Rhodes

Friday 2nd September

David woke at 7 but I managed to doze until 8. Seeing we were up so early we decided to try out the main dining room for breakfast. We thought it might be the only morning we would make it in time. We were not particularly impressed. They gave David the wrong cereal and his hash brown was over-cooked. Our omelettes were lovely but very rich and filling. We asked for brown toast but it turned out to be very dark German bread, toasted until it was dry and crispy.

The Old Town of Rhodes was about a 5-minute walk from the ship. I thought it was close but David struggles to walk for longer than 5 minutes, although he can dance all day. Several times during the day he had to stop to ‘crack’ his back in order to relieve the strain. 

I love the city walls of Rhodes, and the old buildings and remains of even older places.

We wandered for a short distance and then stopped at a café with reasonable Internet. 

We then wandered some more through the lovely streets filled with shop after shop. 

After a few hours we headed back to the ship. Our first stop was, of course, Café al Bacio. My normal order is hot chocolate and a lemon tart. I noticed a bit of discomfort and the start of gastric reflux and wondered if it was the lemon tart.

The weather was warm and sunny so we changed into our swimming costumes and headed for the pool deck. We lay in the sun, swam in the pool, sat in the hot tub and sipped cold drinks. In my case it was usually non-alcoholic raspberry daiquiris.

Around 6pm we headed back to our room to get ready for dinner. We had chosen an early dinner in order to try out the ballroom dancing session at 8.30.

I arrived in the Sky Lounge just at 8.30 to find the Captain’s Cocktail Party just ending. We have not been on enough Celebrity ships to merit an invitation to that. It was hard to tell when the dancing session had begun as the music was more like mood music than dancing music. Eventually someone got up to dance a waltz and we realised it had started. We must have had at least 10 waltzes in a row and only 2 of them were at the right speed. (We later found out that the Entertainment Director had forgotten to press Shuffle, so all the dances were consecutive.) With 4 couples on the circular floor, it was difficult to step it out and do any real dancing. One couple left after their first waltz and after that there were only 4 couples for the entire 2 hours. It was at a poor time, as those at the cocktail party would have gone to dinner, and others would have been at the show for the middle hour. After the waltzes there were some fast rumbas. We attempted one rumba as we thought we would not dance if we did not give in to their tempo. The rumbas were followed by a couple of slow Viennese Waltzes. One of these was slow enough for us to dance a Tango Vals. That was followed by about an hour of fast cha-chas and we were not attempting those. This meant that in 2 hours we managed 4 dances. This is really not a ship for dancing. The other couples attempted a few more than us, but gave up when the cha-chas came on. I enjoyed a couple of Mimosas while we sat around.

We stayed on to see what the advertised ‘Yes-No Game’ might be but decided it was boring – passengers being set up to fail so that others could laugh at them. We went back to our room for another early night.

Unfortunately I woke up at 2am with gastric pain and a bit of reflux, plus coughing. I ended up in the bathroom bringing up as much gastric bile as I could, until I felt better. I then read for an hour until I felt ready to sleep.