3/9 Icy Straight Point. Happy Birthday Paul

Monday 3^rd Icy Strait Point

 

Happy birthday Paul.  Hope you have a great day.

We woke in time but decided not to gym. We had arranged to meet Gail and Dean at their cabin, which was 450 sq ft or twice the size of ours. They had a deeeeeep bath and a large balcony and a kitchen sort of area with kettle and coffee machine. And generally heaps of cupboards and bigger Tvs etc. Ooooh, our drawers are quite amazing – they slide in and out on rollers and when you shut them, they stop just short of fully closed and then slowly glide shut by themselves. We haven’t dug around to see how that works.

From there the 4 of us went straight down to the 2^nd floor dock where we caught the shuttle tender to the wharf – barely 100 metres away. We had a very pleasant slow stroll for almost 2 hours to the tiny settlement and back. It was extremely fair weather, although apparently Alaska tends to be very rainy. Back at the wharf we had a browse through the interesting machinery at the old cannery.

Great scenery again.  Island is a graveyard

Low tide.  Lovely colour of seaweed on rocks

It was an afternoon of Almost in the games and trivia. Tribond ended in a tiebreak which we lost after coming up with some very good answers throughout. Gail was very quick with a lot of answers. Nicky from Miami (and her parents did NOT swim there!) cajoled us into turning out for the blongo tournament down at the bottom of the atrium, with 8 floors of balconies looking down. Basically there are 3 rails like a drying rack and you get to try and wrap your blongo round one of the rails. The blongo is effectively 2 golf balls joined by a 12” rope and it will wrap round something like the thingies (bolos?) the gauchos throw at cows. It was interesting but we are unlikely to do it regularly.

J and Gail did the 70s line dance, where they learned the Travolta dance from Saturday Night Fever. Then straight to Rhyme Time, which had nothing to do with nursery rhymes – you had to rephrase two words with a rhyme – so vulgar man becomes crude dude. Once again we lost a tie break.

We took time off for a tea break on the back verandah where we saw a whale in the distance, blowing off a few times and flapping its tail. Then it was time for Where In The World Is, which we missed by a point.

And so to dinner – Italian night. They finally had lamb shanks, which were excellent, and 4 prawns, which I had for a snack. The usual parade of waiters and O Sole Mio, which they did very well – as they said they had waiters of 40 nationalities, none of them Italian. I told Dean off for waving his hands in my face in the course of his stories – how do I tell him to just shut up for a few minutes occasionally? Tom didn’t utter a peep and sat with his arms folded.

We then dashed off to the music trivia, which was 70s – pretty good for us. A Canadian couple joined us but didn’t know anything. We managed about half the songs and a couple of groups and then James and wife arrived. They were the couple that joined us just after we won the first music show and he has been in a couple of trivia. He turned out to know everything and added a few groups to the songs we had. When they played the songs again for the answers he knew everything – sort of Hannah without hair. We had done enough to win – so that is 3 nights out of 4!

J went to the production show and I hit the gym for an hour. Then it was time for the great 70s disco in the atrium, where J and Gail were supposed to do their line dance, but the whole area was swamped and it didn’t happen quite like that.

So a very busy and enjoyable day – all we needed was a brown bear.

Where, oh where are all the brown bears!!!!