Day 83 May 29 – At Sea

Day 83 Friday May 29th (37 days to go) — We had a sea day but there were a number of events this day, both in the afternoon and evening. In the afternoon we had a Behind The Scenes tour of the Vista. In the evening we had dinner with the group in The Polo Grill and then attended a White Night Party on the pool deck.

I am doing this blog update on June 1st on a sea day and apologize for the shadows on The Currents daily newsletter. The shadows are because I am doing the blog in the cigar lounge as I try to catch up to days missed. You know things going better with a cigar like cutting grass and the weeds die quicker when you spray while smoking and the plants grow better when you water them while smoking a cigar. Well, at least that is my philosophy. 😉

I will try and load videos of the tour and the White Night Party but have run into a problem when trying to upload these videos. If theydo not work, I will fix it when I get home in July. 🙂

The Behind the Scenes tour started by visiting behind The Vista Lounge stage. This photo shows where the items are kept for the passengers who turn in “O” points. The items are in these big plastic containers. Since we have not accomplished getting any “O” points we need to find a way behind these doors to secure our items. Just kidding, we would not break in to do this, but on a drunk night, you never know what might happen. 😉

All of the equipment and props for the various performance shows are kept back here and tied down due to the rolling seas.

This is how the electronic boards look right behind the stage as you walk from one side to the other side of the stage. An interesting thing we learned was the performers have infrared devices attached to their heads during the performance. These are connected electronically to the lights above the stage. Thus, when the performer is moving around the stage it causes the lights to follow them around on the stage.

The area where all the costumes and wardrobe are kept for the performers. This photo is for the female performers preparation area.

Area for the male performers

Female performers area again

Notes and message board for the performers. The practice and performance schedules are posted here.

The next area we toured was the ship’s bridge. This is a view of the ship going aft and is where the officers monitor to see when they are docking the ship

This is a hole in the floor covered with glass so that the officers can look straight down to the see how close the ship is to the dock when they are docking.

Looking out the front of the ship from the bridge. There are two crew members who stand here with binoculars 24 hours a day (in shifts) to look for small vessels that might not appear on the radars. From some our previous blog photos you see many small fishing boats moving around the cruise ship when we come into ports. These many times do not appear on the radar and are monitored by the crew with the binoculars.

The main navigational area of the bridge. The ship can be navigated or driven from five different areas on the bridge, but this is the main area. The officers on duty spoke to us explaining the monitors and answered questions that the passengers had.

This photo is looking our towards the front of the ship. If you look down, you will see furniture tied down. These are the balconies of the Vista Suites. We stayed on one cruise in a Vista Suite and said never again as you cannot use the furniture while the ship is moving, thus making the beautiful balcony useless the majority of the cruise.

This is the area where different country’s flags are folded and kept. When the ship enters a new port, the flag of that country needs to be flown.

One last view out the front of the ship before we left the bridge

Our next stop was the laundry department. The laundry department is run by 20 employees who work 24 hours a day. Every piece of laundry sent to the department is not only washed and dried, but also ironed. It was amazing to see this operation. The thing I noticed is that the employees work on a hard floor with no rubber mats to stand on. This would kill my legs.

These washers can hold 600 pounds of clothing at one time. Each washer has three chambers that can wash three different types of clothing at one time.

This guy is Hansen and he is the supervisor of the department. He explained each piece of machinery and gave us a great tour of the department. Jackie and I got caught by surprise as when we send laundry to be cleaned, I always place $5-$10 in the bag with the tag. I asked him about how the money was given to the employees and right away he said you are cabin 11024.

This machine is amazing. The crew feeds sheets, towels, tablecloths, napkins into it and this folding machine folds each piece. I hope these videos work

This small piece of equipment is the one that all passengers talk about. It prints our small tags that are placed on each piece of laundry we send for cleaning. Passengers laugh about forgetting to remove the small tag when getting dressed and having to get your partner remove the tag or taking the clothes off and then removing the tag as it rubs on your body.

The next stop on the tour was the kitchens for the different restaurants. Again, no rubber mats for employees to stand on and the kitchens are spotless!!!

This area handles room service which is especially busy in the mornings when excursions leave the ship early.

Room service trays are ready to be used

There are 140 chefs and cooks on the staff

None of the food is purchased prepacked. Every piece of bread, croissant etc. is prepared daily. All meals are not cooked in for delivery in the restaurants until the orders are placed by the passengers.

The executive chef on the ship. He led our tour through the kitchens

The next part of the tour were the storerooms. This gentleman handles all the ordering for the ship and manages the storage of all the provisions used on the ship which includes food, alcohol, soft drinks, water, paper goods, etc.

We have many photos of the storerooms so I will only post a few of them

Bags of potatoes

Sacks of onions. No Guidry fresh cut trinity mix onboard the ship!!

Boxes of bananas. I had to stop Jackie from grabbing a box and bringing it back to the cabin so she can have some with her morning cottage cheese

There were more sacks of watermelons that did not make it to my photo. Cases of different melons in the background.

He told us how they are able to save these berries for up to 21 days by keeping separate from the citrus fruits and laying out on cake sheets in the coolers

The carrots were HUGE!!!

Four different types of mushrooms

Sacks of sugar, boxes of sardines to the left

Huge cans of tomatoes and tomato sauce. It has been disappointing that the spaghetti sauce lacks flavor as they do not use the herbs like I do at home.

A different type of sugar as this is cane sugar and the previous photo was just regular sugar

We had dinner at The Polo Grill. David Chen took these photos. You know what is sad? Look at all the empty tables in the restaurant. The company has made a decision to limit the number of reservations since the passenger count is down. Clearly an attempt to reduce cost. It is virtually impossible to get specialty dining reservations.

Look at all the invisible passengers enjoying their dinners

We have a dinner reserved in Privee in June. John, Kevin and David snuck into the room to take a look and snapped these photos.

After dinner we attended The White Party on the pool deck. It was a good evening, and everyone enjoyed themselves, even some crew members who were kidnapped by passengers and dragged to the dance floor. 🙂

Marta did not want to dance with David, so I helped him out. 🙂 We have really enjoyed meeting this group of people. David said is tough hanging around with six people from Louisiana as he doesn’t understand what we are saying. BTW, just joking about the dancing as Marta tried dragging Dave onto the dance floor and asked for lessons later on how to get him to dance…laughing

John and Joan Meyer, just a super fun couple. We have magnets on our cabin door and someone named John keeps moving them around. Our cabin steward Ivana wants to kill him as she continues putting the magnets back in order 🙂

Lane with Janet. Janet is a solo traveler from the Seattle area. She joined us on the excursion in Tahiti and has become a great friend on the ship.

Nancy and Verne Lundquist…..just another awesome nice couple we met while on this cruise.