Sunday, September 27, 2009

This morning we started out our day going to church. It was a nice surprise to find out that there were Latter-Day Saints onboard the ship and that one couple had organized for us to meet. The interesting thing was that they couldn’t put in the Princess Patter (daily information regarding what was going on on the ship leaflet) that we were having a church service, so it was put down that it was a ‘Get together for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints’ - that way it didn’t offend anyone onboard. They had had a problem with another faith spouting off about other faiths and so didn’t even want to put anything in the Patter so this was their compromise. We weren’t sure if it was a church service, but we went dressed for it anyway. It was a shortened version (just one talk), but it was really nice to attend it and Mike was even able to bless the sacrament. The fellow who organized the meeting gave a talk on the Plan of Salvation. We are going to meet each Sunday so that will be great not to have to miss any meetings while we are on our cruise. There were about 15 people who attended today’s meeting.

At 11am we went to the continuing lecture on “The Only Way to Cross” talking about ocean liners that crossed the North Atlantic. This one focused on the Normandie ocean liner. As usual, Mr. Maxtone-Graham was interesting and the hour went by so fast - I said to Mike that it’s hard to believe how fast the time goes - the speaker just makes it that way with his in-depth knowledge of the subject. We are really looking forward to his next lecture which is in three days (after we visit Hilo and Lahaina, Hawaii).

The rest of the day was truly a ‘day of rest’. After lunch, we went to our cabin and had our ‘daily nap’ - the bed is a king size and it’s so comfortable as is the bedding. We are finding it so easy to relax and fall asleep in our cabin. After our nap, we went up on deck and relaxed on a deck chair and read our book for the cruise book club. I keep telling Mike who I think did it and we’ll see what happens when we get to the end of the book.

After supper, we went to the show which was a comedy put on by two entertainers. The first was a ventriloquist, Kevin Johnson. We had seen him earlier in the cruise and thought he was a good ventriloquist but not that funny. This show was actually more funny than the previous show. The second half of the show was the comedy of Jim McDonald. We had talked to people who had seen him earlier in the cruise and they said he was really funny. Well, they were right about that. We just about peed our pants as we listened and laughed along with him - it was great to be able to enjoy good CLEAN comedy. At the end of the show, he did a slide show and commented along with the slides - it, too, was really funny and we quite enjoyed his show. We were sorry that we didn’t see his earlier show.

After the show, we stayed in the Princess Theatre to see the movie “The Soloist”. Although the premise was interesting and the acting was good, it was a bit boring for me and so I asked Mike whether he wanted to stay for the end or not (we had watched it for about an hour at this point) and he was okay with leaving so we went back to our cabin to read for a bit before falling asleep.

Comedian Jim McDonald.