February 20, 2022. 82°F/28°C

#myvikingstory

Good grief! The clocks moved ahead ANOTHER hour last night! This trip is prematurely aging me, plus 2 time shifts in 3 days had me feeling out of sync this morning for the first time. A fellow passenger described it as “gradual jet lag”.

I completely missed breakfast hours; instead I took a latte into the theatre at 11:00 for (Ret.) Wing Commander Bill Simpson’s 45 minute talk on The History of Navigation. He entertainingly covered 5000 years from the Chinese and Phoenicians through to the space shuttle in less than an hour! No pictures, since my iPad didn’t charge overnight. It was out of sync too I guess.

Since I was so late getting going, it was lunch for breakfast. The feature today in the World Café was their take on a steakhouse wedge salad with a generous portion of ribeye. Why not?

At 2:00 magician Greg Moreland held another simple magic class. I attended less to learn new tricks than just to listen to him – he’s SOOO funny! Plus, who can ever get enough of watching a grown man make things disappear up his nose? (He says next lesson he’ll teach us to make things disappear up our noses too!)

Today he taught us his two favourite card tricks: The Mississippi Shuffle (or Dealing to the Kings), and Dealing to the Aces.

We’re “enjoying” another day of virtually no wifi – not even email seems to be coming through, and our formerly reliable Messenger is taking hours to “send”. I’m going to have quite a backlog of blog posts and correspondence once the necessary amplifier repairs have been done to the ship in Cádiz, although one post managed to sneak through today during the few minutes we were in satellite range.

Before dinner, I took in an interesting lecture entitled “Going Out With A Bang”, about British colonial governors who were assassinated. Presenter Nigel Cox apologized for the lighthearted title for a serious subject, because “not all of them were shot – some were stabbed.” Yes, that’s why the title was inappropriate.

Ted’s stomach has been feeling less than ready for anything adventurous for a day or two, so it made sense to hit the buffet in the World Café tonight so that he could choose to eat as plainly as possible – and I could have sushi!

Viking presented yet another guest entertainer tonight, which means that 5 different acts were brought on board in Montevideo to supplement our own terrific entertainment team during this long stretch of sea days. Tonight, Boston native Carl Wishneusky (now there’s a spelling I’ve never encountered before!) presented “The American Songbook, Redefined”, in which he proposed modern additions to the traditional American Songbook, which currently spans only about 1920 to the end of the 50’s. But first, he played selections from the traditional songbook, songs written by Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, and Cole Porter, and songs crooned by Frank Sinatra. His suggestions for a next chapter? How about Great Balls of Fire, Johnny B Goode, or American Pie? Carl did fabulous versions of all of them, but what continues to impress us are the members of our own Viking Band, who learned backup to the entire show in just 45 minutes and rocked out stellar performances.

NOTE: Some blog posts may appear in non-numerical order due to the effect of changing time zones.