Written by Kim
We enjoyed our last night of trivia with our new Aussie friends, Ben & Courtney. Each night we did pre dinner trivia in the Music Hall and then in the pub. We won a few times and they were excited because they said they never win when alone. It is bittersweet meeting friends that live on the other side of the world because we may never see them again. They are a bit younger than us but we got on well. They are newlyweds from New Castle and were enjoying their honeymoon as they got married the Friday before the cruise. We hope they will join us sometime in the future for a Caribbean cruise or visit to the US. We’re not sure if we will be back in Sydney anytime soon because our bucket list of other places to visit is quite long.
During our cruise we got to see the Aurora Australis, or Southern Lights, the counterpart to the Northern Lights on the same night as many of our friends were posting about aurora borealis. How cool – it wasn’t terribly vibrant but here’s what we saw. It was cold and windy on the deck
So cool….
We had a few food highlights I didn’t share in other posts. We tried Wonderland again. We had done it many years ago but since we had the unlimited Specialty restaurant package we tried it again. That will likely be our last try it’s a bit too weird for us.
One night we got sick of eating at Jamie’s which wasn’t very good so did our own tasting dinner. We started in the Windjammer for some salad, went to Solarium Bistro for some appetizers, and finished in Chops for dessert. That was fun! I was disappointed that they have cutdown the menus in all specialty restaurants so your choices are limited and they significantly reduced the tapas in Solarium Bistro. You used to be able to make a meal from them but there were only a few I liked. Oh well….we didn’t starve for sure.
We finally got to the pool on the last sea day but it was so windy and rocky the pool was closed. This was similar to an Alaska cruise kind of cool and windy much of the time.
We enjoyed time in the casino. The first few nights we lost then things turned around. Alex started to play poker (sometimes with Ben) and won a little bit back. I was lucky to play the slots for several days on $20 and cashed my ticket out at $120 so I was happy.
Disembarkment was a breeze! We were scheduled to get off at 7:40 and got off right on time. Our staging area was 270 so we went there for some breakfast and walked off the gangway right from there so no lugging our carryon all over the ship. There was no customs to clear so we just handed our declaration form and were on our way.
We walked out to Circular Quay because we didn’t have cell service initially and got an uber to our rental car place. The next leg of our journey will be driving down to Melbourne. We will take about a week with multiple stops along the way. On to Jervis Bay for tonight.
Until then…..
