Day 8

Sea Days, Trivia & Formal Night 🚢🍹

We woke moderately late for us—around 7am—and headed upstairs for breakfast shortly afterwards. Today was our first full sea day, as we don’t arrive into Cabo San Lucas until tomorrow afternoon.

Thankfully, breakfast was nowhere near as chaotic as embarkation day. The dining room atmosphere was much calmer, which made the whole experience considerably more enjoyable.

One thing we have noticed though is that the food options onboard aren’t quite as good as on some of our previous cruises. The biggest issue is that with Ted being diabetic and myself being vegetarian, we often need to ask staff whether meals are low sugar or vegetarian because the descriptions usually don’t make it very clear. Other cruise lines we’ve travelled on have generally labelled those options much better.

Since today was meant to be more of a relaxing day, we headed upstairs to the Cosmopolitan Club on Deck 14, which has great views over the pool deck and is usually a quieter part of the ship.

As it turned out, some of the people we’d met the night before had exactly the same idea. Ben and Brett were already there when we arrived, and Tyler joined us later on.

When the cruise director made an announcement over the PA about the day’s activities, I decided to give Morning Trivia a try, and Ben and Brett decided to come along too.

We headed down to the Schooner Bar on Deck 4 and joined a surprisingly competitive trivia session involving 20 questions. Important topics included things like how many stars are on the New Zealand flag and how many countries begin with the letter L.

We weren’t exactly confident afterwards when we realised we’d only answered 10 questions correctly… until we discovered we’d actually won. Apparently everyone else had done even worse. Our reward for this incredible intellectual achievement was a complimentary pen each.

Since it still wasn’t lunchtime, I thought I’d try going to the gym. When I first checked upstairs, it didn’t look too busy, so I went back to the room to change and grab water. Somehow, in the five minutes it took me to do that, half the ship appeared to have had exactly the same idea.

Suddenly every bench, dumbbell, and machine was occupied. To make things even more frustrating, there were also people just standing around inside the gym seemingly observing everyone else work out while blocking access to equipment. Despite the chaos, I still managed to put together some kind of workout.

Fortunately, my drinks package includes smoothies, so afterwards I rewarded myself with a “Muscle Builder” smoothie. Whether it actually builds muscle remains to be seen.

Lunch brought us back to the Windjammer Marketplace for another round of what can only really be described as feeding time at the zoo. Honestly, I’m hoping we end up eating more meals in the formal dining room during the cruise because it’s significantly calmer and the meals feel much more balanced.

Since the ship feels noticeably busier than most cruises we’ve done before, we spent the afternoon relaxing in the cabin instead. I showered, read for a while, and generally took it easy while Ted watched the tennis.

Tonight was formal night onboard, so after dinner we headed back to the cabin and put on our Sunday best before going out for drinks.

Interestingly, only a fairly small percentage of passengers seemed to fully embrace the formal theme, although it was genuinely cute seeing some of the younger kids dressed up in little suits and dresses. There was also a 70s-themed event happening elsewhere onboard, and some of the outfits people had put together were very… groovy.

We ended up back at The Bamboo Room and caught up again with several of the people we’d met the previous night. Before that though, we met a Texan man named Joe who seemed far more interested in socialising with the gays than spending time with his wife 🤔

Throughout the evening we also met a couple from Sydney along with several other passengers before Kenny decided everyone with a drinks package should participate in rainbow shots.

As we don’t arrive into Cabo until around midday tomorrow, we didn’t feel too guilty staying out until around 12:30am—which definitely counts as a late night for us these days.Read more