Day 10 found us at sea. We were moving between Sardinia and the North course of Africa. The previous night I slept like crap. I wish there was some consistency to my sleeping and not sleeping. There doesn’t seem to be a smoking gun. Anyway, that kind of set the tone for the day. I was tired. Not that this is a new occurrence so I can’t complain. We got up fairly early and we were on our way to the art auction at 930. I’m not exactly sure how we got roped into going to the art auction but we did. These art auctions are something else. They have about 250 pieces of art. Some of them is really nice. You wander around and take a look at the pictures and put little tags on ones that you might be interested in buying. Then you sit down and they bring the art up to the front and it is an option. If you want a piece of art you bid on it like any other type of auction. The prices go anywhere from $60 up to $30,000. And in this specific auction there were some Pablo Picasso’s and the one price was $171,000. No one bought this but it does show what they offer. They have several other gimmicks for lack of a better term. Mary and I did buy a $50 hand-drawn sketch of Betty Boop. As part of a mystery auction we also picked up a $60 hand sketch of Elmer followed. I don’t mind spending 50 and $60. We did look at some art which we were seriously interested in by a guy name David Walls. We learned later that he’s actually Chinese, but he does have some interesting landscapes. They don’t really going our house very well but there is one that has some green in it which would tie to the green on the walls of the house. There were a series of three of these paintings – there actually reproductions embellished by the artist. We had the opportunity to buy one more all at about $500 each. I don’t think we need $500 painting. The auction went till about noon I guess it was. After that we went and picked up pictures from the previous night. We went back to the room to the cath etc. We decided to go to pizza for lunch. We went down to six to the pizza parlor on the ship. We ate there the first day think it was. This time I had a ham and cheese pizza – it was pretty good. It wasn’t ham and cheese like you think. It was Parmesan cheese and prosciutto I think. Mary had a true pepperoni pizza. I also bought a class of Chianti. It was a nice lunch. It was around this time that the casino was running a slots tournament. Of course we played. Each round was $20. I played a round and did not make the final spot. Mary made the finals right off the bat. I plumped down another $20 to see if I can make the board. I did for about 30 seconds because another player came right along and knocked me off the board. I decided $40 was enough. We waited around for about 30 minutes or so, so Mary could run the finals. She was one of five people in the running for $500. She did receive a free T-shirt and a coupon for a free slot pull. There really is no logic to the slot tournament. It is simply luck based on your machine. If your machine is hot in the three minutes you’re doing the tournament you’re gonna win. If you have a cold machine you’re not gonna win. End of story. As it turns out, Mary did not have a hot machine. She actually came in fifth place. That’s okay. She tried. You can’t win if you don’t try. This ended just in time for us to get to the wine tasting we had signed up for days earlier. The previous winetasting was higher end and cost $25 each. This one was only 9.50 and featured lower end wines. We were seated at a table with a British couple. We did the idle chitchat thing. There were five wines. One was a sparkling wine from California I think. It was pretty good the next two were whites – one from Spain and one from the US. The last two were reds – one from Oregon and one from California. It was strange that the ones we like the British couple didn’t like. Obviously not much can be made of this but it was an interesting fact. This winetasting only lasted about a half hour. We drank our wine, listen to the presenters, and nibbled on the appetizers provided and made notes on the various wines. It’s good to taste on. There might be one that jumps off the plate. The white wine from Spain was pretty good – it’s great was something like Aribger. I’ll have to look it up. I wouldn’t mind buying that at some point. Then at 330 was bingo. What manner way back to the bingo area and sat there and lost. We weren’t even close in any of the cards. We went back to the room. We cleaned up and I think we napped for a few minutes. This day was one event after another and we were not done yet. When we did the art auction in the morning we made an appointment with one of the art ladies at 5 o’clock. The intent was to go through what we had done at 9 o’clock. To see if we really wanted to buy those $500 paintings I guess. As it turns out because we’re going on the second cruise we didn’t really have to do anything. We are in a discussion phase where we are committed to the two small paintings and we still have the option on the bigger $500 paintings if we want them. We agreed that over the next week or so we would continue talking to see if there’s anything else we liked. There are some Mark Godard and James Coleman pieces that Mary and I like. They are probably out of our price range but it doesn’t hurt to look. Godard is more pop art and Coleman is an artist that uses alternative materials like tinfoil and such. They’re both cool – I just don’t want to buy something for the sake of buying it. This discussion took a good hour so we did not make it to dinner until almost 630.
To dinner we go. We took the bottle of red Ferme Blanche we bought in Marseille to dinner. It was pretty good but not as good as the Italian wine we had earlier. I’m not complaining though. It was good. For dinner I had seafood antipasto as an appetizer. I had pot roast for my entrée. Mary tried the soup and liked it. She also had the prime rib again. I’m pretty sure she liked it. For dessert she had ice cream of some sort. The one thing that we can say is that the food is good. It’s hard to have an amazing dinner every night especially 14 nights in a row. I would say that the food was very consistent. It’s hot, it’s fresh and it tastes good. Can’t argue with that. Dinner was quick. We were done by about 730 or so. Mary decided that we should go back upstairs and make a couple of phone calls because it was only around noon in the states. Our new boss texted her the day before asking her to call him. After we figured out how to call the states she talked to him for a few minutes. Apparently, by mistake, Mary facetimed his number and he was curious what she wanted to talk about. After the initial confusion was settled they chatted for a couple of minutes. He sounds like a really wired guy. I’ll be curious to see how the relationship goes. The second call was to the company that we bought the Smart Drive from in Chicago. I think it’s called new motion. Mary talked to them briefly about the possibility of them helping us get the drive fixed or swapped out in Southampton. As it turns out they’re not allowed to do anything with the SmartDrive as far as fixing or swapping goes. That all has to be handled by the company who makes them now called Permobil. Not much progress was made there but at least we knew. We’ll have to get it fixed when we return. These two phone calls, at $2.95 a minute, probably cost somewhere near $50 or $60. Not much we could do there. Because it was still early we went back downstairs and got some pictures taken. After that we wandered into the casino. We are hoping there would be someone to play Texas hold-em but there was no one. Mary plunked some money into a slot machine but managed to lose it. We had the money that I won from Roulette a few days earlier and decided to go back and play roulette. It took us about 20 minutes but we went through the $71. The good thing, if there is a bright spot, is the casino host bought us a drink. I had a bottle of beer and Mary had a Drambuie on the rocks. It was a nice touch. After we drank those we went down to five for tea and cookies, headed back to the house and pretty much called it a night. We did watch part of some movie until we got to tired. That was day ten. It goes to show that these crew ships have a lot of things for people to do. On any given day there are probably 30 or 40 events listed in the daily newsletter called The Princes Patter. If you were inclined, you could run from 7 AM until 2 AM nonstop. The example above of our at Sea day shows that we can be busy too. It was a good day.