World Cruise Day 156/163 Scenic Scandinavia - Sea Day - Freeloaders, Baggo, Trivia, Laundry, Martinis

Cruise day: 156/163

Ports days: 84
Sea days: 72
Countries: 28
Continents: 5
Ports: 61

A sea day - the last sea day of this adventure.  We are here, floating around in the Baltic, traveling south-southwest the roughly 400 miles or so to Gdańsk, Poland.  Sea days can get old when you have a ton of them all at once, like at the beginning of this trip. On February 24, when we arrived in Mindelo, São Vicente, Cape Verde Islands after a nine-day Atlantic crossing, we had been on the ship for 63 days.  Of those, only 19 were spent in port and 44 days were at sea - more than 2:1 at sea.  Today is 93 days later, and we've spent 65 of those in port and 28 at sea - more than 2:1 in port.  If you look at the combined 14-day Viking Homelands and 10-day Scenic Scandinavia cruises, of the 24 days, 22 are port days and only two - one on each cruise - are sea days.  So we are savoring this last sea day, enjoying a loose schedule before we hit the last six ports before finally jetting home.

This morning, I looked out the window and spotted this freeloader, hitching a ride on our sliding glass door.  I expect that he will be a little confused when he figures out tomorrow that he's in Poland.

One of the bigger, and certainly more boisterous activities on the World Cruise was Baggo (Cornhole).  They played every sea day in an ongoing tournament of officers versus guests.  We could never play since we took Bridge lessons and that happened at the same time.  But we could hear it, and everyone involved had a lot of fun with it.  The officers were getting beaten so badly that one afternoon, we saw they had the Baggo boards set up and crew from every department were trying out - housekeeping, culinary, engineering, maintenance - you name it.  The officers were recruiting crew members to find better players!  It was a lot of fun to hear, and see - we could catch the end each day after our lesson.  

Today, Cruise Director Bruce had a Baggo competition so we could finally compete.  Arlona & I got on different teams so that meant one of us was guaranteed the win.  We played three rounds, all played differently.  Round one was traditional Baggo - each player on the team threw four bags and scored points for bags on the board or in the hole.  Round two was similar, except you drew playing cards based on your board/hole count and the card values became your points.  Round three was the most interesting.  Each player had to throw all four bags simultaneously - two from the right hand and two from the left.  Points were awarded for board/hole bags.  In the end, Arlona's team just edged my team out.  OK - they killed us with nearly a 500-240 win.  It was all good fun and helped make a sea day enjoyable.

We played trivia and once again found our spot just out of winning.  The sad part is that we talked ourselves out of two answers that would have given us a tie for top honors.  Our mistakes:

• What is the national bird of India?
• Peacock - we had no idea
• What nationality is Agatha Christie's protagonist, Hercule Poirot?
• Belgian - we guess French
• What is Fugu - a seaweed soup, Tofu dish, fish dish, rice paste, or plum wine & saki drink?
• Fish dish - we talked ourselves out of that - it is pufferfish and if prepared incorrectly, is poisonous
• The first LPs (long-playing vinyl records) were introduced in what decade, and what year +/- 1 year?
• We guessed the 1950s and 1953 - it was the 1940s and 1948
• What famous author wrote all the following phrases:
  One fell swoop, foul play, vanished into thin air, play fast & loose, with bated breath?
• William Shakespeare
• What was the first name of the designed Halston and Givenchy?
• Roy & Hubert
• This author with the first name Abraham went by a nickname and wrote The Lady of the Shroud and The Lair of the White Worm.  What was the author's name and their best-known novel published in 1897?
• Bram Stoker, Dracula

 As always, we had fun and met some new folks.

As we were eating lunch, another freeloader hopped a ride for a bit.  The photos are lousy as I just had my phone and was shooting through the glass from a distance.

Google Lens suggests this might be a western yellow wagtail

Nice of it to make this an official "poop deck"

We tossed in what will likely be our last load of laundry for the cruise.  We should have plenty of clean clothes to see us through this week and we can certainly wash everything easily at home. 

As we waited for dinner, we enjoyed my special martini, crafted by Milos at the Aquavit bar - Arlona on the rocks, me, straight up.  We're running low on the infused vanilla vodka, but we'll make it through the cruise. 

Tonight, we opted for a custom pizza for dinner, handled adeptly by the World Cafe pizza chefs.

It was awesome, like always, and it made for a nice dinner

This evening, we signed up for a martini tasting at Torshavn.  

Bartender Gede, with help from bar waiter, Aliaksandr, took us through making four different martinis

L-R: classic Dry Gin Martini, Cosmopolitan, French Martini, Chocolate Martini

We learned the ins and outs of shaking versus stirring, gin versus vodka, what dirty ice is, what makes a Gibson, and other cocktail trivia.  Even more interesting was that among the eight of us in the tasting, we met a couple from West Bloomfield, Michigan - not far from where I went to high school and where our daughter-in-law's parents live.  Even more interesting than that was the couple right behind us that live in The Village, Florida - where we live.  Funny how that works sometimes.

It is funny seeing the expressions of the new passengers when most of the crew calls us by name all the time.  We get that, "Who are these people?", look from time to time and we chuckle.  But when you've been on the ship longer than nearly every crew member, that's what happens.

We have a short day tomorrow in Gdańsk, Poland, arriving at noon with an onboard time at 6PM.  We plan to take the shuttle into town and I'll give Arlona the tour she missed last week when she was isolated with COVID. Gdańsk is the heart of the amber trade, so we'll be checking that out as well.

Oh yeah - we gain an hour tonight, back to UTC+2 - so silly.  We should have just stayed on this time the last two days.