Day 11 - Tuesday - 3/25/25 - At Sea to Jamaica

 While this was a sea day and we could have slept in, we elected to get up at 8am so we could enjoy a coffee chat with the Cruise & Travel Director, Stephanie and her guests: the female ship's officers.  So after a quick breakfast, we joined the coffee chat in the Rolling Stone lounge. Stephanie was joined by the Media Manager, Food & Beverage Director (only female one in HAL's fleet), Shore Excursions Manager, and Guest Relations Director. All of them have been with HAL well over 10 years and the Food & Beverage Director has been with the company over 20 years.


At 10am Angela watched the cooking demo while I sat in on the Shore Excursions presentation on the World Stage.  Following this Stephanie gave a canned talk on undersea life in the Caribbean.  It actually was pretty interesting.


The Lido Marketplace was absolutely jammed for lunch.  We finally found a table and had a light lunch before doing some laps on the outside promenade deck.  At 2pm we participated in wine tasting before doing more laps around the deck.  Off in the distance we could see Cuba and we passed by Guantanamo Bay.



We ate the second of our free specialty dinners.  This time it was in the Tamarind which is our favorite specialty restaurant on HAL ships.  It was terrific but both of us struggled to eat it because we were still filled from the wine tasting.

Shrimp
Bok choy
Sorbet 


In the receiving line we met the first crew member we previously have sailed with: Vanessa, Front desk manager.  It was a mutually warm greeting. It's moments like these that draw us back to HAL. Tonight Captain Baijen introduced his senior officers (no written notes!) and led a toast to a good voyage.  Laszlo Pap, a violinist, played a nice concert as the evening entertainment.  Afterwards we tried to listen to the band and vocalist in the Rolling Stone Lounge, but walked out after the first song as we were sitting in front of a speaker and it was simply too loud to enjoy. We ended up on deck 3 listening to the 3rd Avenue West trio in the Ocean Bar.  It was relaxing. We were then able to find seats at the 9:00pm set at Billboard Onboard.  It was still quite crowded.  Walking back to the room we met Maybelle, Food & Beverage Director, and had a great chat with her.  We learned we are two of four persons continuing on the charter voyage next week. She's been looking for the four of us.




Tomorrow in Montego Bay we have an interesting shore excursion planned.  Stay tuned.

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