Day 42 - at sea and a quiet day July 5th

The day was mainly quiet as Paula was far from well, with a return of the cough, closed eyes and generally not a happy bunny.  With Paula feeling so unwell, we tried to cancel our tour tickets for Naples tomorrow, but we were too late for a refund – unless they could on-sell them.  She was feeling pretty low but after a bowl of porridge and another sleep, she did surface later in the day, but we both missed the “Crazy Cruiser’s” lunch.  One of the problems of a good cruise ship is that often, you have to make choices as to “what are we going to miss?”, rather than, “what are we going to do?” so at 11:45am, it was either meet for lunch (without Paula) or, go to an informal meet of motorsport enthusiasts.

Seems that not too many got the message but those who were there ranged from a CAMS (Australian motorsport) official, to several ex-rally drivers and navigators and the ex-racer, now proud father of a single sesat5er team owner in Europe.

Paula and I staggered up to the outside grill bar, trying to keep away from the air-conditioning as much as possible.

After the afternoon quiz (14/20...) we nipped back to the buffet for a nice bowl of cream of cauliflower soup, to tide us over until dinner.

Although a couple of days early, we did celebrate Garry’s birthday, though as the ship has run out of champagne (and Sav Blanc... – would you believe it?) we toasted him with whatever was in our respective glasses.  In our case, it was water!

The evening shows were either a Rock ‘n Roll party in the Vista or singer Paul Emmanuel in the theatre. Neither really appealed, though we did poke our heads in the door, so we joined the large audience for Alan & Alana’s quiz, but were a round or two too late to enter.  During the evening, the ship passed between Sicily & Southern Italy and the lights on both coasts made it an attractive but slow cruise, as once again, the mechanical gremlins had struck, and they were working on an engine for about three hours.

As soon as the quiz had finished, most disappeared so we grabbed a hot chocolate each and just relaxed before heading for bed about 11:45pm.  Just as a trial, we opted to leave the ranch slider open all night as we can’t turn the air conditioning off.

Best part of the day, was a message from the tour desk, who had managed to off load our tickets.

Naples tomorrow, but depending on how we feel, will depend on what we do.  We are arriving (and leaving ) an hour later – 8am to 8 pm.