Royal Caribbean Explorer of the Seas ABC cruise - Day 3 of 8
Sea Day
I'm an idiot. (Most of you all know this already) I completely forgot to tell you all yesterday that when playing trivia yesterday with a couple from Cincinnati that we met on the ship, we won! Unfortunately, the prize was just bragging rights. But today, we played with them again, and we won again! This one came with this snazzy swag.
I should also mention that I have no idea what was up with the crazy font sizing issues in yesterday's blog. I tried fixing it today, but nothing worked. Oh well.
This morning, we played several trivia games and just hung out. We ran into the cruise director and got some interesting information. First, the Buddy Cruise program for special-needs families that I mentioned yesterday has over 400 participants on the ship this week. I also reported that the ship's capacity was 4,290. I got clarification that while, if every possible bed was full, the ship would hold 4,290, they consider the full capacity to be right around 3,900. This week, we are sailing with 3,258 passengers, or roughly 84%. And that means that the Buddy Cruise participants make up almost 15% of the passengers.
 |
| A view from the back as we wandered this morning |
After a quick lunch, we decided to attend the ice show this afternoon. Many Royal Caribbean ships have ice rinks on them. They have performers that do a 45-minute ice skating show throughout the cruise as well as opening the rink for open skating. We took a behind-the-scenes tour on an earlier cruise and saw the ice resurfaced - think of a mini-Zamboni. It's all pretty neat.
The show cycles through the seasons of the year, all set to music. The performers are quite talented, skating and jumping on a moving ship.
 |
| Snow machines actually made it snow in the venue |
 |
| Thankfully, they didn't make it rain in the venue! |
For the rest of the afternoon, we just hung out, both on our 12th-floor balcony and on deck 4, trying to get photos of the flying fish.
 |
| Multiple fish, all jumping |
 |
| You can see a couple of them still airborne toward the lower right |
 |
| Check out the zig-zag takeoff run |
 |
| Here's another look at serpentining |
Afterward, we went and watched a little of the Flow Rider - the surfing and boogie board machine. One of the Buddy Cruise folks was boogie boarding. The staff was incredibly supportive and he was living his best life. That was until he was done and his dad tried it. Every time dad wiped out, he laughed harder than just about anyone I've seen. It was really fun to see.
We also saw the Captain, out and about, and making the day of a young Buddy Cruiser.
After dinner, we went to the headliner show featuring singer, Zoe Tyler. She sang a variety of songs from Broadway to Dolly Parton to ABBA to Whitney Houston. It was different for us as we don't usually go to this type of entertainment.
As I write this, we are sitting at the R-Bar, enjoying vanilla-pineapple-limoncello martinis, because, as you know, the internet still doesn't work in our room.
I'll close with some interesting oddities about this ship. Most every other ship we have sailed on uses the following room numbering conversion: port (left) side - even numbered rooms; starboard (right) side - odd numbered rooms. On this ship: even-numbered ships are all on the outside and odd-numbered rooms are all interior rooms. Weird.
Another oddity: this ship has a 13th floor! Most ships go from 12 to 14. No superstitions here!
Tomorrow morning, we dock in Kralendijk, Bonaire. We have a sailing and snorkeling excursion planned so stay tuned for tomorrow's adventure.
No comments:
Post a Comment