Monday, October 8th, all at sea

Today we are at sea on our way to the Panama Canal. This morning we were lucky enough to get invited to a Backstage tour private cruise event for Select and Elite members even though we won't be a Captain's Club Select member until our next cruise with Celebrity.



The tour started out with us seated in the Celebrity theater where they served everyone champagne. Randy and I did take a pass on the champagne since it was 11am and we had a wine and food tasting to go to in a few hours. After an introduction and question/answer period by some of the cast of the Celebrity singers/dancers and backstage crew, we were split in to three groups and taken one group at a time onto the stage where they demonstrated how they spin the cast around on part of the stage that moves, and then took us backstage to see the costume and changing area. After that we were placed on part of the stage that descends to see that lower area and then they turned us around so when we came back up to the theater level we could wave at our audience which was of course another group waiting for their turn at the tour.



As Randy and I were exiting the theater I spoke to Tanushka, the Captain's Club Hostess and thanked her for the opportunity to take the tour. I asked if there was to be a tour of the Infinity's kitchen this cruise and she answered yes, but it was only for the select/elite members and wouldn't be in the daily program. I explained that this cruise qualified me as select but wouldn't go into effect until our next cruise which I expected to be the inaugural voyage of the Solstice on December 14th, 2008 and I sort of doubted they would be doing that type of tour on a maiden voyage. Tanushka agreed with me that it would be unlikely and then was sweet enough to check and see if she could make room for Randy and me on the tour and lucky us she did. The kitchen tour was not to be until Friday, the 12th our last formal night so I'll cover that later.




Later that afternoon we joined Angus and Joyce at a wine and food pairing tasting at the Trellis restaurant. It was a lot of fun tasting the wines with cheese, chicken, chocolate, olives and cherry tomatoes. All the wines were California wines and two of them were from Wente winery in Livermore where Randy and I have enjoyed a couple dinners with concerts by Heart and Styx.


After the Wine tasting the four of us participated in a trivia and spelling contest. The movie below shows a tiny part of the spelling contest. Our team didn't win, but considering we weren't as large or experienced at the contests as the other teams we did good.