Day 6: Tuesday, March 3, 2026

We gained back our lost hour of time and slept in until about 8A, so took our time and got down to breakfast at 9A.  There's no escaping the staff dancing, as the WJ crew were “happy" to snake their way through the dining room so we could “appreciate" their hard work.  Fortunately, our small area was spared all but about 30 seconds of the revelry.  We finished up eating and headed over to Schooner to work through our tablet games while waiting for the 10A general trivia.

For trivia, we were invited to form a team by the folks near us and, having no reason to say no, found ourselves a group of five.  The questions ranged from hard to obscure (including questions like “how many diver sculptures are in the Solarium?” and “how many red lanterns are outside Splashaway Café?”).  Although we only got 10/20, that was actually good enough for 2^nd place, behind the winners who had 16/20.

We stayed in Schooner, playing both Dingbats (15/20) and Phobias (10/20) while filling in down time with reading, as well as watching others who were learning the art of napkin folding.  Ironically, on Dingbats we recognized one that we’d been stumped by during our Brilliance cruise – and we remained stumped by it this time, too!  Finally, at 1245P we headed to WJ for lunch.  While hardly a new thing, the contrast between the abundant variety of food available during our 1^st cruise in 2014 vs the very limited offerings of the last several years in huge.

Found outside our door (when we left for breakfast, actually) was the letter outlining how we were to handle ourselves as B2B cruisers.  Essentially, at 845A tomorrow we're to meet at the Music Hall with our boarding passes and passports and we'll be issued new SeaPass cards, then escorted off-ship to go through Customs before being escorted back on the ship to do as we wish.  If we wanted to do some kind of LA-based activity we could do so, as long as we reboarded after 11A and before All Aboard at 230P.  We're also being hosted for lunch at the Chic section of the MDR (Deck 5).  Curious to see how many people are doing B2B.

Post-lunch we decided that none of the trivia-based activities interested us (things like Game of Thrones, NTT Taylor Swift, and more Harry Potter), so we headed once again to the Library behind two70 to play more missions of our 2-player The Crew game.  They appeared to be doing some tech rehearsing for tonight's Starwater, for which a new cast is apparently debuting.  So we're apparently going to see the 1^st on-ship performance done by this particular group of performers.  Opening Night!  Anyway, mid-afternoon it looks like they were rehearsing a few scenes that involved various apparatus.  We saw one performer suspended about 10’ above the stage wearing a “dress" ala the nightmare scene in Fiddler.  We're planning to let Veronica (our MDR waiter) know that we want to push through dinner so we can leave the MDR no later than 730P in order to stake out good seats for our 8P show.

As has been our custom, we came back to our stateroom around 315P for snacks, relaxation, and naps.  E's cough is definitely getting better, but it is still hanging around and fatiguing her.  My scratchy throat tapered off and was essentially gone in 36 hours and I currently have a VERY mild cold – hardly noticeable and definitely not tiring for me, fortunately.  Hoping that this good fortune continues throughout the 2^nd leg.

We did go down to Schooner for Afternoon Trivia – I think.  Either I didn’t record the score, or we didn’t actually go but I wrote it down ahead of time and forgot to delete if from the “Actual” plan column of the spreadsheet.

At the start of dinner we let Veronica know that we wanted to be out of the MDR by 730P and she and Kadek pushed us through dinner in about 25 minutes(!), so we were out by about 715P.  (Having figured out that they opened up MTD starting at 630P we had already started appearing at the MDR at the earlier time rather than at 645P.)  We made a quick stop at the podium on our way out to ask that they officially change our 2^nd leg reservation to 630P at Veronica's table and then walked over to two70 where they scanned E's SeaPass card to ensure that we had reservations.  Sadly, all the seats in the center (of both decks) were reserved for Star Class and higher, so we ended up on the first level, house left, in the semi-uncomfortable stadium seating – which actually turned out to be a great place to view from.

Starwater is an interesting show.  It starts pretty slow, with several minutes of “artful wanderings" from the cast, broken up about every 60 seconds with about 45 seconds of Madonna's “Vogue", before finally finding its footing.  What follows is a combo of singing, dance, gymnastics (two guys on flying apparatus who perform aerial stunts), and finally ending with an incredible tango followed almost immediately by a super high energy dance number that has the cast pouring buckets of sweat.  Overall, a very enjoyable show and one that we decided we'd see again on the 2^nd leg, probably from the same general location but hopefully slightly more comfy seats.

Our night (and 1^st leg) ended in the Theater with comedian JR McCollum’s adult show (in which the row in front of us had two children under 8 years of age…).  I'm almost certain we saw JR on another cruise at some point.  He was described as a “Royal Caribbean favorite", so I assume he books a lot of time with them.  He was fine – although at the end of a cruise everyone is a bit lower energy than at the start so the room seemed to enjoy him but no one seemed to be howling with laughter.  Guessing that he'll have better energy tomorrow, as he kicks off the next leg of the cruise as the opening show in the Theater for a new, more awake crowd.