Thursday Jan 8, 2025 Day 1 at sea to New Zealand

Deb here. Late night last night and a time change (ahead one hour), so we both slept really late. I grabbed coffee/tea at Mosaics Cafe and brought them back to the cabin, and then we went to the professor’s talk at 10 a.m. He spoke about geographic considerations of living down under, which made our brains think differently about star gazing and perspective.

By this time it was 11 and we hadn’t eaten anything, so we headed to Discoveries Restaurant for the sea day brunch. The brunch food was wonderful, with basically any kind of food you could ask for, along with the band playing. It was packed, but we were able to score seats next to Christine and Mike, the Montrealers we’d met while waiting for a shuttle yesterday. Great food and conversation.

I wanted to go to the line dancing workshop, which turned out being really fun. It was taught by the two dancers who are part of the entertainment team and they did a fine job corraling us all in the right directions at the right time.

Next up was a talk by Aylene, the destination expert,  about the condition of the Maori people here in New Zealand. Sounded a lot like our Native Americans’ issues and history, post colonial.

Wow, this sea day kind of flew by. Following the talk we decided to take some time to walk some laps, have a drink by the pool, and venture into the pool and hot tub. The weather was sunny with blue skies and nothing to see but ocean.

At 6:30 we went to dinner at Windows, this night being an Italian buffet. Good food as always with lots of options. After a bit of time back in our cabin we went to the 9 p.m. entertainment, this time being a Mentalist from South Africa. The Cabaret Lounge was packed and his performance was fantastic. We had no idea how he managed to pull off most of his feats, a lot like Kenny Bang Bang’s show in Bisbee.

Back to the cabin and bed, with another time change scheduled for tonight.