January 28th, 2024

We are in the middle of our 5 sea days to get to New Zealand. It has been pretty calm but we have had lots of swells which makes the boat sway back and forth. The weather is getting cooler and today the high is 77 but lots of clouds and rain. They have tried to do star gazing 3 times now and all 3 times they have canceled due to lots of clouds. We did do a deck party a couple of nights ago and they opened the lid of the pool and the band played good music and lots of people were up dancing. We watched from deck 8 and the skies were pretty clear then.

The deck party

The moon off the back of the ship.

We are back on our sea day routine of Kathy at the gym in the morning, me at Mah Jongg and then lunch with everyone in the buffet and afternoons for reading and napping or watching something on the iPad. Today we have football to watch. I am also trying to walk in the afternoon.

Tomorrow is when we cross the international date line so we believe that the Daily, the paper they put in your room every night, will go straight to the 30th and the 29th will not exist. This is throwing a lot of people off. We have heard people making dinner plans for the 29th and not sure how that is going to work. It will be fun to see.

On the 21/22 world cruise Viking had these amazing Caramel Pecan cookies that you could get in the buffet or in the Living Room. On this cruise it is chocolate chip, oatmeal and double chocolate. In a way it is good that they don’t have the wonderful cookies because we don’t need them. We did mention to Casper, the restaurant manager, that we missed them and wondered where they were and he said he would check into it. When we were in Papeete we got a visit from room service with a little basket of cookies. The funny thing is that when we asked about the cookies Michael and Kathy were there and talking about them also but we were the only ones to get the basket to our room. We tried them and they were crunchy where the caramel pecan cookies were soft and the new cookies also had a very chemical after taste. When a few of the staff checked with us at the buffet we gave them honest feedback but thanked them for the efforts. They said they would try again and sure enough we got another delivery to our room yesterday. Still not the same as what we had on 21/22 but the second attempt was definitely better and Michael & Kathy got them also.

Viking going above and beyond

We are now 6 hours behind Eastern standard time and 2 more days at sea to go before our first stop in Bay of Islands New Zealand.