![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lprovenThe fourth day was our first "sea day" – in other words, one where the Ventura would not dock or visit any island but just steam along in the open ocean. On such days, the P&O Entertainments Team redouble their efforts to provide things for their passengers to do. Normally, there are various spa treatments, a film, the four pools and multiple bars, the casino, several shops, and somewhere a restaurant or two serving from 6AM until midnight. On sea days, there are also talks, deck games, sports in the nets, bands playing and more.
Of course, a significant number of the passengers are perfectly happy provided with alcohol, sun-beds and possibly an occasional dip in a pool to cool off. Kindles and iPads (and a few Android tablets) are everywhere, plus a huge array of fat blockbuster novels: Stieg Larsson is in evidence, plus Wilbur Smith, Stephanie Meyer, Jeffrey Archer and various other novelists I wouldn't touch even if paid to review 'em.
Instead, I went to a lecture on Horatio Nelson. This is not my normal sort of thing: History is the only 'O'-level that I didn't get and my knowledge is scanty, albeit not completely absent. However, Nelson has various ties with the Caribbean and it seemed like a good idea at the time.
I may as well be honest: I fell asleep. The speaker was keen, not dry or dull but also not scintillating or even particularly amusing – although he was, bless him, very self-deprecating and did suggest that he was an inexpensive alternative to sleeping pills. Poor chap.
After a spot of tapping away on my trusty netbook, I decided to exercise my actual muscles as exercising the mental ones on the Napoleonic wars really didn't work for me. Instead, I did something I've long wanted to try but never done: I took a spin class.
This was billed as the "Tour de Ventura" and happened in the passenger gym. (As opposed to the ccrew gym, which I glimpsed during one early-morning stroll as we were docking. ) I turned up early and warmed up on an exercise-bike-based mountain-biking video game, which was quite amusing.
Then it was time. I went over to the main floor, picked a bike, adjusted the saddle, and boarded. The tall, slim, bronzed, muscular (oh, how I hated him already) continental-European instructor put on a mix CD and we eight of his victims started pumping the pedals. Two women, one in her twenties and one in her fifties (at a guess), both slim and trim, and half a dozen blokes from twenty to fifty-plus, ranging from trim to your basic standard Brit bloke: oblate-spheroid, bald, sedentary.
It started quite hard and got harder. Any notion of maintaining a steady 70rpm cadence went out the window: we were spinning fast or pumping slowly on maximum resistance, standing upright on the pedals or leaning forwards while standing, or even hanging off one side or the other.
I kept up without real difficulty, but it was... warm. The gym is air-conditioned, but not very well, given its large size and the people constantly coming and going through the open doors to the spa lobby.
Now, the thing is this. I grew up in Africa; my body's thermoregulation is pretty good, but when it's hot, I do not perspire, I sweat. Copiously. I mean really a lot. And if it's hot and I am physically exerting myself hard – well, I don't merely drip, my face goes very red and the perspiration runs in rivulets down my body and onto the floor. I didn't merely spatter my machine; the sweat was actually pooling on the floor around the exercise bike. I kid you not.
Nobody else was suffering so. The older woman, on my left, was liberally dripping perspiration onto the floor, but just droplets – they weren't joining up. The younger woman, on my right, had perhaps a few dots on her forehead, but then, she did keep towelling off.
The row of guys at 90° to us, on our left, alternately either had damp foreheads, arms and vests, or, in the case of the plump chap, just pinkened a little. But I don't think that he was really trying.
After half an hour, I was pretty pooped. It's a hell of a way to spend seven quid. I would have liked to have taken a session with a personal trainer, but they were forty-five pounds an hour or a less-than-appealing hundred-and-fifty quid for a four-hour bundle. Clearly not everything is in fact free once you're aboard. Compare and contrast with the Internet access rates: sixty-five pounds for four hours over the fortnight, with a warning that access speeds are slower than customers might expect compared to landline broadband. I demurred. That's why you're only getting occasional updates, I'm afraid.
And then, after a cooling dip in the endless pool, where my prowess with the flow machine was starting to really impress some of the older ladies – but sadly not the younger ones – it was time for dinner, and my third ordeal of the day.
Apparently, it's an old law or an ancient statute or something that when a cruise-ship doesn't go into port for a day, dinner is a black-tie affair. This is not, I feel, the ideal garb for tropical climes with the mercury nearly touching 30° Celsius. I am not made of such stern stuff as my Victorian antecedents. As was discussed earlier, I sweat in order to maintain an even 37 or so degrees internal temperature.
And with almost all my skin surface covered by a shirt, bow-tie, dinner-jacket, smart trousers, socks, polished leather shoes and so on, well, I can't do that.
The result was that I was feeling faint and woozy before I even left the cabin, and even sitting directly under an AC vent in the Bay Tree Restaurant, I was still feeling pink and glowing and stuffed very tightly into my clothes. Dinner was a bit of a blur. I am reasonably sure that I used the correct cutlery for everything – I am an old public-school boy, after all – but I suspect I didn't hold my fork upside-down and ingest delicate little bites piled on its back.
