I had a much better sleep, barring one thing, the Illy coffee machine started flashing during the night, and once I’d seen it I couldn’t not see it. I ended up turning it off by unplugging it. I ended up sleeping so late Jane had to nudge me awake and reminding me the breakfast finishes at 09:30. I ended up rushing a shower and heading down the the QG Dining room alone. Jane is feeling guilty about eating far too much so she decided to give breakfast a miss. I did have my orders though to pick up a granola pot from the Kings Court buffet on my way back to the room. The buffet on deck seven is very popular, there was hardly a seat available when I walked through. There were 5 of the table at breakfast where I had the usual bircher muesli followed by kippers and poached egg. One of our table-mates also had kippers but found them a little over cooked, I didn’t have that problem, mine were lovely, moist salty accompanying the poached eggs nicely.
After breakfast I headed back to the stateroom with the requested granola pot before heading down to Illuminations for the morning Insight lectures. The first was Dr Alison Norrington talking about Trolls and the myths and legends surrounding them, I din’t enjoy her lecture half as much as the following one where Professor David Sanders gave his talk on Conspiracy Theories. This was right up my street, informative, entertaining and full of humour, apparently he is a proper Professor. This left me little time to find Jane for lunch. She had parked herself in the Grills Lounge and aided by a flat white she perused the Daily Programme and read her book while waiting for me to be educated.
We had a late lunch. I avoided the starters opting only to have the Spaghetti Bolognese, you really can’t fault Cunard’s pasta dishes as they are consistently good Jane had the same, but she also had the avocado tartar to start. I had tart tatin for dessert with a scoop of vanilla ice cream, mmmm! After that we went down Illuminations were the Quiz show “The Pinnacle” was already in progress so we stayed to watch it, a similar concept to the BBC TV show “The 1% Club” and looked like a lot of fun. After all the fun of that it was now time for more fun as we’d arranged to meet Pam and Max in the Carinthia Lounge for the Trivia quiz. The quiz started off with three very simple questions but rapidly descended in to the impossible. In the end we struggled to get 14/20 with the winners on 17/20.
After there it was Commodore O’clock where Jane finally got a QEII after being told the day before it wasn’t available. It turned out to be a bit of a disappointment and tasted weaker than she remembered. I had a spicy Bloody Mary rather than a beer and I really enjoyed that. I’ve been cutting back on my boozing lately, mainly because I sleep really badly after drinking alcohol. One of our table mates suggested a re-hydration sachet before going to bed to replace electrolytes, so I drank one down before retiring and had a fantastic nights sleep. I’m going to get hammered tonight and take one again to see if it still works on more than a Bloody Mary and a couple of glasses of wine.
There was lamb on the menu for dinner so that was Jane sorted, I had the fillet steak from the a la carte menu and that was perfection. After dinner we went to the Royal Court theatre to see the show. It was the acrobatic act Travellers Duo who did things with ropes and ribbons I can only dream of. On the way back to the room Jane got a hankering for a hot chocolate and after a bit of persuading she headed the short distance to the Commodore Club returning five minutes later sporting a big grin and steaming hot chocolate drink.