Sept. 27, 2018 Crossing the International Date Line

Sept 27, 2018 no wait, it’s the 26th..... wth, day 10 was only an hour long and lost as we crossed the international dateline! Actually 23 hours was lost so the 26th was just an hour long. I don’t understand this so guess i won’t talk about it except to say i understand i’ll get a day back once I get home.
So i went for brekkie and ate my muesli and then got myself to the Scavenger hunt on time. Annie, Li Scott and i formed a team and figured out each riddle and thought we knew each item that had to be found. We each chose the items we were comfortable with looking for, or knew where to get the item or whatever. This scavenger hunt was with the members of Cruise Critic. The list was 25 riddles that you had to figure out and then find the item that represented it. I think the rest of my team had the harder items and mine were fairly simple. We had 3 hours to get as many as we could. That was a relief as i had joined a scavenger hunt on another cruise eons ago that was like you had about ten minutes to get the required items and when i saw the contestants all run up the stairs at the word go i limped back to my seat instead of to the elevator, lol.

One of my items to find was a penny and i had dumped all my change before i left home but remembered i had found a penny several days ago but then i couldn’t remember what ’d done with it. Where oh where did i put you lucky penny? Did i make a wish and throw it overboard? Nope, i found it!  Another item for me was a teabag and that was easy. Then a cherry tomato or any kind of tomato and of course my first thought was the buffet because there’s always salad everyday. Well, today’s buffet had sliced tomatoes and that would be messy so i forged on and and asked a waiter in O’Sheehans bar if they had cherry tomatoes and they did and he got me one. Then a needle and i knew i had one because i go prepared and i brought my little scissors too even though someone else on my team had said they’d get it i decided to bring mine just in case. A newspaper was needed and i didn’t think anyone onboard would have one but someone did. We got away with just bringing one of the daily programs we get which is like a daily newspaper. In the end there were 3 teams who won and i think we had only missed one thing, or maybe two. One was tricky and we had erroneously thought we were to get a pic of a Norwegian who worked onboard but we could have found any Norwegian man and taken his pic. We didn’t know at the time that there’s actually no Norwegian employees on our Norwegian ship! The other one is still a puzzle to me because the riddle didn’t make sense. If it had i would have been able to supply the Mardi Gras beads that were required. Oh well, we still wouldn't have won but it was fun anyway.

Later this afternoon we went to the ship sponsored scavenger hunt and it was going to be the kind where the first person back with all the required items first would be the winner and that didn’t appeal to us so we bowed out and went to dinner early.

We ate at ChinChins Chinese restaurant and i had pork stir fry and veg fried rice and a bean paste dessert. Onward we went to the Stardust Theatre for the Australian BeeGees show. It was very good and I enjoyed the music a lot though it was a tad too loud.

The ship is rocking and rolling tonight. Even the stage performers were stumbling around a bit. It got worse as time went on as we are on the edge of the typhoon that’s headed for Japan. Some people simply cannot walk straight when a ship is swaying even just slightly and i’m one of them. OMG i was swishing and swaying and using up the entire staircase getting out of the theatre and then again in the hallways. When we reached an exit door to the outside deck we noticed it was closed off and you could hear the wind howling very loudly and nobody in their right mind would want to go out there. In the elevator people were having a hard time not bumping into others and that caused much laughter and then we went to the Spinnakers Lounge for some game time. Contestants had to do things in 55 seconds or less to win a prize like bounce a ping pong ball for 10 feet and be able to bounce it into a bucket. Another challenge was to unroll a whole roll of toilet paper and with the rock and roll ship it was impossible to do. Back in our cabin the swaying seemed even worse and thank goodness i don’t get seasick because a lot of people do.

It sounds like we are in for quite a ride. Our captain has spoken to us about the possibility of having to change our course because of the typhoon that's coming our way and we might not be able to dock in Hakodate, Japan at all. That’s still several days away and amazing how we get such early warnings. We are well past the Aleutian Islands, still on the Bering Sea and 2 days away from docking in Petropavlovsk, Russia. This city of about 250,000 people is on the Kamchatka Peninsula. I know from other cruises that big storms can raise havoc and there’s the possibility that we might not be able to dock there either. I had thought we would probably have to to fuel up there but our Captain has said no, we don’t have to take on any fuel or any supplies at all. Gotta wonder how much a ship can hold! Meanwhile the noises are getting louder and the rocking is getting rockier. You can hear things that have broken loose banging against the ship or whatever. I know they never send crew to fix whatever is broken and that’s because it would be too dangerous for them after dark  I’m not worried or scared, i feel safe and i think the rocking will lull me to sleep.