The after-dinner entertainment was a George Michael tribute act. Not, I am afraid, an especially good one.
Of course, a significant number of the passengers are perfectly happy provided with alcohol, sun-beds and possibly an occasional dip in a pool to cool off. Kindles and iPads (and a few Android tablets) are everywhere, plus a huge array of fat blockbuster novels: Stieg Larsson is in evidence, plus Wilbur Smith, Stephanie Meyer, Jeffrey Archer and various other novelists I wouldn't touch even if paid to review 'em.
Instead, I went to a lecture on Horatio Nelson. This is not my normal sort of thing: History is the only 'O'-level that I didn't get and my knowledge is scanty, albeit not completely absent. However, Nelson has various ties with the Caribbean and it seemed like a good idea at the time.
I may as well be honest: I fell asleep. The speaker was keen, not dry or dull but also not scintillating or even particularly amusing – although he was, bless him, very self-deprecating and did suggest that he was an inexpensive alternative to sleeping pills. Poor chap.
After a spot of tapping away on my trusty netbook, I decided to exercise my actual muscles as exercising the mental ones on the Napoleonic wars really didn't work for me. Instead, I did something I've long wanted to try but never done: I took a spin class.
This was billed as the "Tour de Ventura" and happened in the passenger gym. (As opposed to the ccrew gym, which I glimpsed during one early-morning stroll as we were docking. ) I turned up early and warmed up on an exercise-bike-based mountain-biking video game, which was quite amusing.
Then it was time. I went over to the main floor, picked a bike, adjusted the saddle, and boarded. The tall, slim, bronzed, muscular (oh, how I hated him already) continental-European instructor put on a mix CD and we eight of his victims started pumping the pedals. Two women, one in her twenties and one in her fifties (at a guess), both slim and trim, and half a dozen blokes from twenty to fifty-plus, ranging from trim to your basic standard Brit bloke: oblate-spheroid, bald, sedentary.
It started quite hard and got harder. Any notion of maintaining a steady 70rpm cadence went out the window: we were spinning fast or pumping slowly on maximum resistance, standing upright on the pedals or leaning forwards while standing, or even hanging off one side or the other.
I kept up without real difficulty, but it was... warm. The gym is air-conditioned, but not very well, given its large size and the people constantly coming and going through the open doors to the spa lobby.
Now, the thing is this. I grew up in Africa; my body's thermoregulation is pretty good, but when it's hot, I do not perspire, I sweat. Copiously. I mean really a lot. And if it's hot and I am physically exerting myself hard – well, I don't merely drip, my face goes very red and the perspiration runs in rivulets down my body and onto the floor. I didn't merely spatter my machine; the sweat was actually pooling on the floor around the exercise bike. I kid you not.
Nobody else was suffering so. The older woman, on my left, was liberally dripping perspiration onto the floor, but just droplets – they weren't joining up. The younger woman, on my right, had perhaps a few dots on her forehead, but then, she did keep towelling off.
The row of guys at 90° to us, on our left, alternately either had damp foreheads, arms and vests, or, in the case of the plump chap, just pinkened a little. But I don't think that he was really trying.
After half an hour, I was pretty pooped. It's a hell of a way to spend seven quid. I would have liked to have taken a session with a personal trainer, but they were forty-five pounds an hour or a less-than-appealing hundred-and-fifty quid for a four-hour bundle. Clearly not everything is in fact free once you're aboard. Compare and contrast with the Internet access rates: sixty-five pounds for four hours over the fortnight, with a warning that access speeds are slower than customers might expect compared to landline broadband. I demurred. That's why you're only getting occasional updates, I'm afraid.
And then, after a cooling dip in the endless pool, where my prowess with the flow machine was starting to really impress some of the older ladies – but sadly not the younger ones – it was time for dinner, and my third ordeal of the day.
Apparently, it's an old law or an ancient statute or something that when a cruise-ship doesn't go into port for a day, dinner is a black-tie affair. This is not, I feel, the ideal garb for tropical climes with the mercury nearly touching 30° Celsius. I am not made of such stern stuff as my Victorian antecedents. As was discussed earlier, I sweat in order to maintain an even 37 or so degrees internal temperature.
And with almost all my skin surface covered by a shirt, bow-tie, dinner-jacket, smart trousers, socks, polished leather shoes and so on, well, I can't do that.
The result was that I was feeling faint and woozy before I even left the cabin, and even sitting directly under an AC vent in the Bay Tree Restaurant, I was still feeling pink and glowing and stuffed very tightly into my clothes. Dinner was a bit of a blur. I am reasonably sure that I used the correct cutlery for everything – I am an old public-school boy, after all – but I suspect I didn't hold my fork upside-down and ingest delicate little bites piled on its back.
The after-dinner entertainment was a George Michael tribute act. Not, I am afraid, an especially good one.
