Day 12 - Sun 21Apr2024 - At Sea to Papeete - Day 2

 After a fairly short sleep of around 6 hours, we woke up around 7am in order to attend the interdenominational Sunday service which was held in the Vista Lounge.  It was very well attended with over 100 in attendance.  Ron Schaefer gave a message on the beatitudes found in Matthew's gospel, chapter 5.  It was a very good sermon with some keen insight into the progressive nature of the beatitudes.  This service was followed immediately by the regular Bible study in the 14th Floor meeting room.  About 20 of us gathered and Ron shared a bit of his personal life and what his writing style is.  Another lady shared a very personal testimony of her faith journey.  


The morning continued with Sue Beard's destination lecture on Polynesia and we enjoyed splitting a pizza in Alfredo's for lunch.  During this time we crossed over the international dateline.  



After lunch Franz presented his Enrichment lecture on "The Strange Last Voyage of Frank Crowhurst" which was about an Englishman, Frank Crowhurst, who disappeared during a solo round the world sailboat race.  It was pretty chilling and there's a movie account of it available on Amazon called "Deep Water".  Since life is short, we indulged in another premium dessert mid afternoon before dinner.  It was decadent and oh so yummy.

After dinner, we attended the two sets of Patrick McMahon, an Australian Country/Western & folk song singer in the Princess Theater.  He's really good and we've seen him multiple times over the past 10 years on Holland America ships.  Chatting with him after his second set, he said that he just got off of the Volendam on its Papeete to San Diego run.  If you have the opportunity to see him, please take it.

In between the two music sets, we attended the YES/NO game show.  The show is very simple.  The contestant just has to have a 3 minute interview with either Olivia, the Cruise Director or Tommy, her assistant and not say the word Yes or the word NO.  I lasted just short of 3 minutes and won a water bottle which was what I wanted.  The top prize is a bottle of wine.  It was fun and my goal was to beat my wife's record of 2 seconds.  It was fun and it's probably our favorite game show on the cruise.


It was a laundry night so we took care of that in the laundromat which is just down the hall from our stateroom.  It costs $3 to wash and $3 to dry.  We bring our own detergent in the form of a sheet impregnated with detergent.  As a result of this we didn't get to bed until after midnight which will make for another short night as tomorrow we are repeating today.  Fortunately we are not losing another hour of sleep due to a clock change.  We'll see how observing today again tomorrow and what confusion that might bring,  We have some premonition that there will be confusion as the printed Princess Patter does not correspond to the electronic version of the schedule found on the Princess APP.  Are you confused yet?

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