Favalosa Seventeen
The clocks went forward yet again last night. Apparently at 6 am we sailed passed Gibraltar and entered the Mediterranean, but Sue and I remained firmly asleep and didn’t emerge for breakfast until 9 am. One think we noticed as we ate was the number of ships we could see through the windows. Having gone for a couple of weeks and not seen any, we were now surrounded by the things. Plus, we also saw two lots of dolphins swim by before we had even finished breakfast, just shows how busy the Med is.

Our morning game of Scrabble had to be with the only board left in the library and it was German (again). We have been used to playing with the Spanish version, but the one today was a bit of a ‘mare for both of us. The values and numbers for each letter are so different from the English that what would would have been high value words resulted in fetching a very low score and vice-versa, plus the numbers of letters were not conducive to producing English words. However, like good Brits, yet again we won through and finished the game in the face of German adversity!

We have clear blue skies again to today even though we were expecting worse as we had heard that the UK was having heavy snow. We were just off the coast of Southern Spain and we could clearly see a lot of snow on the mountains in the distance. I think this must be a very rare occurrence for so far south.
In keeping, during the late morning Sue watched an ice-carving demonstration on the deck, while I used the binoculars to observe the many ships that we seemed to be passing so quickly (20 knots).

We had lunch and spotted a couple more groups of dolphins swimming with the ship and afterwards we sat on the top deck with the binoculars enjoying the sun and looking at the many types of ship passing by. There was a meeting in one of the lounges during the afternoon to give out the information for disembarking the ship at the end of the cruise. It sounded pretty straight forward and hopefully will go smoothly. After the meeting we sat with our dinner partners and had coffee, we watched more dolphins swim with the ship for a while, before returning to the cabin and watching the atrocious weather conditions back in the UK on BBC24. Feeling a bit chilly by such news we returned on the deck and sat in the sun to warm up.

The evening meal was a Gala Dinner and again we had been invited to the Captain’s Cocktail Party before hand, this time we got dressed in our glad-rags and attended. After 3 glasses of champagne and a small glass of grappa (thank God), we left the party and joined Glynnis and Ray for dinner (Jonathan and his mum were eating in another restaurant). The waiters and cooks entertained us with more song and dance routines. We had some more champagne and a special cake (Sue wouldn’t eat mine and I had to myself, yuk).

We met Jonathan and mum in the theatre later for the evening show. It was titled ‘Vibrations’, singers and dancers with special effects. Thoroughly enjoyable, loved ‘Pinball Wizard’ and all the Abba numbers. We lost track of the number of costume changes as the songs rapidly followed each other without pause for over an hour. We had coffee as usual with our dinner partners afterwards.