Cruise Days 10 & 11 - At Sea & Victoria

Page 1, & Trip Index

Click on each photo to greatly enlarge it.

Wednesday, May 19: This morning at 06:05 from the aft of Deck 10 - another beautiful start to what appeared to be a calm day at sea.

Sea days are a time to experience the ship. We started off with another of ship naturalist Brent Nixon's energetic presentations, this one on Alaska's Coastal Bald Eagles.

Next was a very interesting presentation by David Lynch on the effect of asteroids strikes on the earth - and how we might now be able to deflect them.

I finished off the educational part of my day at 4:00pm with a 1-hour workshop on using Powerpoint - while I can create a basic presentation, I want to be able to "jazz it up" a bit, and the workshop was excellent.

At around 5:00pm the sea quite suddenly started to get very rough. This photo was shot from our cabin at 6:55pm.

Some of the waves created spray that went higher than our window on Deck 3.

Thursday, May 20: We got hammered by the seas all night - the evening theatre performance was even cancelled due to the possibility of the dancers being injured. At 03:45 I woke up and just had to go up and see the waves. I thought that the Constellation Lounge would be great but it was too bright inside and too dark outside.

The swimming pool was again fun to watch as it did a very thorough self-cleaning! This was shot at 05:26.

Deck 4 was definitely the wave-watching location winner!

Last night was the roughest ride we've ever had at sea. I really love storms at sea - I find the whole experience to be very invigorating - but I know that many people are much less enthusiastic about it!

As we neared Victoria, our cabin's salt-covered window was again washed - this is a good example of the extremely high level of service we experienced on the Infinity.

Two Royal Caribbean ships, the Radiance of the Seas and the Rhapsody of the Seas, were already docked when we arrived.

The cruise was apparently not going well for this fellow from the Rhapsody.

Victoria tour operators do a very poor job of promoting themselves in an organized way. After seeing places like Juneau, it's quite a shock to not be able to browse the options for getting downtown - so we just took the $7 shuttle bus instead of something like a pedicab (one of who we talked to but he wanted to do a full tour or nothing).

By the number of tour operators looking for clients, you'd never know that there were 6,000 extra people downtown.

This was an excellent, relaxing day for us. We explored downtown a bit...

... took a walk through Beacon Hill Park, and then a friend from high school drove down from a couple of hours north to meet us. We toured some of Victoria's ritzy oceanfront residential areas and ended up at a pub in Saanich for a late lunch.

The show in the theatre tonight was excellent, with an excellent pair of aerialists and a performance by singer Joni Butler. Take a few minutes and listen to her on her MySpace page - I think you'll be as impressed by her as we are.

To Cruise Day 12: Vancouver to Whitehorse