Tuesday 29 May 2012 Messina

I went out a little early this morning to watch them docking the ship. It is quite a long and slow procedure. You want to make sure you don’t have too much momentum approaching the dock!!

Holland America has an agreement with Microsoft wherein there is computer guy onboard to give classes, answer questions, and plug Microsoft products. I attended two of his classes this morning and picked up some useful tips.

None of the excursions here had any great appeal for us, so we did not book any. At 11 AM we left the ship for a walk around town. We caught the clock tower show at noon beside the main church. It was pretty slow moving for today’s times. I wonder if anyone from the next generation or two will even bother to watch them.

The Cruise Director had been recommending the cannoli here all week, so we tried one from a little hole in the wall bakery. It was so good we had to go back for another and let our pants out another notch.

We returned to the ship and I wandered around taking pictures for a while.

We went for a late lunch around 2:30. I took in another computer class at 3:30, and then we went up to the Crow’s Nest for happy hour, team trivia challenge, and departure. We didn’t do as well on the trivia today. We missed a couple where we talked ourselves out of the right answer or we would have been in second place and missed another two pointer that we should have known that would have won it for us.

They had a Sicilian buffet on the pool deck this evening. It looked pretty good so we skipped the sit-down meal and ate there. Then I downloaded pictures and wrote blog for a while. The 8 PM show had a British female singer/comedienne who was pretty good. After her show we went to the singer/guitarist show again. We stopped in at the piano bar for a short while, then back to the room to post the blog, but unable to successfully connect. Off again to the 11:30 Philippine crew show. It was pretty amateur, but we were glad to support them. About 30% of the crew is Philippine and 50% Indonesian. They are always so cheerful and helpful and they are away from home and family for months at a time. You have to give them a lot of credit.

Weather: sunny, 27 degrees C, light wind