Day 36 - Saturday, 12/14/24 - At Sea to Florida - Day 2

 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 related to the voyage. Some people are still skeptical about AI but it's very interesting to see how Bradley approaches AI and its use in the creative process.

Created with AI

Nick followed with one of his canned port talks, and this one was on Fun Fast and Fabulous about the world of expensive Italian automobiles it finished with a section on the always lovable Vespa scooters. It was really a good presentation for this type of item. And it was one that we have never seen before. It brought back memories of us riding our motorcycle around on the Grand Prix course of Monaco some years ago just after the race reset concluded about a week earlier. Many of the overhead signs and barriers were still in place and I gave the feeling of racing on the actual course

Captain Adams then gave us a navigational update with both videos of docking and undockings as well as a graphical representations of the process. For our last stop at Cadiz, he enlisted the help of two of the third officers. One was the third officer on the bridge and the other was the third officer in the engine room, both ladies And they gave a good description of the whole process. He also called to the stage, the new chief engineer to explain some things about the propulsion system. Parenthetically all note that the top four senior officers of all swapped out during the course of this voyage: the captain, the staff, captain, the hotel, general manager, and the chief engineer. Additionally, other lower levels officers and staff have also swapped out. This seems rather unusual to me as I've not experienced that on longer voyages. However, I think it has to do with the ship being made ready to go on the very long pulled hole cruise that starts January 25, 2025.

Richard Watson then followed with his talk on early Atlantic exploration, which was pretty interesting even though a lot of the information is a bit vague and one has to add a little imagination to the scanty historical record. Featured voices of exploration down the West Coast of Africa down into the Congo area. And all of this was done before the 1500's.

Of course, we adjourned afterwards to the crows nest where we enjoyed our Coke zeros and peanuts and watch the waves go by. Around 5 o'clock we could even see the hills of Ponta Delgada which was about 20 miles off our starboard. In the Captain's briefing and in his noon announcement, he commented that he had elected to do a weather route. This route would  would take us quite close to those islands in order to avoid the storm which was to the south of us. There's been a little bit of motion to the ocean. It appears that he made a great decision and ride has been pretty comfortable.

We had one more free Pinnacle Grill dinner and a 5:30pm dining time opened up so we took it and ate dinner in the Pinnacle Grill. It turned out that this was the first night of Caribbean offerings and so we elected a couple Caribbean entrées for our main courses. They was lovely although a bit more food than I would prefer to eat on a regular basis. And that's one of the reasons why we eat in the Lido so we can control our portion size.

Paul Adams was back as the evening entertainment. His comedy is clean and super funny. We really enjoy his British humor. There's one lady who sits just in front of us tends to engage with him too much and he made a spectacle out of that. Tonight was also the Orange party up in the crows nest. So I dawned my orange Holland America shirt, wore my orange baseball cap, and donned an orange mustache. The party was well attended, however, the music was a bit loud for my taste and we stayed for about an hour. 

I should note that in the late afternoon I received a phone call that our $250 CCL stock credit which had not been posted to our account had been fixed and the credit was now available. So I used part of it to purchase a gimbal for my cell phone camera. 

Before I went to bed, I started backing up my pictures to an SD card. Felt good to organize the pictures by date and location. I needed this in order to be able to share pictures with another guest to want copies of my photos. I think that after I get home, I'll upload my pictures to an album online so that those who would like to see them can have access to them without me having to Send them to each person. We'll see how that goes.

It was another good day on the sea, enjoying lectures, entertainment, and pleasant chats with friends.