Today’s Daily Programme is Here ….
It was still dark as I made my way down to the gym, it’s not getting any easier, especially after all the excitement of yesterday. We’d already docked so at least the treadmill would be nice and stable for a change. I returned to the room after my run bearing a gift of a yoghurt and granola pot from the Kings Court buffet.
After breakfast, we headed into Funchal with no real purpose other than to have a mooch around and possibly get some olives for snacking on. It’s been a while since we were in Funchal and I don’t remember how far it was to walk into town, it was a long one, but given all the food we’ve eaten it was worth it. Funchal was very busy, especially since it was a Thursday, with lots of people milling around, many of whom were locals rather than cruise ship passengers. Our trek took us to the market and although there were a multitude of stalls there was not one selling olives, dried fruit, nuts and seed by the barrow load, but not an olive. We did find a stall selling Madeira wine and cake for €4.50, and it would be a travesty not to indulge. After that we headed back to the ship for lunch, it was Spaghetti Carbonara and I’m very partial to a creamy pasta dish.
After lunch we tried out the Grills Terrace for the first time, it was lovely in the sun out there, but I could see that being a bit of a bun fight getting a sun lounger on a port intensive Caribbean cruise is the space is fairly limited. While we were there the steward brought around glasses of iced water which was appreciated.
After the Afternoon Trivia, we seem to be maintaining three points away from the winning score which in today’s case was 19/20 we headed to the chart room for a drink rather than the Commodore Club, we had an appointment with our photographer at 18:00 so look at the photos from yesterdays ceremony and decide on the package we wanted.
We chose the full package, which was a scary amount of money, but as was pointed out to me, these are memories that we treasure forever, even though it is still a scary amount of money. We received a stick of the professional photos with the instructions to decide on our top 20 photographs and any duplicates that we may require and they would print them up in the required sizes.
We dropped all of that off back at the stateroom but we were due at our celebration dinner at the Verandah Restaurant. We had invited our friends Pam and Max to join us as a thank you for being our witnesses. The dinner was lovely, I had steak tartar to start and a perfectly cooked Rib Eye steak as a main with triple cooked chips and onion rings. I very nearly didn’t have room for the sherry trifle as dessert. Jane had grilled asparagus followed by Rack of Lamb.
