World Cruise Day 105/152 - Sea Day - A well-deserved rest

Cruise day: 105/152

Ports days: 46
Sea days: 59
Countries: 18
Continents: 5
Ports: 34

It's a sea day - woo!  After yesterday's 13-hour, 109-degree marathon, a sea day is welcome.  We're cruising at about 10 knots heading north in the Gulf of Suez to our parking location for our entry into the Suez Canal.  As I discussed on our first transit, ships must arrive the evening before and anchor.  Then, at 3:30AM from the south and 4:00AM from the north, the caravan heads into the canal so that they meet where they can pass each other.  We should arrive around 10PM tonight and will very likely be leading or near the front of the caravan again.

It's a sea day, so we had another bridge lesson - today focusing on overcalling and cue bidding - a really goofy concept that many struggles to grasp.

We were right on track with trivia, one question out of the running as usual.  We only missed two questions but failed miserably in the tiebreaker.

• What element has the atomic number 92?
• We had uranium and then second-guessed ourselves into platinum - it was uranium
• Who did Orpheus rescue by traveling to Hades?
• Eurydice 
• The tiebreaker: How many movies (of any type) have featured Barbie (like the doll) as the leading character?
• The team leaned hard to 3 - I said it was probably ridiculously high like 47 - we went with 3, it was 43

Heads-up - internet rant coming...

You may have noticed that I have not mentioned the ship's internet access in a while.  Why?  Every single time that I started to write that it seemed to have improved, it got worse.  After a while, I thought that my thinking it was better was causing it to fail.  I was getting a complex.  So, I decided to just ignore it.  Want to know what happened?  Nothing, it still sucks.

Don't get me wrong, it is better than it was when we were in South America where it bordered on being completely unusable.  But still, there are times when it just stops working completely or works so slowly that it is useless.  The official line from Viking was that we, the passengers, were to blame.  With the advent of cloud backups, with 500 people on the ship, all having their daily phone photos automatically backing up to Google Photos, Amazon Photos, iCloud, or wherever, our smart devices were using up all the available bandwidth.  So it's not them, it's us.  Well...yesterday, 450 of the 500 passengers on the ship left.  10% of the passengers did not book an excursion.  With everyone gone and not using bandwidth, how was the internet.  Based on comments from our friends who were two of the 50 that remained on the ship...it still sucked.  In fact, it was so bad that they thought it was out completely for a while.  The bottom line is that Viking needs another vendor to provide internet service on the ship.  We have been on Carnival, Royal Caribbean, and Celebrity recently.  All three have figured out how to get reliable, high-speed internet at sea, and for a whole lot more than 500 people at a time.  Viking really needs to step this part of their act as it tarnishes the luster of all the other things that they do so well.

There - I feel better now that I got that off my chest

It was interesting looking outside today.  Since we're heading to the entry of the Suez Canal, it means we're smack dab in the middle of shipping lanes and that means traffic.  Plus, there are fishing and oil rigs here, so looking around is fun.  Even with the heavy haze in the air today, there was a lot to see at sea.

This yacht has been following us all day

Viking brought a new art instructor on and they started new classes.  Today, they were painting Arab Dhow fishing boats.

The inspiration

Arlona's excellent watercolor interpretation, complete with her trademark three gulls

A friend was celebrating her birthday today, a few days after the fact for scheduling reasons, and we celebrated with a group in Manfredi's private room.  

It was a terrific evening with terrific people.  As I've said before, these types of things are what make this cruise amazing. We didn't know any of these fine folks before this cruise.

Tonight, we anchor in Suez, Egypt.  Tomorrow, we transit the Suez Canal from the Gulf of Suez in the Red Sea on the south end to Port Said, Egypt in the Mediterranean Sea on the north end. We will be docking in Port Said tomorrow evening and then visiting Cairo, Giza, the great pyramids, and sphynx on Saturday.