I woke this morning to clearing clouds on the waves, the slow shifting of the boat, and peaceful quiet. I could hear the soft thrum of the engines, far below us. We had arranged for room service to bring us breakfast (more luxury!) at 9:30, but it was not even 8 a.m. yet, so I called to expedite it. I had my first shower on the boat that morning. It was rather odd to feel the floor rocking slowly beneath me as the water fell; luckily, there were hand rails in case things got more violent.

After breakfast, Mom went walking about the boat, and I accompanied Nicole up to a top desk so she could find a deck chair to sun in. This kind of thing is almost painfully boring for me, so I got her situated and then wandered around with my camera.

This is not really a panoramic shot, but once I saw all of the pictures together, I realized that it does give a good sense of what the boat was like, from up top. The left and right shots are both taken while facing forward, but the middle picture is looking aft. It shows the water slide and inner top deck quite nicely. I never used the slide or any of the pools -- there were more interesting things to do aboard ship, and much better swimming when we were off the boat! -- but I'm told they are filled with salt water, which makes sense when you think about it, since hauling around vast tubs of fresh water just for the pools would be silly. The orange blobs to either side of the boat are the lifeboats.

To the left is the view down our hallway. The hallways were color-coded, which helped once you were in them, but unfortunately all of the middle areas looked the same, so from the elevator there was no easy way to orient yourself. At any rate, we were in the blue hallway (where the pink rooms are. Go figure.). This picture gives you an idea of the impressive length just in one hallway of the ship.

I wandered further down into the bowels of the ship, below the lowest "guest" level, and found the crew and food storage decks. They had full floor plans posted there, which were really fascinating, since the pocket maps we'd received only featured colored blobs to mark areas on the ship, and were not very accurate.

I also got some pictures of the magnificent central lobby area, complete with the twin glass elevators and arched glass ceiling.

Inside the elevator (Mom is reflected)

Twin elevators

The great glass ceiling

By then, it was lunch time. Guests have the option of eating in the dining room at a specified time or of hanging out on the ship and just wandering into the 24-hour cafeteria to snag pizza or whatever is available, whenever. We opted for the nice lunch (which was very nice), and found the dining room almost deserted. This suited me fine, although our poor waiter (Martin) seemed very bored and kept hovering at our table. :)

Nicole and Mom decided to attend an art auction, so I tagged along. However, after about 30 minutes of the extremely loud and obnoxious auctioneer, I couldn't take it any more (crowd overstimulation) so I retreated to the cabin and fell asleep in exhaustion. I woke when they returned and accompanied Nicole up to a karaoke event. This was a new thing for me, but I was pleasantly surprised -- the quality of singing was quite high! Intimidatingly so. Nicole was actually willing to go up there and sing, and wanted me to sing with her (yikes!), but we could not agree on a song (apparently I like all the "old" songs :) ), so we didn't.

By the time we returned to our room, it was time to head up for dinner (we had the early dinner slot, 5:30 p.m.). The waiters feted Mom, as it was the day before her birthday, and we all had cake. We got lots of photos taken afterwards (this turns out to be one of the money-making gimmicks on the boat -- the pictures are taken for free, but you can only buy most of them as 8x10's (pricey!). You can get wallets and 5x7's, but not without purchasing the huge one as well.), and Mom was repeatedly mistaken as being our sister. :) The show that evening featured a rather odd flash dance show, but one part in particular made my evening: there was this fabulous theater arts couple -- probably the best I've ever seen. She just flowed from his hands to the floor and back into the air. It was beautiful.

We returned to our cabin to find this lovely swan on the bed, made out of towels. It is a very happy swan, because Nicole is feeding it candy. Apparently the towel-animal craft is an art practiced by cabin stewards in their idle hours. Or, more likely, an enforced skill that they all attend courses for; we discovered that every cabin is graced by the towel creations of its attendant stewart.