Shipboard Fun

Since leaving the Panama Canal, we enjoyed two evenings and another full day at sea on our ship filled with fun activities and too much food. I was picked for one of the onboard game shows last night. Normally I prefer to watch the shows rather than participate, but my improv class I took last year has helped me a lot with not feeling nervous in the spotlight. I didn’t win, but I had fun!

What else were we up to? Those who know us well probably wouldn’t raise an eyebrow to hear that today started with drinking wine at 10:30 a.m. 😂 One perk of our level in Celebrity’s loyalty club was getting invited to the Captain’s wine tasting today. When we accepted the invite, we didn’t know it was at 10:30 in the morning, but hey… it’s a cruise, and we’re adaptable people! So we sat with about 100 new friends drinking wine with a sommelier from the Philippines giving us some great wine tips. And as the sommelier quoted “You can’t drink all day if you don’t start in the morning!” 😂

As a special thank you to those family and friends reading this, I will share with you a funny-but-humiliating story from today’s wine tasting. For context, you should know that when we did our last big Celebrity cruise, they also had a Captain’s wine tasting that we were invited to. That tasting clearly had more people RSVP than actually showed up (not shocking given that it was a bit early for most wine drinkers), and they had pre-poured all of the glasses of wine at the long dining tables, putting four at each place setting. So, at the end of our tasting, there were about 80 or so glasses of wine samples sitting around the empty spots not being touched. This was a sad, sad thing in the opinions of Rob and me and our table mates, so we staged a coup at the end of the tasting and started drinking our favorites from all the untouched gasses at tables around us. A good time was had by all, no one seemed phased by our uncouth behavior, and we made several new, fun friends.

Fast forward to this Monday: we arrive at this wine tasting noting that, once again, all the samples are pre-poured for each long table (4 samples per person). Some tables are full, but ours was not. The sommelier gives his speech, we all drink our wine, thank him for a lovely time, start to leave, and Rob and I look around and see full sample glasses sitting on our table. Well, by gosh, we are NOT people who approve of waste, so Rob and I each pick out our favorite type of wine from an empty spot at the sampling and bring it back to our seats. I had just taken a sip of my “bonus wine” when, to my utter mortification, I see a man walk up to the spot we had just come from and sit back down. He had evidently been chatting with the sommelier, and – we think?- returned to his seat to drink his wine (? or continue to drink his wine?!) only to find two of his glasses missing. I dropped that glass back on the table like it was on fire, and making eye contact with no one, Rob and I speed walked out of that dining room like there was an angry mob behind us, which there might have been. I was cry laughing the whole way back to our cabin. And this is why you can’t take us nice places.

Sunday night we enjoyed dinner in one of the specialty dining restaurants onboard, Le Petit Chef at Qsine. This was a really neat experience combining dining and entertainment! The restaurant basically pairs the 4 course menu with an animated show that occurs on each diner’s plate (see video below) and relates specifically to the course coming up. The food was good and the show was such fun!

Pura Vida in Costa Rica

It was such a treat for us to be back in Costa Rica, with their magical spirit of pura vida. Unfortunately, the 93-degree temps with direct beaming sun were not quite as hospitable. We were sweating before we even cleared the ship doors, and I don’t think I had even finished the walk to the end of the pier where we docked before I was hunting for air conditioning (which we found in exactly zero places in Puntarenas, not even the church). So, we scrapped our informal plans for the day to wander the city and instead followed the tourism center’s signs for a “historic district walk” and spent an hour or two sweating our way thru a few miles in the city. There were some pretty sights and kind people, but a lot of the port town is in disrepair. We enjoyed the sights (if not the heat), Rob stopped for a local beer, and I was only interested in a/c by that point so I headed back to our ship. In hindsight, a beach day may have been much more apropos, but live and learn!! And meanwhile, enjoy the gorgeous beaches and lush mountains in the background in these photos 😃.

Tomorrow we have another sea day before our next port of call, Puerto Quetzal, Guatemala. We are on the standby list for a shore excursion that day because evidently the port town doesn’t have much to it, so stay tuned for whatever shenanigans that day may bring- or not! Thanks for adventuring with us!