Day 43 - At Sea

Day 43 – Saturday 22^nd February 2014 – At Sea

A peaceful morning, after the exercises, spent time on the computer waiting for the afternoon activities.

Lunch time dance lesson was again the quickstep, gaining more confidence with this one and appear to be gliding along the ballroom.

At 13.00 it was our final rehearsal for the choir, then off to get dressed up for the concert.

The choir this time consisted of nearly 100 of us, as before we waited nervously behind the theatre curtain for the announcements.  As before, there were about 500 people in the audience.

First off we sang, ‘Take Me Home, Country Roads’, then ‘Amazing Grace’, this one went down very well.  ‘Any Dream Will Do’, followed by a combination of ‘Wonderful World/Over The Rainbow’, this had a great ending to it and the audience liked this one.  Moving onto the old favourite ‘I Am Sailing’, the next was the one we had been struggling with, from the musical ‘ Les Miserables’, the song ‘Do You Hear The People sing’, we got it right this time.

Back to the old ones, a combination of Vera Lynn’s ‘Blue Birds/We’ll Meet again’, to finish off with the hundred year old Maori song ‘Now Is The Hour’, we really got a lot of feeling into this one.  This was the end of our repertoire and the audience were on their feet giving us all a standing ovation, we could only bow and broadly smile back.

This time around a little more prepared and for the encore sang ‘You Raise me Up’, and again, Leah our choir leader went all emotional, as the tears flowed we managed to keep it together.  Another wonderful experience for our new and old members of the choir, and day we will never forget.

It was not all over as the choir stood on the grand staircase in the lobby for the official photograph, and we sang ‘Now Is The Hour’.  Finally, we made it into the Golden Lion for a celebration pint of Speckled Hen.

We were back in there again at 19.30 for a pub sing along which included hot dogs, sausage rolls or curry.  Stuck to the beer, as into dinner at 20.30; for me escargots/sirloin steak/chocolate cake, the garlic snails were wonderful.

The theatre show was by a young New Zealander ‘Will Martin’, this lad was great and definitely a name to remember for the future.

After the theatre, went up on deck for stargazing with Howard, the astronomer, with a lot of other people.  They had switched off most of the deck and pool lights to reduce the light pollution. Howard was excellent pointing out, using his green laser light, the different planets, star constellations, the Southern Cross and false cross.

 

It was a wonderful end to a slow start, but a very eventful day.