At sea again

9/4 – a day at sea………oops, a bit of a glitch with the time zones. Pete set the alarm for 7.15, planning to have breakfast and go to the history talk at 9.30. BUT his phone decided to be extra-clever and reset itself to Spanish time when we passed by the northern part of Spain so we were up extra early on our second ‘lazy’ day at sea. No trouble making it to the talk at 9.30 about the Bayeux Tapestry with Dr Fenella Bazin who is the ship’s resident historian, and to her second talk at 2.30 about how four nations became the United Kingdom. Pete also went to one in-between about Stonehenge, full house at the theatre he said – and the conclusion is, it wasn’t the druids!

We had an interesting chat to Dr Fenella and her husband Michael later in the café, a lovely couple well into their 80’s I’d say. She has been the historian since 2015 when Viking first started out so they’ve sailed all over. She comes from the Isle of Man.

Regarding the Bayeux tapestry, of course it depicts Vikings in it’s story and all of the Viking cruise ships have large panels taken from the tapestry in each stairwell, probably five times life-size. Dr Fenella pointed out that the colours around the ship are taken from the tapestry – the blues, browns, ochre etc – and some of the patterns echo the tapestry as well.

Looking again at the demographics on the ship, a week on (and where has that time gone?), we’ve concluded that we haven’t seen one single dark face amongst the passengers, there’s a smattering of Asian passengers but the demographic is overwhelmingly white, grey-haired, and probably over 75, and there’s a bit of botox employed in some of the faces. We’d say maybe a dozen under about 30 on the ship, and possibly just 10% under 50. As far as the crew goes, they come from everywhere. So far we know of: UK, USA, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Peru, India, Vietnam, Thailand, Ukraine, Russia, Argentina, Azerbaijan, China …………and it’s too late to think of any of the others we’ve come across. A real rainbow nation looking after us.

Each night the show kicks off with this song being played really loudly, it’s very catchy, I had to google it – have a listen (skip the ads at the start). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIZdjT1472Y.

Tonight it was the resident band and four singers/dancers with a round-up of popular songs from the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s, definitely singing along to those ones.

As I upload this the ship tracker tells us we're west of Brittany and the island of Ushant. Tomorrow we hit the UK and expect wet weather for two days, let’s see what happens.Read more