Sunday, October 15, 2023, at Sea, Zuiderdam Grand Africa cruise

No pictures today!

Jeff’s alarm went off at 7:30 and he actually got up and went to the gym … and was back before I got out of bed at 8:30. It looked like it had brightened up outside by then so I put on my walking shoes, I grabbed my ear pods and walked on deck 10. I was going to walk 10 laps. At 5 laps I had 2200 steps. Somewhere between laps 6 and 9 I lost track. I checked my step count and it was 4900 so I knew that I had done all my laps. Then I checked my time and I was at 54 minutes, so I did a couple more laps to make it a full hour. When I got back to the room I was soaked and needed a shower. Jeff was ready for breakfast and afraid the line shut down at 10, I thought it was 10:30, but I sent him down to breakfast on his own. When I made it to breakfast, I was surprised that I actually found him! The line was still open so I grabbed my egg and bacon. After breakfast we went out to the back pool deck and Jeff stayed until his lecture started at 11.

While I was taking a shower the captain came on the intercom system and said that a pipe had broke in the engine room and the common are toilets and decks 1, 2 & 3 would be without water for up to an hour and a half.  It was fixed right on time!

Jeff said Fletcher’s talk today was on Chaos theory.  And here’s Jeff:  Andy Fletchers lecture today was an introduction to Chaos Theory for Dummy’s (my words, not his).  The phrase “Butterfly Effect” kept coming up in the lecture.  It does not mean that EVERY time a butterfly flaps its wings a world altering event takes place.  It means that occasionally things line up in just the right way that only a small event can instigate devastating consequences.  One example he gave was a lightening bolt hitting a tree in Ohio many years ago.  A limb from that tree fell onto a power line causing a local disruption which was not noted at the power station because they were using a slower and older computer systems.  They were looking at a screen that showed everything was normal while the screen next to it was slowly updating showing the outage.  The event began to cascade causing the blackout of power in northern Ohio, into Canada, New York State and the Eastern Seaboard.  Wow.

The captain’s briefing at noon said we have traveled 2192 so far and 1303 to first stop at a speed of 19.7 knots. We are 988 miles away from the nearest land, which is Cape Verde. It was 79 degrees and the bad news was we were going to change the clocks forward AGAIN tonight! He usually gives us sunset and sunrise times. Today he just said sunrise was going to be really late! This afternoon we will start heading in a more northerly direction.

Dinner was uneventful, followed by Geography trivia where we scored 16/20, which is our best yet! After that we watched Sid Davis, comedian. His best joke punch line wasn’t his …. He talked about how he would go to a baseball game with his dad and they would always have to leave early to “beat the traffic.”  He then asked the crowd if anyone was like his dad and the lady in front of us replied enthusiastically … YES! And then the comedian asked if anyone LIVED WITH someone like that and her husband loudly proclaimed YUP!

We followed that by a stop at our usual haunt … Rolling Stone … where they had a “Game Night” show called “guess your identity”. That involves 3 crew members who have someone else’s identity (famous or not) on the screen behind them. They ask the crowd questions that can be responded to with a yes or no and they attempt to be the first one to guess who they are. (Am I a male? Am I an actor?) It was mildly amusing but the best part was one of the female crew members participating in the game looked VERY familiar. I asked the cruise director when he walked by if she was on the South Pacific cruise and he said no, that was Amanda, and she is now a stewardess. Here’s the AHA moment … I just now realized that Amanda told us on the South Pacific cruise that she was a twin! Stay tuned …. We’ll verify as soon as we see her doppelganger again.

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