28 January - Back at sea, met up with Linda & Cathy and WON the 10:15 trivia! Big trouble at Launderette deck 6...

Relieved to Leave Rio? YES...

The ship sailed at 6:30 pm much to my relief, as Rio's harbour is very smelly. The fuel lighter tied up directly under our balcony and the fuel fumes drifted up and completely filled the open space. There were no warnings about not smoking, but common sense prevailed, as it was obvious that one spark could have ignited the surrounding air.

Almost as soon as the ship got into open sea it ran into a spectacular thunder storm. We watched the lightning strikes from the forward looking windows in Commodore Lounge while slurping "Sex on the Beach" cocktails... now that's roughing it!

Finally WON a Quiz
Linda & Cathy met up with us at the morning trivia and I must say, they are two very attractive ladies and far younger than I thought they would be. Cathy happened to know the final answer and our team won for the first time, so I guess she did bring some Texas luck with her (Note: Always get your luck from Texas... they tend to have BIGGER slices of it).

Big Trouble at Laundry - Hijacked Tumble Dryer!

I finally managed to get Ann to accompany me to the laundry to retrieve our washing from the tumble dryer. I'd set the drying cycle to 60 minutes and we returned "precisely 55 minutes later. Imagine Ann's horror when we found all of our washing unceremoniously dumped on an ironing board leaving most of our underwear open to inspection by any causal passerby. The washing was damp and in places still wet to the touch. Clearly, somebody had "hijacked" our dryer, dumping our stuff and replaced it with their own. I was furious and had a blistering argument with the woman from New York who at that time was using our dryer. Ann eventually calmed me down and we returned to our cabin to hang the clothes out on the balcony. My plan for future laundry runs is to order a six pack of Carlsberg a club sandwich and make a party out of the experience.

And another thing, the standard of ironing on this ship is very poor. I've had to stand in line for ages while watching some aging aristocrat "dab" at her husbands shirt... strewth, I've already carried out two complete demonstrations of the correct (military) procedures to employ when ironing a dress shirt. Have they learnt anything? NO, dab, dab, dab... drives me NUTS!

I was telling Irene about the laundry hijacking experience and she countered with an even stranger tale.

It seems Irene was in the laundry one day waiting for a wash cycle to finish (as you do), when a large American man entered in a big hurry. He went down the line of machines opening and closing each door until he found one empty. He chucked his washing in, set the timer to sixty minutes and then rushed off. 

Out of curiosity, Irene checked the load and found it was indeed dirty washing, she then said "I did wonder why somebody would want to warm up dirty clothes". In the man's haste, he'd thrown his washing directly into a tumble dryer. I cracked up...

More Later...