July 11

We awoke to a time zone change, so Jared’s normal wake up time of around 6 became around 5am :/

The morning started out with an energetic Jared getting up in search of coffee, and a sleepy Lauren eventually joining him. We opted to get pastries that required payment from the café because they were a) superior quality, and b) it meant that we didn’t have to run the gauntlet of the buffet breakfast and try to avoid coming back with an entire plateful of unneeded food. (Giant pain au chocolat = £1)

Jared and I did our customary few laps of the deck and listened to a few podcasts to distract from the boredom of walking around in circles. We had a cursory glance for cetaceans, having now been trained in what to watch out for (fins, spy-hopping, blow, tail, calm patches in the ocean aka ‘fluke spots’), but alas saw nothing much except for a few seabirds – Jared is always looking for a shag anyway so this pastime comes naturally to him. 😉

We also attended talks about the history and geography of Iceland, by the lovely Laura Macfarlane – very informative, learning all about why it is the land of ice and fire, and how, (much like New Zealand,) it is a land that has sprung up out of the ocean from tectonic activity.

Jared was busy napping later that evening, so I went to discover the hot tub (on deck 11 aft). I had it all to myself, and awkwardly got changed in the corridor before going out and realising that there were in fact toilets just near there and I could’ve just used those – I only got snapped by one middle aged man, so it was fiiiiine.

I tried again for the jewellery class at 3pm, and was successful this time – got a seat and made myself a very sweet set of earrings and a necklace from beads. It was quite a lot of fun, and I was feeling very chuffed with myself.

One pleasant surprise was that there’s an additional little grill restaurant on board, and it’s free! It’s a nice alternative to the buffet, and just has fries, hot dogs, pizza, burgers and more fries (recommend the burgers and the fries, the rest of it is pretty average) So 5pm fries have become a cruise guilty pleasure.

By 8pm, Jared had napped enough that he was feeling human again, and we attempted some food in the buffet – discovering that the buffet is identical to the downstairs restaurant but without all the pomp and ceremony.

Jared, having slept half of the day, was not inclined for bed after dinner, so we went to the show at the Palladium, and as we came out of the show, at 11:30, the sun was just setting, Iceland was in sight – and so was the exploding volcano!

Having known this was likely, I had spent most of the afternoon napping after my jewellery class in preparation for getting up to see the volcano erupting, so we headed upstairs to the Observatory restaurant to have a couple of drinks while we took it all in.

While we were there we had a go at dancing – the sea mercifully calm. We met another couple that also do ceroc and had a go at dancing with each other, and while dancing, I stepped on something – the heart pendant from the middle of my necklace!

I quickly realised that if the middle of my necklace was on the floor, then probably the rest of it was as well – and it became a dance-floor-wide treasure hunt to find the missing beads! I collected up as many as I could initially, and with the help of literally everyone else on the dance floor over the next hour, even more of them. They had gone to every corner of the dance floor! I was so far past embarrassed – at interrupting everyone’s dancing, but also at my evidently poor jewellery making skills – that it just became comical! Jared helped me collect them in a napkin and he put them in his coffee cup for safe keeping.

Jared took that as his cue to exit, and took himself back off to bed, having accomplished dancing, seeing a volcano – what more was there to stay up for?  (He did later complain to ladies of ORCA that his photo of the sunset next to the volcano did not include a spectacular humpback whale gleefully breaching the surface of the water.  To which they humbly apologised and promised to organise the schedule with the whales better next time) 

I knew that sunrise was going to be in only a few hours, so I tried to stay up for it, and also to see if there were any further developments on the volcano front.

I decided to brave the dance floor alone – and had all these very sweet people bringing me beads that they spotted continually for the next hour as we boogied the night away.

The late night disco thinned out the crowds considerably, and there was only a family, the DJ and a random guy called Matthew left. They invited me to join them, and we danced some more then obviously got into solving all of life’s problems over a few drinks afterwards.

All of a sudden it was 3am, the bar was closing, and I figured I should probably get some sleep before doing a full day bus tour…