I had a much better sleep than the previous night in Barcelona, it’s nice to back in the, oh so comfy Cunard beds and fluffy pillows. On the first day Jane never feels like making it to breakfast, scuppered by a combination of excitement and booze she’d already preempted not getting up by ordering breakfast from room service. Bacon bagel and pot of coffee. While Jane devoured that I indulged in a nice hot shower, unfortunately I’d forgotten to put the mat down outside and not noticed that door seal wasn’t on the door properly so when I got out I nearly went tip over apex. I sorted the door seal so Jane didn’t have the same issue as I did and belatedly put down the mat to soak up the flood. All nice and clean it was time for breakfast, so I headed up to deck 11 and the QG restaurant for bircher muesli followed by kippers and poached egg. All very nice and unremarkable, I could have done with the kippers to be a little more grilled, I like my kippers to have a bit of a crust to them, but they were absolutely fine. I tried the trick of eating them with a little marmalade to stop them repeating, turns out it doesn’t work for me as I was still eating them as we went to lunch.
I headed to the Grills lounge as I wanted to discuss internet things with the Concierge, firstly, I hadn’t received my Diamond credit automatically from my pre-payed internet package. I also wanted to find out if there were issues with the internet. I was barely getting 200kbs uploading my photo’s to WordPress and Immich which is well under the Premium internet’s streaming capability. She said it was fine and suggested turning Airplane mode on and seeing if that was better. Against my better judgement it was and I was getting up towards 1Mbs upload speed.
After getting IT support from the Concierge I decided to chill in the Grills Lounge and have a leisurely coffee while waiting for Jane to come and join me. We’d decided to go to see Professor Paul Sanders’ Insights lecture at 11:00. Professor Sanders is a psychologist, so not normally my cup of tea, but I’d seen his lectures on the November cruise to Norway and found them to be excellent, so I jumped at the chance to see him again and Jane, who had missed his lectures wanted to see what I was enthusing about. His lecture today was about perception and how we can’t believe our lying eyes. It was really good again if a little disconcerting. Oddly enough the Glasgow Times today has a story about a motorist crashing in the Clyde Tunnel mistaking graffiti for the tunnel entrance.
We both went for lunch in the main restaurant, we needed to order our first “off-menu” dish of the cruise, Tequila Prawns, with saffron rice, hopefully this will be as nice as the version we had on QM2. lunch for me was battered calamari rings to start while Jane roasted beets with beet hummus and we both had the tuna poke bowl as the main dish, for dessert I had the chocolate pudding with Chantilly cream, I almost got away with eating that, but Jane who didn’t want a pudding decided she needed to try mine, I thoroughly enjoyed my lunch and nearly enjoyed my dessert.
We had a relaxing afternoon flitting between chilling in the Commodore Club (no drinks) where we noticed that the sun had come out and our stateroom where we sat on the balcony soaking up the little afternoon sun that was left. On the way back to the room we passed by the Queens room where a band were entertaining the afternoon tea brigade, playing a medley from the Greatest Showman. It was soon time for our first Trivia quiz of the cruise at 16:15 in the Winter Garden, we did surprisingly well coming about 3rd with 16/20 and the winners getting 18/20. Not bad for just the two of us, we were obviously missing our quizzing buddies Pam and Max. After a quick drink in the Commodore Club, Ginger Cosmo and a Doombar it was time for Jane to get her hairdoo for the Gala night, so I headed back to the room where I chased the butler for a decent hair dryer after the disastrous failure of the Dyson Airwrap which has Jane almost apoplectic with worry about drying her hair for the rest of the cruise
Suitably primped, Jane returned to the stateroom where we got ready for the Gala night, Black and White ball, tonight. The Tequila prawns we’d ordered at lunch were the highlight of the meal, but the spice tuna starter was really nice as well as was the passion fruit souffle. All in all it was a very nice dinner with some very nice company.