Christmas at Sea

Skip and I are spending the holidays at sea on a luxurious ship, the Crystal Serenity. I've taught 3 knitting classes so far including teaching 3 knitters from scratch. One learned to purl at the second class and two more will be purling today. Several other guests join us just to sit and knit. It's pretty fun.

We sailed from Charleston SC on Wednesday, picked up more guests on Thursday and had two days at sea before docking at St. John's, Antigua yesterday for 6 hours.

Looking astern as we sail into Saint John's Harbour

Our dock mate, the Caribbean Princess with Saint John's in the background. The captain was getting ready to turn and back into our berth.

We went ashore, wandered through some of the shops, and stopped for a refreshing drink quayside. Skip had a Wadadli - a local beer and I had a mango daiquiri. Yum!

Back on the ship we had a wee nap before dinner. Skip and I usually ask the maitre d' to seat us wherever is convenient for him (i.e. to fill out a table, etc.). Apparently we had made such a good impression on our table mates the night before that they requested that we dine with them again. After dinner they invited us to the 'post-Hannukkah' celebration where delicious latkes and cookies were served.

After the show we went to the bar in the Atrium for a nightcap and to listen to the little combo. After I finished my Bailey's, the bartender gave me another one. I didn't really want to drink it there so we took our drinks back to the stateroom.

A little bit of the remaining Bailey's got splashed INTO my mobile printer.

My little office at sea - Netbook and mobile printer

Yikes! I spent the next hour cleaning out what I could and praying it would work OK. To no avail. I was very bummed out as being able to print patterns for my guests makes my job so much easier, not to mention printing our boarding passes next week for our return trip home. I Googled the error message and tried all the suggestions to get it to work again but no dice. I gave up and went to bed, pouring the offending, remaining Bailey's down the sink.

After breakfast, I tried to print something with no luck. After lunch I removed the battery pack and just used the power cable and it worked!!! I was able to print the patterns I needed for today's class. I'm SO relieved as I figured it would cost more to repair the printer (now a discontinued model) than to buy the updated version that has mixed reviews about its Wifi connectivity.

So the crisis has been averted. I'm done mourning the demise of my printer. Yay!

Tomorrow we dock in Scarborough, Tobago for the day. Neither of us has been there before and we didn't book an excursion so we'll probably just walk around the town.

Skip secretly packed a couple of Santa hats and surprised me with them this morning. We have been wearing them today and have been wished 'Merry Christmas' by many guests. We took our Christmas selfie out on our balcony/verandah.

Merry Christmas from the Caribbean Sea