October 19 2012 At sea

The Good Morning Westerdam talk today was with Captain PJ (von Maurik) so quite a crowd turned up. I’m really enjoying these informal talks as they can be very informative. One subject that was discussed was the medical evacuation from Christmas Island. We knew that a plane had to be sent from Hawaii but I didn’t know that the US Coast Guard was called in and that they organised for a Hercules to fly in to take the patient to Honolulu.

My trivia team thought we were going so well today until we got to some sticky questions towards the end. One question we did get correct though (and not many others did) was which two kings had Eleanor of Aquitaine married. I’m very interested in genealogy and have recently traced back one line to the Plantagenets and Eleanor so we aced this question. Fortunately for us, our rival team didn’t do so well either (not that I’m keeping score).

One activity which we have on this cruise which I haven’t seen before is the ‘Public Forum’. Those passengers who have a special interest or hobby they would like to share in a seminar are invited to register their interest. One such forum took place today by an author/writer who gave a Q&A workshop on writing your memoire.

Apparently Marilyn gave an initial talk yesterday and it generated so much interest that she was asked to give another talk today. Even though I missed yesterday’s talk, I still found today’s talk useful, so much so that I came back to my cabin and worked on my journal (apart from the online blog I keep a personal journal with watercolour sketches).

As I got carried away with my work, I decided to order a light room service dinner tonight. I’ve also been getting my gear ready for tomorrow when we finally reach land again, Raiatea, Tahiti, where I am booked to go on a drift snorkelling trip over coral gardens. The snorkelling gear I bought in Hawaii will finally get a work out!