Africa 2023:
Day 18 - At Sea
Day 18 - At Sea
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Friday, October 27, 2023: Room service is here! Room service is here! We had ordered room service for 8:30 AM this morning. Debbie ordered the European cold breakfast plate, which was sliced ham, Gouda cheese, herring, beets, and a boiled egg served with lettuce, tomato, cucumber, and bread. Tom ordered the All-American breakfast again, which was two eggs (scrambled), hash browns, bacon, and sausage. |
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Our wake was especially pretty today. It's like someone was following behind with a paintbrush. |
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Lunch in the Lido was Greek specialties, and it seemed like everyone was lining up to get some. We snuck around to the dessert end of the station where there was no line and picked up some Greek bread pudding and two pieces of baklava before ... |
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... heading to the Distant Lands section to get something from the Taste of the Philippines. |
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We both got a bowl with noodles, the supreme chicken adobo, and the stir fried calamari, and Tom also got some of the beef steak Tagalog. After we finished our meal, we went back to the station with Greek food for some more baklava, but they were out. When Tom went back up to the Lido an hour later, there wasn't any then either, and they had gone so far as to remove the stand that it was on. We were very thankful that we had each gotten one piece when it was available. |
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Our minifigs were enjoying a relaxing day at sea working on their laptops. |
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After dinner in the Lido, Debbie spotted a dragonfly fluttering around on the balcony, ... |
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... and eventually managed to get this closeup of it. We were more than a hundred miles from land. Where did it come from? |
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We sat in the chairs on our balcony while the sun went down, ... |
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... eventually lighting up the low clouds in a brilliant display of orange. |
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At 7:00 PM, our captain came over the PA to announce that due to the current situation in the Middle East, they had been advised by the Dutch government to avoid the Gulf of Aqaba entirely, and that our port calls to Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, and Aqaba, Jordan, had been canceled. Instead, we would be sailing directly to Safaga, Egypt, after transiting the Suez Canal, and that they were adding a new port call in Salalah, Oman. We learned a short time later that a missile, likely fired by Houthi rebels in Yemen, had landed in the resort town of Taba, Egypt, right on the southern border between Egypt and Israel and less than ten kilometers from where we would have been docked in Aqaba. Yikes. |
Copyright © Deborah Schilling/Thomas Bundy