Sea Day - January 7

Captain's Welcome Party

The photo you see here is the Captain’s Welcome Party – we are seated with good friends Bill & Mary from Tampa, Florida – we met them last year and kept in contact once we returned. Wonderful folks…they even remembered our 25th wedding anniversary! Two days out of Ft. Lauderdale now – experiencing 12’ seas today with conditions expected to get worse this evening. Sickness bags can be spotted throughout the ship and attendance at many activities is noticeably down, but this is a walk in the park compared to what we went through last year coming around the tip of South America. We actually enjoy the motion – it’s like being rocked to sleep! We met our remaining tablemates last evening – Joyce & Gary (from Sacramento) – very nice folks – so along with Jinny & Jim, we are once again this year very fortunate to have great people to have dinner with each evening. We’ve already heard rumblings from other guests that they’re disappointed with their tablemates for one reason or another. Holland America is very accommodating, however, and will make every effort to move people around should there be personality conflicts. Surprisingly, there’s a lot of shuffling around – I told Cheryl you just never know…we may go to dinner tonight and find that our four tablemates have bailed on US!!

We attended our first session of Wii games earlier today – the group is a little more quiet than last year but it’s early yet – people will loosen with passing time and start getting rowdy, at least we hope so! Everyone sure is nice, at least based on first impressions & interaction.

We are expected to Dock in Cartagena, Columbia at 7am tomorrow morning.