At Sea Day #2: First Dinner in the Dining Room & a Late-Night Tropical Buffet

April 2, 2019

ABOARD COSTA PACIFICA IN THE NORTH ATLANTIC OCEAN – Read about West Africa for my next trip, had my first dinner in the New York New York dining room, took in the tropical buffet and dance party, and failed to override an annoying restriction on my cabin’s TV during our second day at sea crossing the Atlantic Ocean after visiting six Caribbean islands.

Got up at 1:52 p.m. aboard Costa Pacifica. Oh man I slept almost 12 hours again. Plus there’s a one-hour time change forward from GMT-3 to GMT-2, so the time became 2:52 p.m. I missed the lunch buffet. Ugh.

Another nice sunny day at sea.

Went up to Decks 12 and 13 to read the Senegal and Gambia chapters of Lonely Planet’s West Africa guidebook. I’ll be heading there after this cruise concludes April 11 in Barcelona, Spain. Grabbed a snack about 4 p.m.

The sun set at 7:23.

Sunset viewed from Costa Pacifica during At Sea Day #2

Then I jogged 41½ minutes on the Deck 12 track. It was so windy! Holy cow. I should try Deck 4 tomorrow – though unsure if it goes all the way around the ship. But it should be more sheltered.

For the first time, I took my dinner (actually my lunch due to my sleep schedule) tonight at the New York New York dining room. I was assigned to the first seating, but got switched to Table 380 by myself at the second seating. It’s nice having my own table. I am not a fan of dining with strangers.

My first dinner in Costa Pacifica’s New York New York dining room

I ate a five-course meal. It was okay. I found the menu to be limited. My appetizer was Aruba seafood croquette with Tamarind sauce followed by a second course of seafood jambalaya. Next came a caesar salad, then my main course: grilled scorpion fish fillet. I was disappointed that although my dessert (chocolate and coconut flan) was good, no ice cream was available!

Appetizer
Seafood jambalaya
Main course
Dessert

After dinner I went to the conference room on Deck 4 to scan numerous travel papers. Trying to lighten my heavy load.

Took a break at 11:20 p.m. to visit the tropical buffet out on the pool deck.

There was a surprising number of people there at Lido Calypso eating and dancing at this late hour! (This voyage, like most long cruises, is mostly full of senior citizens.) I did not expect that.

I grabbed dinner from the tropical buffet and stashed it in my cabin to eat later. Returned to my “floating office” on Dec 4 to continue scanning documents. Ugh, so tedious!

Returned to my cabin at 5:35 a.m. I had to unplug the wires for the two intercoms in my stateroom – one in the main area and one in the bathroom. The ship makes announcements at 11 a.m. that come into the cabin, disrupting my sleep. Most cruiseships do not make any announcements into cabins unless there is an emergency. It’s worse aboard Pacifica as the announcements are made in six languages so they go on forever.

Next I set to work trying to fix my cabin TV so I could plug my laptop in the HDMI port to watch videos on the bigger screen. I ran into an annoying problem the second day of the cruise when I could not switch the TV’s input from the ship’s cable wire to my HDMI cable. I learned Costa Pacifica’s televisions are programmed to disallow any devices to be hooked up to them. I thought I might be able to perform a factory reset to get rid of that restriction, but I could not find anything on the mother board to uninstall the Costa software restricting input ports. Really strange. I wonder how such a restriction could be installed on a TV without any visible way to change or disable it. I’ve never encountered anything like this in any cruise cabin or hotel room around the world.

I gave up, screwing the rear panel back on the TV. Watched “NCIS” on my laptop before bed at 6:51 a.m.