At Sea - Mar 19/20, 2013

Here we are on sea day 3 of 4 before we visit the country of Jordan and the “Red-Rose City” of Petra. At the time of writing this it is about 12:30 pm and Jan is sitting pool side just finished a swim, I am sitting out of the sun so I can write this and we are listening to Larry (from Vancouver) playing his guitar on the Lido (also poolside). The weather is now slightly overcast but nice and comfortably warm. Larry has an amazing story, short version is he always was banging away at something as a kid growing up, fell eventually onto the guitar. By trade he is an ironworker and works mostly at this trade while at home (he was part of the crew that built the Surrey Memorial Hospital). He always played guitar in bands on the side some six days a week. Then tragedy struck at work where he lost his ring and pinkie finger on his left hand in an industrial accident. A few years went by where there was no hope of him being able to play guitar again... Then he was at a remote fishing lodge on Vancouver Island and one of the musicians broke a guitar string, with no music shops close by Larry was able to make the guitar work by using a different string to makeshift it to work. When mucking around with it he found that he could actually make this guitar work for him. He now has nine guitars all now fitted with this string adjustment and now he is able to play again. Hence he playing some Neil Young for us right now on this ship, he plays three to six months out of the year to get out the Vancouver dark and wet winters. I learned his story while sitting in at the Good Morning Rotterdam coffee talk show this morning. So during these sea days we relax and learn a few things by attending the various seminars and / or cooking shows. Our pictures today include some of the daily happenings on board, yesterday the singers on board did a broadway medley show, which was great because HAL has their canned shows that the cast puts on (now these are very good don’t get me wrong) but on this ship they have extra time so they are able to get a little creative and put shows together that really compliment their voices, so these extra shows are very good. There was also a magic box cooking competition going on - two teams are given six ingredients that they must use to make some incredible dish, good fun. I have also included a few ship photos, including the Atrium clock sculpture and the new retreat are at the back of the ship - on the big screen on the back they usually play concert shows, for example, Tina Turner, Bee Gees, James Taylor etc. Okay time for lunch, almost daily they have a feature menu area, two days ago was foods of the U.K., yesterday was seafood today as the pictures show they are featuring Indonesian food. A great day at sea ....