again as our custom is, we ate breakfast and then attended the interdenominational devotional time which continues to be really good and quite refreshing to start out the morning. This was followed by Nick's coffee chat, which featured Prasad, the beverage manager and Jobelle, the Cellar Master. We have sailed with Prasad on the number of voyages and he's always a smiling individual to encounter, and of course recognizes us from the prior voyages. We then attended the 10 o'clock lecture, which was Bradley Jacobson's AI for Art Creation session. This was an outstanding session in which Bradley demonstrated how to use AI to generate art. He really engaged the audience in the process and demonstrated how the program worked. I ended up downloading the app for my phone and created several pictures on themes relat...