vacation Friday: Happy Birthday!

We actually slept to an almost normal time this morning: 7am. I was a bit worried about this; I expect

that we’ll start getting used to the time change just as it is time to go home. We went to one of the

downstairs restaurants today for breakfast because they had a chocolate croissant and as always it was

delicious. They also had a pretty good almond croissant, but there wasn’t quite enough marzipan in it.

The weather in the morning was foggy. There isn’t really anything for us to see besides the waters of

the Pacific ocean today though, so I guess it isn’t a big deal. We do have some blue glass as our balcony

walls, and it always makes the water look bluer than it actually is. It’s a good trick.

Do you see my birthday cake?

We did a scavenger hunt this morning. We were paired with two other people which actually worked

out really well; they knew were a lot of things were. It was also a race, which was unexpected. We tied

for the win! It ended up being a lot of fun…we all got into it, even though at the beginning we all said

that we didn’t really care about winning much.

The winners!  Our medals even say 'winner' on them.

In front of the Discovery sign

Pretending to get out of the water

A wedding proposal by the chaple

By my fish that I never saw on the monitors

We rested for a while in the room and watched a movie. We did take another walk about the boat,

stopping for some pictures and to play some mini-golf. I won! They also were missing holes 5 and 6,

which seemed rather strange.

Dinner was in a special dining room. It was a five course meal and absolutely delicious. It started out

with bread and bruschetta, followed by fried calamari, linguini carbanara, veal, and an assortment of

desserts. I also got a birthday cake and off-key song, which we elected to bring back to the room for

later. (The cake that is, not the song.) If I did it again, I’d probably ask for half portions of everything. I

still only ate about half of everything and was still completely stuffed at the end. Speaking of birthday cake, it was my 40 th birthday today! There are digital signs all over the boat keyed to the medallion thing you need to wear, so they were often saying “Happy Birthday Amanda H!” But…they were rather tricky. They only did it sometimes when I was nearby. Or they’d do it after I was waiting there for a minute due to the elevators. It was so much fun trying to find them.

Although we had plans to find a hot tub at night, we ended up reading. We were both in the middle of

good books and sometimes that’s a hard thing to put down.