Day 17 - Monday - 3/31/25 - At Sea to Amber Cove, Dominican Republic

 On this our first day at sea, we had a morning devotional and it was at 7:30 in the morning. So we were up early to avoid it make that event. The speaker was Woody Wright and he's a musician and he  spoke about how music engages the entire brain and is used for treating people with dementia and Alzheimer's. My wife has been involved in that ministry for three or four years since Covid and is active participate three times a week online helping people with those issues. Later we spoke with him one on one and had a great conversation.  Most of the rest of the day was spent attending concert and singing sessions along with eating.  I'm not going to the details about that unless any of my readers are interested in it. I would say that our hearts were very full after participating in all these activities.

One really interesting thing happened during the day today. There was a hymn sing scheduled for the billboard on board and we went early to get a good seat. Shortly after we arrived, a large crew of workers showed up and totally rearranged the chairs to increase the capacity. Crew removed all the chairs from the casino, which is closed for this cruise and arranged them for the audience to sit in. Later in the day, when we walked by there, all the chairs were take a back and  restored to the casino. It was a lot of work.

Contrary to our normal pattern of eating dinner in the LIDO, we have decided to eat dinner in the main dining room at our assigned time and table at 5 o'clock each day. And once again we met with Kathy and Pam at table 155 and had a nice dinner together. For the evening concert we are in the purple group and we're assigned priority so we got ourselves in line and then we're allowed first into the theater to get the best seats. The organizers are very good at rotating the priority among three groups so that everybody has a chance that good seats. After this nearly 2 hour concert, there was a concluding concert by the Gaither Vocal Band who sang about 12 love songs. And they were very good.

I'll add that since this is a charter cruise, the organizers are in charge of all of the audiovisual, crowd control, &  seating. People tend to be very patient waiting in long lines to get into each of the venues and it really helps to have the color-coded badges and lanyards. There are very few announcement by Stephanie our cruise and travel Director. The billboard on board event takes place every night and there is still trivia periodically throughout the day as well. And the captain makes his normal new position and weather announcements like a normal cruise.

We have an early morning tomorrow &  every day this week so we headed to bed to get ready for that. It was still midnight so it'll be a short night