The day before Barbados

We've been a bit quiet lately, nothing major to report, but we do enjoy reading your comments, and KA, you'll be pleased to hear we are working on that invite still!  We're getting to know some of the ships company, we spent a couple of hours in the evening with one of the entertainment officers and we actually met our Captain "Ian" last night in the lift.  We only had a few seconds to chat (a true elevator pitch!) but the seed is sown!  It's also quite interesting to hear about some of the inner workings of the ship and the crew.  We know for example that there is an official position of ships carpenter, that we took on quite a lot of water during our rough seas and that it may still lead to problems in port.  We'll let you know if we notice anything un-toward.  And rather darker, we know that the ships morgue has space for 5, and that on the last cruise, sadly, only 2 were still available when they docked in Southampton.  This really is a floating town, with similar ups and downs (no pun intended) of life in a land based community.

We stumbled upon a meteor shower last night too.  Not sure if it's visible from the UK, we hadn't read anything about it, but happened to be outside on our own around midnight (still very warm) and saw 5/6 shooting stars in the course of half an hour, pretty special.  It gave us another idea for a class on star gazing.  As some of you will know, we were really looking forward to the darkness of being in the middle of the ocean to allow us to see more stars, but it seems even the ships own lights are spoiling that a little, we need to find a better spot on a high deck.

We're very much looking forward to getting to Barbados tomorrow morning, 8 straight days at sea has seemed like a long time, and you can tell everyone is getting a little bit itchy!  It is starting to feel like a holiday now, as the temperature was 27C today, and both pools are in use and the open decks looking like rocky outcrops on a wildlife programme!

Another hour back tonight, so we'll be GMT -4 by the time we reach Barbados.  No adverse effects felt yet from the slow time changes, it's just innate laziness keeping us in bed until 10am!