Heading East – Day Four

There isn’t a great deal to say about today. It’s been more or less the same as all the other sea-days on this long, five-day return journey.

But what’s a typical at-sea day?

We’ve been losing the few hours we gained earlier in the trip, as we’ve gone along, putting the clocks forward on three occasions, to gradually put us back into line with UK time. As a consequence of this, we’ve been retiring a little earlier than usual, and setting the alarm for 8am.

In the morning, after a leisurely breakfast and a brief walk out on deck to check the temperature and blow the cobwebs away, Tracey has taken her book or laptop upstairs to the Eros bar, by the pool, and I’ve stayed downstairs because I prefer to work without any distractions.

I’ve been doing online student and email stuff for most of the mornings, heading upstairs to use the on-board wi-fi about 11am (which has been behaving much better on the return journey) and joining Tracey around about noon for lunch.

After lunch (around about 12:45), we head towards the craft area to set up the class for a 1:30pm start. Today, I’ve had them painting simple figures, which most folks seemed to enjoy; the first class was 1:30pm, the second at 3:30pm.

With the second class finishing about 4:45pm, and the cleanup operation taking about 45 minutes, it means we’re not back in our cabin until getting on for 6pm. This gives us an hour and a half timeout before we’re upstairs again, in the bistro for dinner.

After dinner, we’ve been taking to going to the Tavener’s pub to read and enjoy a drink, unless we want to go and see the show in the Show Lounge. This evening, we got wind of another pub quiz due to start around 10:15pm. With the last one having dragged on until about midnight, we took the opportunity to leg it before it began.

It’s been a very ordinary, uneventful day at sea.