Day 7: At Sea
Wednesday, March 12, 2025

Cruise Compass
MDR Menu: The Royal Night
Today’s Weather: sunny, mid 60’s, waves about 2’, winds about 8mph out of the WNW
Internet Speed: 9.22 Mbps down, 3.82 up, connecting out of Los Angeles
Location at Start of Day: At about 9:00A

Location at End of Day: At about 10:00P

Disaster!  For some reason my tablet didn’t recharge overnight, so I only have 28% battery.  OK, so not the end of the world, but guess I’ll have to carry the battery around for a while today.  We both got a good night’s sleep, but E is clearly in the opening stages of her cold, so by the time we get on the plane in about 48 hours we should both be pretty juicy.

Another typical WJ morning.  While it is still sunny out, the winds are building.  The captain came on around lunch time to advise everyone that it was going to be much colder and partially overcast tomorrow with even higher winds, so anyone wanting deck time in the sun was advised to do it today.  Too cool for us – we’re staying indoors.  We’re not even doing our “let’s walk the length of the ship on the outside deck” trick today, and certainly don’t expect to do so tomorrow, either.

Morning trivia at Schooner was entertaining, even if not for the politically correct reasons.  The staffer doing the quiz was Chinese and had a VERY heavy accent, so part one of the quiz was trying to figure out exactly what she was saying, followed by part two, which was trying to answer the question.  We failed a couple of times at part one, so our final score was poor.  Oh well!

After trivia we went to Family Friendly Feud in the theater.  They run it as (essentially) three different 15 minute games, cycling 6 groups of 5 up to stage to answer questions.  The crowd wasn’t the highest energy – at the least, WE weren’t the highest energy.  I spent most of the show working on my tablet games.  From there we went back to Schooner for Elton John Name that Tune.  Given how bad we (usually) are with Name That Tune, we were quite pleased to get 13/20 – if we answered it, we got it right!

Quick stop of Café Prom for restock of napkins/kleenix and a pause to watch kids launching paper airplanes from the bridge across the Promenade, we made our way to WJ for a pedestrian lunch, and then back to the cabin for rest.  We even chose to skip the Simpson trivia event at 2:00P in favor of napping.

We were back out, this time to the Star Lounge for (visual) Disney trivia, where the goal was to ID, from a closeup, what character and movie was being shown.  With an additional bonus point available, we got 16/31, which we knew was poor.  That was confirmed when something like eight teams got 31/31 and had to do a rock-scissors-paper playoff.  Guess it helps when you have kids on your team.

We stopped again at Café Prom – this time for actual snacks – before passing time at Schooner (with drinks) for the 5:00P general trivia.  Another good (i.e. challenging) quiz where our 12/20 was actually good enough for 2^nd highest score, although no prize opportunity because two other teams where ahead of us with 13/20.

Tonight is our 3^rd/last time in the MDR, for “Dress Your Best” on Royal Night, so we came back to the cabin around 5:45p to change before our 6:45P reservation.  Once we were seated we were informed that our normal waiter (Renee) was “tired” (we assume this means sick) and that our waiter that night would be Miller, instead.  While I don’t think it was this change that responsible, the pacing of tonight’s meal was markedly slower than prior nights.  From sit down to appetizer was a little over 15 minutes – but that seemed to be true of the tables around us served by other waiters, too.  Perhaps “Royal Night”, which is a formal night, is intentionally paced slower?

Anyway, since we didn’t get out of dinner until about 7:50P we were unable to find seating in the Star Lounge for the 8:00P “Finish the Lyric” show, so we instead sat outside the English pub where the guitarist was providing music.  He turned out to be pretty good and we killed an hour there before heading over to the theater for the dance show.   I thought the show was pretty MEH, but I think E liked it better than me.  Upon exit we checked the schedule and there was really nothing going on in the 10P hour – and we were more than OK with returning to the cabin to wind down the rest of the evening.

One thing I noted today.  I’d forgotten to download the Cruise Compass in the morning and didn’t do it until 2:00P.  It was then I noted that they were advising folks to use the app to update their departure info by noon today (i.e. 2 hours prior to my seeing it).  I checked the app and saw they’d assigned us to departure group 14, scheduled to leave at 8:30A.  Since we plan to self-debark earlier in order to catch our 10:30A flight out of LGB our exit group doesn’t matter.  However, I was surprised at how little info there was around this step of the process.  The only reason we know Royal queries us about departure plans is because we’ve been on prior cruises.  I’m not sure how a first-time cruiser would have known anything about this process.