First of all an apology to our followers for the FIVE postings of Picton. Some of you, who know Barry's passion for flying might attribute this to his over zealous enthusiasm for the day he and Jonathan spent at the Air Museum. The truth is that he posted this from his computer and I posted the other two from mine, and for some reason they posted in the wrong order, so he didn't think Picton got posted - so he hit the send button many times in frustration. It is too expensive for us to go online and fix it until we go home.
We left New Zealand with great reluctance, as this is truly a beautiful country, and we enjoyed every single day there. However we are pretty excited about seeing a lot more of Australia than we have ever seen before.
The last time Barry and I sailed the Tasman Sea, was on the Veendam, on a Christmas cruise of New Zealand and Australia, when we experienced a 3 day crossing with 40 foot swells, that drove 50% of guests from the dining room because they were so sea sick. When we looked out to the stern from the 5th floor dining room - it was all sea, all sky. We were pleasantly surprised when Captain Jonathan announced at his noon time daily weather report, that there were surprisingly good seas ahead, in spite of some nasty storms south in Antarctica. For these 3 days we had cool (61 degrees F) temperatures and swells of about 2 1/2 meters. A little rocking and rolling, but the sea sick bags were not in sight in the corridors- always a good sign.
I have not been attending as many lectures as we did last year, but I finally got to one about the tectonic plates that have caused all the changes in our earth's continents and particularly how the volcanic activity was formed in New Zealand. We saw a little movie of how the continents separated from the once huge landmass of Gondwana over that last 100 million years.
I did mundane things like refolding and re-organizing our clothing, to keep our little cabin room in good order. I found some time for knitting too. We enjoyed 2 wonderful evening performances and 1 afternoon matinee. Outstanding entertainment, and some very funny comedian acts. The quality of the entertainment is a cut above last year. The singing and dancing is Broadway quality and the other entertainers usually get a standing ovation from the passengers, most of whom are quite discerning.
In the Signature Shops where they sell the jewellery and other duty free items, they feature designer jewellery from the countries to which we are proceeding. Leslie had signed up to model some paua jewellery that was being featured and changed her mind and asked me to substitute. This beautiful shell is a member of the abalone family, and is only found on the South Island of New Zealand. Two sisters started the business. They were recently featured in a Vogue fashion show in New York. I wore one of the pieces from that show.. Too bad the price tag was $800+.
Thursday was Valentines Day, and on a ship everyone gets into the mood all day long, and the dining room was festooned in red. Jonathan and Karen were able to join us for the formal dinner as there was no Captain's dinner. We had a very nice evening - but tried to figure out how we would all stay awake for the Ball that started at 10 - so we went to the movie which was a strange one that we all bailed on after an hour. We stayed later than we planned at the Ball, as it was a lot of fun. That made it pretty challenging as we were arriving in Sydney Harbour in the morning and we originally intended to get up at 5:30 for the sail in - but I confess we didn't, because it was raining, and we had previously had 2 glorious sail ins in pure rising sunshine. Poor Jonathan had to be up at 4:30 AM to be ready to greet the pilot who would help us to Sydney Harbour.
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