Day 11 - At Sea

 

Date:  Jan. 19, 2007

 

Location:  At Sea

 

Next Port:  Salvador de Bahia, Jan. 20

 

Quick Summary:  A perfect sea day…the best one yet. Though the temps were only a degree or two cooler and the humidity was still in the mid-90s, the haze was gone and the perfectly blue sky was crystal clear and marked with just puffy white clouds.

 

Report:  Larry got his workout in early before joining Karen for the 20-min. daily devotional gathering in the Horizon Lounger at 8:45. This was followed by our normal breakfast on the aft deck off La Veranda where our delightful French waiter, Alexis, takes very good care of us. By now, he automatically gets Larry’s orange juice and skim milk and fills Karen’s walk-around coffee thermos cup (that she was smart enough to bring) while we hit the indoors buffet line for our cereal and fruit.

 

Next Larry attended Daniel Silke’s Globalization lecture on the new competitors, the BRIC nations (Brazil, Russia, India and China). Karen did some laundry and attended a bridge lesson.

 

After the lecture, Larry finished yesterday’s journal entry and caught up on some newspaper reading. One of our neighbors, Don, has enough Regent sailing credits that he gets a complimentary printed satellite copy of the Wall Street Journal. He shares it with Larry each day. It’s a great satellite fax service (from newspaperdirect.com) that can provide ships and hotels some 400 newspapers from 68 countries in 38 languages. It must carry more than 75% of the copy in the WSJ and is great reading. If one doesn’t have enough Regent points to get a complimentary copy, the cost is $6.50/day. So Larry is very thankful that Don shares. Similar copies of USA Today are available in the Library and other guests also place copies of their favorite papers there when they are finished with them. We also get CNN International, Fox News and CNBC (most of the time) live on our in-suite TVs.

 

After a late light lunch onthe back deck (with Alexis), we stretched our legs in the beautiful sun before going off to an afternoon of reading for Larry and some casual bridge in the Observation Lounge for Karen.  She also got in a late afternoon walk on the upper deck.

 

This evening we enjoyed pre-dinner drinks in the Observation Lounge (with guitar music) and dinner in Signatures with Dody and Larry, from Oregon…a couple we met at the pre-departure dinner in Miami. They also attend the devotionals with us and are a delightful couple. The show included two dances by a very talented Brazilian couple and singer David Bouchet (a matinee idol). A great evening.

 

We both enjoyed being on our balcony and walking the deck at various times today. We were cruising only about 13-15 miles off shore so we could see the coastline and various cities.  We also saw many small and large boats as well as beautiful soaring gannets and flying fish. It was one of those days where the horizon was knife-edge sharp and drew us to be outside as much as possible. A perfect sea day!

 

Tomorrow pull into Salvador de Bahia, Brazil’s first capital.

 

Karen and Larry