on my way home now

October 19, 2013: Ponta Delgada
It feels strange now having two sea days, that’s the most we had in one cruise all season, and now we have two in a row. 7 is going to come as a shock now after that. I’d nearly forgotten what a sea day was like! Anyway, it was a pretty long two sea days; I was on teens for most of the time (which means working on a puzzle and watching movies/Doctor Who and watching them play video games), but the two sessions I had with the kids was a bit crazy. One of them I ended up having everyone show up, and we couldn’t really do the activities because the younger kids and older kids couldn’t get on the same level to do it, the older ones were very impatient with the littles, so the little ones I got to play Legos and the older ones played the game. The next session was an afternoon one, one kid showed up right at 1, and he was the only one until 2:30 when his mom picked him up, she wasn’t the happiest to find out none of the other kids had come, but I had told her when she dropped him off that most afternoons are quiet since swimming is an option. As soon as he left, one other kid came, this is the kid that memorizes the schedule and repeats it to us, then complains when we do what’s on the schedule. He somehow didn’t understand that “ice cream cool down” in the Lido meant we were going to eat ice cream; he thought we would make it. Strange thought process. So, he was the only one for the second hour and half. I started to color a new picture (Bambi this time) while he decorated his Body Tracing once we got back from ice cream. The teens have been good, they’re pretty relaxed, most of what we do when we’re on Loft duty now is work on the puzzle and talk with them when they decide to take a break from their video games. Not bad at all. I’ve made quite a good bit of progress on the puzzle because of afternoons in the Loft.

Last night the crew were invited to the tech run of one of the shows, Garage Band after work. This is one of my favorite shows, cheesy but it involves a lot of talent by the dancers, singers, and techies. The cast and HAL Cats definitely made it interesting for us. They were goofing off and all of us were loving it, laughing hysterically through most of the show. It was a lot of fun, nice to have something different to do at night after work!
Today, we arrived a bit early, and yet breakfast was still really crowded for some reason, odd because the last few days I’ve gone at the exact same time and it’s been rather quiet in the Lido. After breakfast, I hung out with Ryan in Club HAL for a bit then went down to the room to change and wait on Megan’s drill to be over so we could get off. Turns out that this is a rather boring port. If it was warmer, we could’ve gone swimming, but it was cool so we wandered around town twice, figured out there was nothing to do, so spent the rest of our euros on souvenirs and food and got wifi. There was almost less to do than in Sydney on the Canada/New England run. We came back to the ship for Ryan and the three of us wandered a bit more around town, saving up our last moments on land before the upcoming 7 days at sea (somewhat rough seas too if the last two days are any indication).
I had the teens night session, one of them was there at first and he was content to play video games while I puzzled, then Megan got off work in the kids room and we watched Doctor Who the rest of the night. Easy night, the teens actually all left rather early for curfew which was kind of nice though a bit strange.