Grand Princess Sea Day

Hello from the calm waters somewhere off the coast of Baja California. Seriously, these waters are the smoothest of our long cruising year. Take a look at that water.

We love this ship. Actually, we love the crew on this ship. Some of them have been on this ship for several contracts and we get to see them year after year here. They are what make us come back to the Grand again and again. I’ll never get tired of the love we get from these guys and am so excited to have 18 more days of it. Unfortunately, the ship is desperately in need of some deep cleaning. I had considered taking some photos of just how badly stained I’m finding things – carpets, furnishings, bathrooms, and shower - but decided to pass. It’s not ruining our cruise, but it is definitely very noticeable. As long as our favorite crew comes back this ship we’ll keep coming back. As soon as they move on from the Grand, so will we.

Working around certain crew member schedules has us falling into a routine:

• Hubby grabs some coffee at a special bar with a special bartender while I sleep in a few extra minutes.
• When I’m ready, I choose my encouraging word money pocket for the day and drop it in the Wake Show box then meet hubby at the bar where I get my morning beverage, ice water. (I don’t drink coffee and I don’t drink hot tea.) 
• When we’re ready we head to breakfast at the buffet. 
• After breakfast hubby heads out to do who-knows-what while I head to the crafting session. I’m very happy to report this ship has two crafting sessions a day, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. Yesterday was the crepe paper flowers; today was button crafts. Can’t wait to see what tomorrow is.
• Hubby and I then meet up again at noon and head to the Promenade deck. (Today it is almost warm enough to sit out there. Almost, but not quite.) 
• Back to the cabin to work on typing up the blog in a Word document while we wait for another special crew member to get off his duty so we can visit one-on-one and share the love. 
• Back to the special bar and bartender. 
• Off to dinner in the buffet. (Except tonight I had to take a little rest between the bar and the buffet. Our bartender pal took very good care of me this afternoon. Enough to warrant a little lie down.)
• Back to the cabin to, if we’re lucky, catch at least part of a movie before we fall asleep. (Last night I fell asleep to It’s a Wonderful Life. I really like that they have the holiday movie channel!)

Other than finding a few minutes somewhere on the ship with a solid internet signal to get the blog posted, that is pretty much our day. I am going to again complain about the internet. It takes almost 10 minutes just for my email to load. In two days I’ve already blown through half of my 250 minute allotment. And I’m not even reading anything else – just uploading a minimal number of blog pictures, posting the blog (which is just a matter of copying and pasting because I wrote it offline), and checking email. That’s it. No responding to email, no surfing the web. Nothing else. And I can’t even do any of that in the cabin because I have no internet access in there. It. Just. Plain. Sucks.

While our daily routine doesn’t sound exhausting it must be because we have been asleep before 9 every night so far. Tonight is formal night and we’ll leave the Champagne Waterfall for those who can manage to stay up later than we can.

Tomorrow is yet another sea day and the Most Traveled Passenger Luncheon. We might just have to alter our busy boring schedule to fit it in.

(For those looking for the Patter, I’ve tried several times to get it to upload into Google docs. The internet is just taking too long. Sorry. I do have it scanned, though.)