A great sea day today.   We are somewhere in the English Channel heading to Madeira, an island that is a part of Portugal.  Nana and I love our sea days. Nana goes to her exercise class before Mass.  I meet her for breakfast and we walk a mile around the outside deck. It has been cold and today it seemed colder. Luckily we brought our warm Alaskan jackets, Nana and I look like a matching couple.   

After our walk, we head to the exercise room and we work on the weight machines.  I am still trying to gain back some of my muscle weight that I lost when I lost my weight.   After exercising we head over to the hot tub in the thermal suite and relax.   ………. It is a tough morning !

Today I worked on my train programs.  I made a lot of progress.  I have finished the Battle Creek train programs, the Nunes train programs, and the Eperthener inside train programs.  I spent a lot of time making the programs generic so many programs are common to all of the layouts.  I added several new features.  I still will need to test the programs at each location and refine as the simulation does not catch everything but all the programs are running with no errors and do what they are supposed to do.  I started to program the Raspberry Pi Sim cards with the new programs.  It will be easy to insert a new sim card at the location and everything will be up and running.  I brought a Raspberry pi on the cruise and I can connect my Mac Laptop and transfer the files and get everything all set up.

The afternoon was crazy.  This 2nd two weeks has a completely different feel from the first two weeks.  All of the bars and common areas are packed.  There was standing room only at the Dutch Cafe.  I couldn’t get my scotch at the Ocean bar as they were swamped and the line at the bar was 6 deep.  We replaced a lot of Americans and Canadians from the 1st week with the Dutch for this second week.  They love their drinking and want to be out and about.  I guess us Americans and Canadians like to rest and take naps in the afternoon. The Dining room is packed for breakfast and the Orange Club was very busy especially later in the morning.  The Lido deck must be very empty for breakfast.    It is also interesting that Holland America knows the differences and caters to each group.  A big bingo and lottery was very popular this afternoon.  The mixology class took up the whole Ocean Bar while only two tables were used for the first 2 weeks.  It is a little too crazy for me, so we have been spending more time back at the room.  We did not see the same thing happen during our Asian cruise.  That cruise earlier this year was broken into two two week trips but both the first and second part were very similar.

We tried the Asian restaurant last night with the Harterts.  Laura and Wolfgang are great and we had some great conservations.  We loved the restaurant and we had a fantastic view as the restaurant looks out the stern and has windows on 3 sides.  Before dinner we invited another couple that we meet, Daro and Lynn.  They are long time cruisers and we had some great conservations.  That is one big area we enjoy on the cruise is meeting and getting to know people.