Northeast Passage Part Five

Days Eight and Nine

We have finally reached the relaxing portion of the trip with a couple of days without port calls. We're just sailing across the Gulf of St. Lawrence, enjoying a bit of rain and wind, gloom filled skies above and white capped waves below. I think it's hot buttered rum time.

We are doing all the normal cruise things for a change now that we don't have port calls to distract us. This consists primarily of eating more things, getting our drinking started earlier in the day and forgetting about those pledges to improve our minds. So we missed the classes we signed up for  - the Berlitz French course and the Yamaha keyboard course. I felt bad later but that was then. In the meantime we spent a great deal of time reading, watched a couple of movies, and I walked around the deck a couple of times. Mary went to afternoon tea while I played Two Years Before the Mast, braving the sea and the elements. Or something like that. It might have been my means of skipping the tea, but that was just unfounded supposition on Mary's part.

We did get some hours on the computer. Speeds weren't quite up to landline standards, but they were still respectable, though the prices were most definitely not, at twenty cents a minute.

Over the course of our two sea days, as well as a subsequent day in Quebec City, we tried both of the specialty restaurants on board and the Vintage Room wine dinner. The first specialty restaurant we tried, Jade Garden, is an Asian fusion restaurant. Apparenty it is associated with Wolfgang Puck in some manner and serves some of the dishes from his Chinois restaurant. We enjoyed the food immensely and the service was as good as in any in the main dining room, if not better. I could go on and on about the succulence of the lobster appetizer or the stunning spiciness of the prawns but then that would be just taunting. Suffice it to say that the meal was excellent and we would take the opportunity to dine there again in a flash. Interestingly enough we were seated at one of only four or five occupied tables in the restaurant when we dined at Jade Garden, while probably another ten or so tables went empty. Perhaps the majority of the passengers are of an age group that is more comfortable in an Italian place rather than an Asian venue. We'd have a chance to check that out in a couple of days.

In the meantime we participated in a Vintage Room dinner. Basically it is a wine tasting dinner, with different wines served with every course. In this case all the wines were hand picked by the head sommelier on board and from what we tasted he is a talented judge of wines. I won't bother to list all the courses or the wines we drank, but we did discover a couple of new varieties of which we were unaware that we intend to seek out when we get home. The dinner is expensive and limited to 12 guests (our dinner had 11 total) and held only once or twice per sailing. We definitely thought we got our money's worth out of it.

I wish we could say the same about our last specialty restaurant experience at Prego, an Italian themed restaurant, in case the name didn't clue you in. Unfortunately it turned out to be the only disappointing meal we had during our entire cruise. It wasn't that the food or the service was bad or anything. It just wasn't up to snuff with anything else. The food was lacking in any real excitment or snap, instead being fairly pedestrian middle of the road Italian. After the excellence of the Asian restaurant our expectations were probably unduly high. We both decided that we'd rather eat in the main dining room than in Prego.

Mary quite enjoyed her tea. It was served every afternoon but we only attended once. We'd probably have sampled it more often if we weren't already busy still digesting lunch when it was served.