Hello from somewhere in the Pacific Ocean! We are enjoying our third day on the Celebrity Solstice, and decided to push the limits of our fairly crappy WiFi package to try and do a post from the ship. We had beautiful weather our first days after we left Honolu, and gorgeous sunsets.

The Solstice is one of Celebrity’s older ships, having launched in 2008, and while it is still lovely, it is definitely showing some wear and tear. It holds 2,850 passengers, and we have not been told if we are at capacity, but the ship seems very full, so I suspect we are near it. With our 21 day itinerary, 15 of our days will be at sea. And by “at sea,” we do mean when we look around us, this is the only thing we see.

As we always seem to do, we have acclimated instantly to cruise ship life. It is so wonderfully different from our everyday life, and the whole concept of “nothing we have to do” is fantastic. There is plenty we CAN do, however. The ship has tons of games, events, and activities going on at all times, and the usual ridiculous amounts of cruise food available 24/7. We are “joiners” and tend to take advantage of the many fun offerings and events every time we cruise, but we also try to balance it with plenty of poolside book reading and floating time. 😁

Here are some of the other ways we’ve been spending our time so far:

Day three was cloudy and rainy with limited visibility, which made us feel like we were on a ghost ship creeping around in the ocean. Luckily there were calm and flat seas, so no issues (but we typically aren’t prone to seasickness). I got a bit too much sun yesterday, so I figured the universe (or my dermatologist?) was telling me to chill inside.

We spent the day doing inside cruise ship activities like the art auction, lunch at the sushi place onboard (Rob wisely pointed out we should probably NOT go get sushi after 13 days at sea, and going now was a better idea), some college football watching, and onboard shows. We did not get to see the UCF-Kansas game, which might have been good since our alma mater lost- again.

We’ve done a fair bit of reading since we boarded, and noticed that this cruise has more readers hanging out everywhere on board than we’ve ever seen on any previous cruise. I guess that makes sense- you probably wouldn’t want 21 days on a ship if you aren’t comfortable entertaining yourself. 😂 On the down side, the “library “ on board this ship was the worst we have EVER seen on a cruise. There were- no exaggeration- about 30 books in the entire fiction section, and not one of them was in English! 😂 This is an international ship, after all, so I expected some degree of that, but NONE?! Luckily we have our Kindles, but man…

Tonight I was randomly selected to be part of a game show onboard called “Whisper Challenge” in which passengers and crew members had to pass a message down a line while wearing headphones with loud music, so you could only receive the message by “lip reading” the person in front of you. They awarded points at the end for each word your team got right as stated by the last player in line. It’s similar to a childhood game I played called “telephone”. Of course, the lip reading goes awry and hilarity ensues. It was a lot of fun.

We ended our night with two more fun shows (followed by a late night slice of pizza in the cafe 😬). We enjoyed a really good magic show by an Argentinian magician named Norberto Jansenson, and then went to a late night “adults only” (though there are very few kids on this cruise) game show called “The Naughty List”. It was a categories guessing game with audience participation, but I won’t go into details as it was definitely adult oriented, and definitely hilarious.

So much more fun ahead! Fingers crossed this will load from our little place in the universe. Thanks for adventuring with us.