Through the Panama Canal -- Day 2

Day 2 -- At sea. 80°, mostly sunny. Turning cloudy mid-afternoon

I woke up pretty early for a couple of reasons. Our bed was not the most comfortable and I hated the pillows. Additionally, there was a lot of noise in the night. The ship was at full speed, with a lot of motion, and everything was creaking or rattling or squeaking. The motion was so noticeable that the crew had put out motion-sickness bags in the stairwell lobbies. Personally, I didn't think it was that bad at all. I could feel the motion, but I was never uncomfortable.

Kath and I took advantage of the walking/jogging path on Deck 12. We did this every day of the cruise, I think. The track is a little odd because it only covers half of the deck, but lots of people used it. For the first 3 days of the cruise, the ship was doing 20+ knots and we had winds of over 30 knots. So you can imagine what the wind felt like as we walked around on deck. A lot of times when I lifted my foot to take a step, the wind would blow the back leg into my other leg. So it was real work to do laps!

We had a late breakfast at Windjammer Café, which is the buffet restaurant. I'm going to try not to keep repeating myself, but I was not impressed with the buffet offerings. They had the usual stuff, and it was ok. But it just felt pretty average to me. Somehow, I took no pictures in the Windjammer! 

Because of the late breakfast, I skipped lunch and went to the casino for a poker tournament. However, when I got there, it had already sold out  To make it worse, I was told that there would be one other tournament on this sailing. (Only two poker events on a 14 night itinerary???) So I purchased my entry for the next tournament. When I got back to my room, I realized that the game was scheduled for the day that we were going through the Panama Canal. WHAT?? Who's going to sit in the casino while we go through the Canal??? Terrible planning. To make a long story short, they didn't get enough players for that event, so it was rescheduled, thankfully.

Anyway, here are a few pics of the casino.

While I was at the casino, Kath went to one of the shops and bought shampoo for me and hand lotion for herself. Let me just say that unless you are traveling in a suite -- bring your own toiletries. In the shower, is a single dispenser of a shampoo/body wash combo. It is terrible as a body wash and it's worse as a shampoo. The suites all have separate dispensers for soap, shampoo, and hair conditioner. But what you get in the non-suites is horrible.

For dinner, we went to the specialty restaurant Samba. This is a Brazilian-style steakhouse. Appetizers are on a buffet, but then waiters bring 7 or 8 cuts of meat to your table on skewers. There were sides of rice/beans, yucca fries, and fried plantains that were served family-style. The food was very good. I enjoyed the restaurant very much. The service was just ok, but they kept the meats coming. There were two minor drawbacks. First, you can only access the restaurant from the outside deck. So you HAVE to walk outside to get to dinner. As I already mentioned, winds on deck reached about 45 knots. So we got all dressed up and then got blown around by the wind before we could sit down. (They told us that in heavy rain, they allow people to come in through a crew-only passageway.) The second drawback is that shipboard announcements about upcoming activities were piped into the restaurant. So we're in this upscale setting that we've paid extra for, and we have to stop our conversation to hear about bingo and karaoke. That took away from any special feeling for the evening.

But even with those two minor inconveniences, I really enjoyed this meal. I would definitely recommend giving it a try if you ever sail on the Radiance.

As a palate-cleanser, they served a grilled pineapple that was pretty amazing. It was not at all what I expected. It was caramelized, which made it really unique in my experience. I loved it.

After dinner, the evening show in the main theater was entitled "Piano Man". We thought this was going to be a Billy Joel tribute, or maybe more generally a tribute to piano-playing pop artists. And in a way, it was. They used Billy Joel and Elton John songs, but they tried to build a dance show around the songs. So there was a kind of story about a young couple, and every song was a big dance number. If you've ever read my trip reports before, you know that this is just not my cup of tea. I didn't like it, but I didn't think it was terrible. Surprisingly (to me, anyway), Kathryn hated it. She did not enjoy the singing performances at all. I thought they were fine, definitely talented, but it's not the kind of show that I wanted to see.

After the show, all four of us wandered through the casino so my father-in-law could play a few slots. (A silly tradition on a dress-up night.) But then I headed back to the room, because I was very tired from my lack of sleep the previous night. The funny thing about going to bed early was that the ship's TV was running the Pixar movie Ratatouille, which was a fun surprise. The bigger surprise was that it was voiced in Spanish! So we watched about 45 minutes of it, doing the dialogue in English while trying to figure out how close the Spanish was to what we were used to.