New itinerary

New itinerary

Saturday, February 10, 2024

Tasman Sea

Today is day three out of four crossing the Tasman Sea from New Zealand to Melbourne.  For the most part, the seas have been pretty good, although today we had some large swells making for fun walking up and down the corridors. The air temp has been in the low 60s and the roof over the pool deck has been closed the entire trip.  We have crossed the Tasman sea many times, but this is the first time we have crossed starting from Cook Strait in New Zealand rather than the bottom of the south island. This means we took a more westerly crossing versus a northwesterly crossing.  As I mentioned before, the captain decided to scrub Milford sound on the west side of the south island of New Zealand in order to cross the Tasman Sea due to a storm that was expected.  All in all, it was a good decision; however, we could’ve been in Melbourne today instead of the day after tomorrow if he had put a little bit of speed on it. So that means an additional day of work.

My knitting group is going strong and my beginners are doing very well. I’m excited for them as they are really enjoying the process and learning quite a bit. Michael is still getting around 70 people for beginner lessons and slightly fewer for intermediate lessons. The duplicate games are still small, but some of the beginners are starting to move in and playing. More experience players are mentoring the newbies. I played with a newbie today and we came in first!

We had a reunion from the 2019 world cruise and the 2020 world cruise. It was nice to see some familiar faces, but in truth, I didn’t recognize most of them.  It was fun, sharing the stories of trying to get home when Covid hit.

Tonight we celebrated the Chinese new year by eating in the world café, and stuffing ourselves with soup, roasted pig, egg rolls, etc. Eight of us shared a table (Walkers, Duncan and Melinda; Thi and Emily; and Tom and Kathleen).  We had a really good time just visiting and eating.  In order to stay awake between dinner and the show, we played a little bridge and had quite a crowd watching us play. Maybe we should think about having some night games. Anyway, we went off to the show and had good time listening to some good old rock ‘n’ roll. 

2020 World Cruise Reunion 

2019 World Cruise Reunion 

Chinese New Year Dinner