A duck and the dreaded captain announcement

Apologies - I realized that all that's in the previous posts as far as dates is the posting date. From now on, I'll leave the entry date.

Wednesday 2/8

We woke up around 9 to significant rocking (Glen said, I wish the captain would change lanes more smoothly – remember we’re from California and the land of Botts-dots). We went to Sabbattiini’s where we had a lovely breakfast with Ken and Nancy, friends from both Facebook and Cruise Critic who were able to book a suite at the last minute. It was busier than usual today, but we had a nice time.

After breakfast Nancy and I went to the atrium to join the Duck Adventure. The cruise staff gave out small rubber ducks. The challenge is to give your duck adventures throughout the cruise and photograph it. Then you pick the best picture, come up with a story, and the cruise staff puts the bests into a slide show and the audience votes on the best one. I grabbed my duck, which Glen named Fonzie because of the duck tail and we headed upstairs, grabbed some reading material, the duck and a camera, and went to the Patassiere since Eli wanted to clean the room.

I was reading my coursework, doing a bit of web surfing, and sort of attending the hula lesson in the atrium when the captain got on the PA. That was unusual – there is a noon briefing from the bridge but it’s never that early. He started by talking about the wind and sea – 50 mile an hour gusts and 20 foot swells, and the slow down of the ship. And that was followed by the inevitable itinerary change. Apparently, we were going too slow to make Honolulu tomorrow, so it’s been moved to Saturday, replacing Hilo which we are now skipping. Maui and Kauai remain the same, although we might be at Maui longer.

I spent the next hour trying to find a new rental car. Dollar was sold out, but I was able to get Avis. I don’t think they have a shuttle, so I expect we’ll have to take a cab to pick up the car. I also tried to move our Thursday lunch to Saturday (sadly, our friends are leaving Waikiki on Friday night so no friends – we’re 0 for 2 on this trip).

We then went to lunch. We were seated with other friendly people at a table by the window. We noticed that the waves were pretty close to the window.

It was after 2pm by the time we finished lunch, so we headed back up to our room – Glen took his iphone to the balcony to catch up on work email and I worked on this blog for a bit and cleared some email.

We eventually went for a long walk around the upper decks. We stopped by the spa and got stickers for our cruise cards so we could use the Thermal Suite. We also got a tour of it. We stopped in the Horizon Court for a snack and ran into a few of our tablemates and sat with them.

We also visisted Skywalkers for a bit, and then watched The Princess and the Frog in the room. I selected two new videos, and left the old ones for Eli to take.

Once again, our whole table was there for dinner, although the other two tables in our section were empty. It was the Cosmopolitan dinner night, and some of the highlights were surf and turf and Cherries Jubilee.

After dinner we danced two sets in Explorers. For the second time, we saw a couple who were doing some extremely advanced WC swing. We’d seen them before in the Wheelhouse, and thought they were great dancers, although they weren’t exactly dancing with the music. Both times we saw them, they did once dance and then left. I’d guess the guy is a professional.

After dancing we retired to the room, where I played on the web for a while, since we set the clocks back again.