Sept 28 – At Sea

(At sea, the cell phones don't ring, and the internet is $55 for 100 minutes).

Our first day at sea (for an entire day), and to the credit of the Holland America team, they are very aware that people at sea can get bored pretty quickly and then not enjoy the cruise, so they actually over compensate. They had so many events and things scheduled for this day that it was really a sensory overload. Here's just a sampling of the offerings: ukulele and hula lessons, a sale of $10 items, free tickets that might win a case of liquor, Windows 10 classes, and about 20 other topics.

For our part, Sandra and I took a tour of the big kitchen—it's really a walk through with a guide,

but you can actually see the stations and the cooks at work. We've done this tour on many other ships and it's good to see how clean and careful they are.

Then later in the day we sat through two cooking classes run by Chef Patel, who is an Indian and second or third in command. He also trains the cooks who come to Holland America. His efforts today included a Cedar planked Halibut, some killer brownies, and dungeness crab cakes with Thai sweet chili. Then in his 2^nd class he made Hosin pork chops with Hawaiian cole slaw—all this is conducted in a modern “show” kitchen where about 200 people can see and smell and taste the products, so it's quite the event.

I know this will sound like something really unusual for us, but we took a 1 mile stroll around the Prominade Deck, it's 4 laps to the mile (no jogging, please) and so we embarked on that walk, the weather has been chilly, so the sunny side of the ship was quite nice, the shady side, pretty brisk. So rather than doing laps, we walked back and forth on the sunny side—but we did it and hope to continue each day.

I have promised myself that I will get my computer files sorted and named, photos and documents alike, and so I have started that. When that's done, I have another book ready to upload to Kindle, and it needs another pass and the illustrations added as needed and as appropriate. It's about the Spanish American War, and frankly I think it's very interesting.

At dinner we met a nice couple who live in Oceanside Calfiornia, he originally from Indonesia, she from Barcelona, Spain. They were telling us about a road trip from Lisbon to Madrid to Barcelona, and suugesting we should consider doing that. It's a nice area of the world (Iberia) and still a safe place.

Later we saw two musical shows, one a Neil Diamond tribute and the other an Australian named Patrick McMahon who sang a dozen or so “oldies” that we all enjoyed,