Transatlantic Cruise Day 3 - First Full Day At Sea

 Hi all! Hoping this one is shorter than yesterday's, but no promises. 😀

    After a fantastic first day on our new home, we settled in for a night's rest. We both woke up around 10am feeling surprisingly great! Considering we don't usually drink alcohol when we are home, the champaign and palomas didn't seem to have much of an impact on our ability to rest. One of the interesting things they have on the ship is an IV bar, where you can get IV fluids if you need to "rehydrate, recharge and feel revitalized". Thankfully, that hasn't been needed it to date.

    With a slow start, we got cleaned up and headed up to the Lido deck for lunch. Today they had Thai food in the Asian corner which was good. I also grabbed a pulled pork sandwich and some tuscan style creamy chicken. By the time we got a table it had all mixed together and was an interesting flavor. Not something I will recommend and soupy things will be getting their own plates from now on. Maybe Valerie's food touching aversion is rubbing off on me after 14 years. 

    One of the things I've heard about on some of the higher end cruise lines is enrichment seminars where the cruise lines will bring experts onto their ships to give talks about things related to the cruise. I've seen this on videos about Antarctic cruises where they bring on ecologists or zoologists to talk about Antarctica and the flora and fauna that exist there. We were excited to hear that there would be enrichment seminars on the ports of call we would be going to as well as history seminars about things we will be seeing and doing. The port seminars are at 9:00a and to be honest, it's unlikely we are going to be making those, however the 1:00pm historical enrichment seminars are on our must do lists! 

    Yesterday's seminars was about forgotten stories of Atlantic crossings and it was phenomenal! It was a 45 minute lecture covering three stories; the history of the viking crossings to the new world, the story Jack Binns, a radio operator on the lost RMS Republic, and the story of the Roanoke settlers. The historian/archeologist, Jacob Marvin, who told these stories was incredible, discussing both the stories of the individuals, the historical records, and the impacts these events have on the modern day.

    I knew the vikings had been the first Europeans to land on North America, but hearing about how they colonized Iceland and Greenland and eventually had settlements in modern day Canada and New England was fascinating. He spoke about the vikings not having a written history until the 1200's so the discoveries of the new world were kept alive through oral tradition with two different versions of the story of the vikings being written down 200 years after the discovery of North America and how archaeologists have discovered viking settlements to prove the stories right. Jacob also went over some of the science on how they dated these findings and how they are able to use trees used in different buildings to know to the year when a tree was hewn.

    Next, he told the story of Jack Binns, an orphan who became a radio operator on steam powered ocean liners at the turn of the 20th century. He was onboard the RMS Republic on a foggy night when the fog was so thick they couldn't see their nose in front of their face and the SS Florida was in the same area. Both ships were constantly blowing their foghorns to try to avoid hitting each other, but fog reflects sound in odd ways, making it impossible to determine the direction of the sound. Eventually the SS Florida crashed into side of the RMS Republic and the Republic began to sink. The radio onboard the Republic was damaged, Jack managed to get it working well enough to get word back to the mainland that they were sinking and eventually all 1,000+ passengers onboard the Republic were saved, only 3 members of the crew dying due to the impact. The rescue was so uneventful that the passengers would later lodge formal complaints that their luggage wasn't able to saved. After his experience on the RMS Republic, Jack would go on to advocate for extra radio equipment and an additional radio operator be staffed on all ocean liners to ensure that there was redundancy in all of the critical life saving equipment and personnel aboard these ships.

    The final story was of the Roanoke settlers, and the multiple failed attempts to settle the island. From unprepared colonists, to food and supplies being damaged during one of the ships running aground in the outer banks causing war with the native peoples of Roanoke when the natives didn't have enough food to support both themselves and the colonists, the story of the original colonies from England is a fascinating adventure. DNA analysis of today's Native American's living around Roanoke show that some of the colonists ended up integrating into the Native American populations and their ancestors are alive today, although what caused the Roanoke colonies to disappear is still a mystery to this day.

    Jacob has an account on substack at https://jacobmarvin.substack.com if you want to check him out. His essay on the Childran of Llullsallaco offers a great insight into the ritual human sacrifices performed by the Incan peoples. I'm looking forward to reading the other stories he has on his substack.

    After the enrichment seminar, we headed back up to the Lido deck for coffee and our favorite cruise past time, Bananagrams! I had a slow start, getting some challenging letter late in the game. Valerie won the first game, although she played the word "ZOOT" which is not in the Scrabble dictionary so she claims she lost because she called Bananagrams with an incomplete board. I believe she won because the word "ZOOT" exists in the real dictionary and the only reason Scrabble doesn't recognize it is because one of the meanings is "a marijuana cigarette". However Zoot is also a type of suit worn by men in the 1930's and 1940's during the golden age of jazz. There is even a historical event called the Zoot Suit Riots where white men were committing violence against Mexican Americans in 1943 Los Angeles, stripping them of their zoot suits and beating them for being "unpatriotic". 

    For all the above reasons, I believe Valerie should have won the first the game. The second game dealt me a terrible hand with 2 V's, 2 Q's and no U's, a Z, and 5 E's with a jumble of other random lower quality letters. I did get to play OVARIES as my first word, but Valerie kept the pressure on and I had 7 letters left when she called out Bananagrams and put me out of my misery.

    End of Day 2 Bananagrams Score: Valerie - 2, Bill - 0. I still have 20 days to catch up!

    After getting a beatdown at Banagrams, we decided to come back to the cabin and write our first blog posts. As you probably know by now, I had a lot to say. It took me 3 hours to get all that out and copy edited, but it felt good when I did. By the time I finished and posted, it was time for dinner!

    We headed down to see T and Robert, and neither of us felt like drinking. We ordered a couple of Coke Zeros and settled in to look at the menu. I ended up getting the Thai coconut soup with chicken (Tom Kha Gai) and the chicken parm. Valerie had a caesar salad and the same chicken parm. Dinner was good, but the chicken was a little dry. For dessert I had cherries jubilee and Valerie had the cheesecake. T also brought us out a mango samosa with a mint dipping sauce for us to share. Desserts were good, coffee was great and we were off to see the show.

    I mentioned in yesterday's post about the house band. They were playing on the stage with a duo called "Ebony and Ivory", a very talented couple who were recently engaged. The man, Nathan, was on a recent season of The Voice and made it to fourth place! They put on a fantastic show, playing songs from the 60's and 70's. My favorite was when Nathan sang Superstition by Stevie Wonder. It's not my favorite Stevie song, but it's up there and he killed it! They both received a standing ovation from the crowd, well those of us who could stand did anyways, and they will be performing separately later this week. Really looking forward to hearing more from them!

    After the show we headed back to our cabin and off to bed. Now that we are not running around quite as much the jet lag is starting to hit and it's about to hit harder. One of the things I hadn't considered when booking this cruise is that we will be crossing 5 timezones during the cruise, not to mention the 3 from California to Florida and last night we lost our first hour. We'll be losing an hour almost everyday until we get to Portugal. If we do this again, I think it would be better to start in Europe and come to the US so we are gaining an hour instead of losing it. It made it a bit challenging for us to fall asleep, but around 2:00am we finally drifted off to sleep.

    That's all for today, but I'll be back tomorrow with the story of Francisco Pizzaro and his experiences conquering the Incas in the 1500's and updated Bananagram scores!