Thursday – at Sea

Rita rang last night and we arranged a rendezvous for this morning in the Crows Nest.  I had my first Explorations coffee last night (well, first coffee of the day, really!) and I’ve more or less done enough orienteering to know where everything is. The Zaandam is really only a small ship – less than 1500 guests and that’s rather nice. Shopping is somewhat limited: they don’t have as much available as far as cheap cruise clothing goes, in fact the duty free is mainly jewellery; however, there’ll be plenty to see in Hawaii, not that I plan on spending much anyway.

I went to the welcome concert at 9.30pm, which was okay, but I’m not really into the showtime stuff. It’s just lovely being on board again: the window, as I downloaded photos last night, was doing a distracting light show from the lights of the towns along the coast that we’re passing (I’m on port side, which is really good on this cruise because we hug the coast for ages). I could just sit there for hours, but thought I’d better get to bed!

We were to set the clocks back; as my phone had autoset when I hit LA, I assumed it would do so overnight; so I ended up in the Lido at 6.40am having breakfast, when I thought it was an hour later! Oh well, early to bed tonight. We’re in quite a swell now; I barely noticed it in bed because I’m on Deck 1 amidships, but up in the Lido, it was careful, drunken walking everywhere! Well, true to form for Holland America, not only do we have a Mass every day and an interdenominational service but also tonight the Jewish community is celebrating Passover.

After breakfast I went to the service: the pastors are Walt and his wife, Lydia, an elderly retired couple from Ontario CA. We had some prayer and did a lovely Bible study on worship, based on a few Psalms and scriptures; there were a little over a dozen of us there. So it wasn’t really a service; however, it was certainly encouraging and nice to begin a connection with these people. I’m finding that most people on board appear to be a little or a lot older than me and there is only a small percentage of younger couples – a little unusual, but perhaps most people prefer to fly to Hawaii these days.

I had coffee with Rita this morning; Bob was at a session in the art studio. It was really lovely to catch up; Rita is going along well but Bob has had lots of health issues. We’re going to have dinner in the Pinnacle Grill tomorrow night together, as we both have a complimentary gift dinner from our travel agents. Today I went to some information sessions on our Hawaiian ports; first port will be Honolulu on Tuesday morning, for 2 days.

I heard you’ve had some more hot weather. It’s cold here at sea, cloudy today and the wind is too cold to do more than a couple of laps of the deck. Of course, as we said further south it will get warmer.