2000 miles from home, by Katie

I thought it is time for me to put together a few English thoughts together and share with you the beauty of what is going on here, now probably about 2000 nautical miles away from the cost of England. I can’t believe it is already day 6 of our voyage!

We are sitting on one of the top decks of this massive ship, drinking a pint of Stella, being in the middle of Atlantic, you can look as much and as far as you like, and all you would see would be this wonderful, calming and playful gentle waves, moving our Arcadia gently but fast and more and more toward the west. We are currently constantly doing about 22 -23 knots, which compares to about  25mph.  Weather has massively improved also temperature-wise and today we woke up to 20 degrees Celsius, so t-shirts and shorts is already definitely very appropriate wear here during the day.

I am quite pleased that not many people are as brave as me and not willing to try the pool. It is indeed heated and very warm and pleasant to swim up and down. However, when I was asked by a few random people what is the water like, I just said, that it might feel a bit cold to some ;-), as of course you don’t want to encourage all the fellow passengers to be using our Aquarius pool!! No way, if they don’t want to try themselves, I will keep the pool to us. Well, Chris is not so keen on having a swim, maybe he prefers to wait for next 3 days, when we will finally get to our first port, to Barbados! We are going to join a catamaran and go snorkeling over the coral reef and then at the second location we should be able to swim with turtles!

 I can’t wait to have a proper taste of the nice warm sea. You see, I would already have an additional business idea what attraction to add to the P&O cruises, especially to our one on Arcadia. They should have small motorized boats that would take people on tours, maybe doing a bit of snorkeling or dolphin watching during the day. The only down side is that it would have to go quite fast, certainly faster then 22 knots, so it can catch up with the ship again. Not sure if I have a proper business structure to sell it to the management of the P&O.

During our lunch time today, there have been already a few business ideas, while we were sharing our lunch with our dinner-table-mates/new friends Trevor and Jean. We were coming up with ideas for the ship entertainment. One was they should try to form a band out of passengers as there is definitely good number of musicians on board. Chris could play drums, of course. The other idea was to do Arcadia’s Dragon’s Den. As there are surely a few rich people who don’t know what to do with their money, they can volunteer and have some young entrepreneur-minded people (like usJ ) present them their business ideas and they could invest in their business. There is a suggesting box at the reception – and funnily enough Chris just asked me as I was writing this, where the suggestion box was so he must be blooming with ideas! – so it would be quite easy to make this happen. Well we should not forget we are on holiday and leave the business aside a bit, but looks like we can’t just help ourselves.

It turned out that Trevor works as a self-employed consultant where he advises people who want to start their own business and leads them on their entrepreneur’s path. I think we could not have met better person and share our dinner table with! We just both had an initial chat with him and Jean, his wife, during the lunchtime and looks like he is definitely a good person to talk to about our ideas we have in our heads. Trevor’s very first and a bit unofficial advice is if you starting our own business definitely stick to what you know. Also try to choose a business where you need to use as little money as possible, rent no premises and don’t hold too much stock. Not something we did not already know, but it is really nice to get blessing and nods of understanding from someone who know what is he talking about. So hopefully, Trevor, you don’t mind the shop talk while on holiday, and we look forward to talking to you in the due course / cruise J.

I also wanted to mention that we spend today 2 full hours today learning cha-cha-cha. It was very good and I think we did quite well for beginners. It is also much better then going to gym, because after each lesson you really sweat like a little piggy, so dancing is fun and fantastic work outJ.  I really hope Chris is enjoying it as much as I am. I must tell you something about Chris, I need to make sure some other single ladies don’t steal him and believe me there are some takers - he is a very good dancer and his hips movements - you see in Cuban dances you need to use your hips a lot – are just getting better and better, so who knows what he will be capable of by the end of our adventure!!

We are both very pleased that you enjoy reading our blog and thank you for your support and comments. With our next invention – the TeleportEngland, Scotland and the Czech Republic. Lots of love from Katie! xxx