·         Afternoon Trivia: 6/20, with 16 winning.  The winner was referenced by the game host as “Mr. Blue Shirt” – we’d later hear him called “Wally”, as he also B2B’ed our cruises.  Wally was clearly a serial solo cruiser who was VERY impressed with himself.  He always played as a team of 1 and always loudly called out the answers he’d memorized.  (Those that he wasn’t certain about didn’t earn the same level of volume.)  Winning was clearly VERY important to Wally – and we’d meet another guy later in the cruise (Dan) who had a very similar MO.

On the food and drink front:

·         I tried one of Schooner’s special drinks: Toasted Marshmallow Old Fashioned;  meh, while Eileen had a Pina Colada (also meh).

·         For lunch (the only one I bothered taking notes for) I had the BBQ pork chops (good) with mashed potatoes and gravy (the expected meh) while E made herself a sandwich by picking apart their roasted chicken.  We tried both the “mainstream” red velvet cake (yellow, too much whipped crème, not enough cake) and Coconut Custard Tart (awful – suffering from the same gelatinous issue that so many of the mass-produced desserts have).

·         The poor MDR waitstaff: at dinner the waiters and assistant waiters are obligated to dance like monkeys and perform the Macarena around dessert time.  Hate it!  While we didn’t witness this any other night, on our final night onboard we heard them calling all waitstaff to prepare for their entertainment as we were leaving the MDR.)

After dinner we went over to the Music Hall and read while listening to the Family Majority Rules game.  This is our second time at this game, after our time on Brilliance.  It seems likely that the “winners” come out of teams with serial cruisers on them, as the questions (which are clearly standardized since it was the same ones we already heard) generated mostly the SAME majority answers as last time.  We guessed that the answers that were mentioned by only 1-2 teams were newbie teams who were making honest responses, while the majority responses were mostly tams going “yeah, this was the majority answer the last 3 of 5 cruises…”

We attended the first of their two production shows this night.  Sequins and Feathers involved a large cast of 6 singers, 12 dancers (6 men, 6 women) and 4 showgirls.  Honestly, not certain I could tell the difference between female dancers and the showgirls.  The last couple of cruises the male dancers didn’t seem as strong as the women, but we thought all the dancing was good this time.  The singing was fine, with one of the men being particularly strong.  Like all shows, lots of costume changes and what we THOUGHT were some tough quick changes…until we later saw Starwater, which has some horrifically tough changes.  We were both happy to plan on re-watching this show on the 2^nd leg of our B2B.

Now, let me insert some general comments on other things I was tracking on a daily basis:

·         Internet speed: With only one exception, we remained connected to Starlink via a Los Angeles-based ISP.  Down/up speed tests showed 8Mbps down/3Mbps up speeds, in general. 

·         Wireless quality: Wireless generally got worse the deeper into the cabin I got.  At the bed it was fine, at the couch next to the balcony it was sometimes spotty.  It seemed like we both got auto-disconnected overnight every day.  We’d have to reconnect every morning.

·         Weather: I used the Windy app for forecasting, which wasn’t necessarily the best choice.  Doing it on my tablet rather than phone was tough because I didn’t have location services on the tablet, so had to click on the map and compare the long/lat with that shown on the TV to ensure I was in the proper location.