MV Explorer of the Seas

The ship was heading back West towards Miami on its second long leg at sea. Dan started our second sea day with a run - the first time the running track had been open whilst at see in the voyage so far. By this stage of the trip we had figured out that some sessions were being streamed on the in-room TVs, so we watched William Shatner’s second show over the coffee Dan collected on the way back from running. We headed out around 11:00 for “The Many Face of…” where Casey Biggs, Vaughn Armstrong and Steve Rankin performed songs and told stories in the main dining room, including how Casey adlibbed Damar's dying words.

We spent the next 90minutes or so on the ‘Search for Spock’ scavenger hunt all around the ship; once we got the hang of it the clues were falling into place at a steady pace. We also stopped off in the museum at the foreword end of deck 5; we thought there might be an item in there, but its (perhaps unsurprisingly) harder to get Dan out of a room full of cool Star Trek stuff than getting him into one. Everything went pretty smoothly until we had just one Spock left to find - we were sure it was in the Casino, and we even asked a dealer questions about card games to make sure we had properly understood the cryptic clue but it took about half an hour to physically find it. The hunt was great fun, although it might have been better on the first sea day (as a way of getting to know the ship) and it would have been really nice if the hardest to find Spock wasn’t in the room full of smokers.

The scavenger hunt complete, we went to get our photograph taken with Robert Picardo, he was very pleasant (Dan pitched him the idea of putting on the Tempest on the next cruise). At lunch there was were finally some good vegetable available, and shortly after we tucked in Max Grodenchnick and his family sat down at the next table. We finished out the rest of the afternoon watching more Voyager on the in-room TV.Read more