Friday 3rd April 2015 – Good Friday - Day at Sea.

Went to the Good Friday church service led by the Rev Goodheart… what a brilliant name for a vicar! Yes – you’ve guessed it, he’s American.

There is a three day Easter Egg hunt starting today and Nesta has decided we’re participating. (Ian was asked his opinion, which was then ignored!)

We decided to support Lee, so registered for the choir again. Catherine is recovering well and hopes to fly out to re-join us in Madeira.

It was a sunny afternoon and a pleasant temperature so we actually joined the sun-worshippers and sat out reading for over an hour!! (Yes, Ian did wear his hat!)

We went to a lecture about Burke and Wills, who led a disastrous expedition to cross Australia for the first time from Melbourne to the Gulf of Carpentaria. Although they both died during the return journey they showed it could be done - and the first telegraph link across Australia eventually followed their route. The content of Peter G Drake MBE. FRGS. presentation was interesting, but his delivery style wasn’t up to much. We might give his lectures on Africa a miss!

We went back to our cabin and managed to skype Martin – which was good.

After this it was time to scrub up once again and don our formal gear – this time for the World Voyagers Cocktail Party. As the queue wasn’t too long we decided to let the Captain be introduced to us!

We actually ate some lovely food prepared in the Queens Room by four chefs – but we drank a bit too much… Festivities continued in G32 (the nightclub) with us all singing (loudly) to Vibz and even resulted in us strutting our stuff on the dancefloor!

We had no plans to attend the Carnival Ball which was in full steam in The Queens Room - but when we left G32, the Carnival Parade had just started - so we ended up, wrapped in streamers, joining it and parading around the floor.

Thank goodness the clocks go back yet another hour tonight – more time to recover and sleep!

 

Saturday 4^th April – Easter Saturday - Day at Sea.

We are now at GMT + 7 (BST + 6)

We went to the crew’s tug of war competition - in aid of the three charities supported by Cunard. It was a bit of fun – if a farce! The rules stipulated six people on each team – but this meant that the six little cabin stewards and the six girls from the children’s entertainment team were no match for the six burly men who formed the teams from the restaurants and bars! In the end the better technique of the restaurant team meant they won the overall trophy (for the fifth successive year, apparently).

Ian went to choir at 2pm but Nesta had to miss the first 30 minutes as she had to go to Bingo (yes, they honestly have daily bingo aboard QM2) as it was one of the clues in her great Easter Egg hunt… Immediately after choir, we went to our free wine tasting (due to us now being Platinum Members of the Cunard Travel Club). They were Italian wines and though were ok - weren’t really to our taste. (There were however some nice complementary and complimentary cheeses to go with the reds!)

In the evening we went into the restaurant for dinner. It’s a strange coincidence that just like on our trip on Voyager - there is a new Executive Chef on board, who is German, and the choice and standard of food presented has dipped noticeably since he got on.

Finally we went to see the crew talent show but were disappointed once again to find that this time there was only one member of what we regard as crew taking part. The Entertainments team and Photographers made up the rest of the acts. Shame, really as we enjoyed the crew shows on Voyager.