Day 14 - Friday, 11/22/24 - At Sea to Livorno - Day 2

 Day 2 on our way to Livorno began in the normal way with a 6:45am alarm.  The interdenominational devotional time was first and Nick's coffee chat followed.  Today's guest was Steven, Chief Engineer.  I think we've sailed with him previously.  When asked about the major things that happened in the recent dry dock, he said that the major thing was replacement of 22 tons of steel.  With an aging ship, they are constantly monitoring steel thicknesses and the insurance underwriters require replacement of steel that is too thin.  Hopefully there will be pictures of this in the Captain's presentation later in the cruise.  He also commented that the propellers were serviced and than the additional USB outlets were added to cabins but while it was thought that USB outlets could be added beside the beds, ultimately it was decided to be impractical and require too much disassembly of cabins.  He also noted that many of the fresh water lines were replaced.  When asked about why certain areas of the ship were so cold (World Stage in particular), it was due to the continuing replacement of valves and that the cooling system was all manually controlled and they are still working out the balance of the system.  He was quite informative and easy to listen to.


I chose to eat breakfast after the coffee chat and skip the shore excursion presentation as we have all of our shore excursions already planned.  I was also able to update this blog before attending Nick's port talk on Malta which was good.


Coming through the Lido pool area the sloshing was pretty intense, and they subsequently closed it.




We ate a quick lunch with Pam before returning to the showroom for Brian Beck's last presentation on Technology.  It was pretty short.  Kate then gave her last presentation on Lost Cities which was really interesting.  We had to vacate the showroom for rehearsal so I went to the Crow's Nest to watch the angry seas.  And were they angry!


Carlo Ruggiero, Italian tenor then performed an afternoon concert on a rocky stage, and it was very good.  Afterwards, we spent more time in the Crow's Nest watching the angry seas and sipping on hot chocolates. 



The Lido area for dinner was crowded because the seafood boil special dinner was using the starboard side of the Lido.  Pam once again joined us.  


Our evening entertainment was a British comedian, Jason Patterson.  He was clean and pretty funny. We ended our evening watching a movie in the Wajang Theater:  The Journey: A Music Special of Andrea Bocelli. It was really good and very inspirational featuring several gospel artists including Michael W. Smith.

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