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Over The Water And Back Again—A Transatlantic Trip
By Snookums, edited by Filbert, photos by Filbert

Part 5-- below (or at the "read more").

May 8 (Thursday, Day 12, At sea) –

Our phone rang around 10:30 AM and it was the Guest Services Manager just checking on us and making sure we were happy which, for the moment, we were.  We guessed that we will receive a call tomorrow morning from her, too.

Filbert at sea

Filbert showered and Snookums didn’t since she was going to conquer the rock climbing wall.  She climbed to the top and rang the bell and Filbert got some pictures.  Her whole body was shaking for about 30 minutes due to the hard work.

Dead bird

Snookums climbs the rock wall:

Snookums, going up

Ringing the bell

 

Descent

 

Unhooking

 

While Snookums was waiting to climb the wall, Filbert watched a dove fly and he saw it go full speed into the Plexiglas window/wall at the edge of the ship.  Snookums saw it out of the corner of her eye and heard the “thunk.”. It fell to the deck and was bloody and everything.  Dead bird.  We told a rock wall worker and she got someone to pick it up and then she cleaned the blood from the deck.  Filbert got a picture of it.

Today was our last day to move our watches forward one hour.  Yippee!!!  We were supposed to go through the Straight of Gibraltar around 6 PM today and Spain was to be 5 miles off our port side and Africa  2 miles off our starboard side.

Passing a SeaDream yacht just off Gibraltar

Snookums finally remembered to look in the ship’s cookbook that is for sale for the flourless chocolate cake recipe to see if it had alcohol in it.  Sure enough, it had two tablespoons of dark rum per 10-inch cake.  She KNEW that she tasted alcohol in it and that’s why she didn’t like it.  So that mystery was resolved.

While we were eating lunch an ethnically Asian-Indian woman from Texas and her parents asked to join us and then she proceeded to tell us about her awful experiences on this ship.  That was even before we told her about ours.  It seemed like everyone we met on  board was having a less-than-expected experience on this particular cruise.  We told her to meet with Carly Ackerman and she said she definitely would since all of her visits to the front desk have ended poorly.  (Really, really, we don't go out of our way to make trouble.  Really, we don't -Ed.)

Dolphins off Gibraltar

The Grand Marketplace

After dinner all of our table met in the ice rink theater for the game “Quest”.  This was an adults-only audience participation game that RCI must play on all of its cruises.  The audience was divided into 6 teams based on where you are sitting and then the announcer asks for things like “two women’s bras” or “three men with their pants off” or “one bald man” and the first team that came down to the front with the “answer” got the most points.  Our team had a bunch of energetic youngsters on it and we won without any problem at all.  Filbert did run down on two occasions (once with a $20 bill--”a picture of the White house” and once with his Manhattan--”a drink with fruit in it”) but since we were sitting in the very back row he didn’t get to the front before one of our teammates did.  The teams also got points for cheering the loudest and our team won most of those bonus rounds.  Filbert was sweating and hoarse when it was all over.  Anja, one of the women from Denmark, was on one side of Filbert and she couldn’t believe he could yell that loud, but then, she's never seen him at a basketball game.   We all had a lot of fun, that’s for sure.

The Quest