Trivial Experience

As with many things aboard ship I am sure that a certain amount of serendipity involved. I met Thom and Lynne during the boarding process. Nice people, they cruise often and more likely on Celebrity than Royal. They are also members of Cruise Critic so I ran into them again at the Meet and Mingle.

Due to the Noro Virus outbreak, there has been no breakfast buffet set out for the Diamond/Diamond + members in the upstairs lounge so the Diamond Lounge has been remarkably empty in the mornings. In fact, the morning on the ship which also happened to correspond to a sea day saw Thom along with a lovely English gentleman as the only others in the lounge for at least the hour prior to 0800.

I didn’t say that they had disabled the specially coffee machine, so being up bright and early so as to enjoy a latte made perfect sense to me and apparently them as well. For the next several mornings we have had a chance to become better acquainted.

Last night turned out to be another formal night – the Englishman, his wife and two friends also decided to eat in the Windjammer – dressed to the nines they were. They invited me to join them so I had more than pleasant dinner companions rather than sitting by myself with sushi and a book.

This afternoon, for lack of knitting enthusiasm, I headed to the theater planning on listening in on Royal Caribbean trivia. So there I was, minding my own business when Thom came down for a chat and invited me back to join him and Lynne for the trivia. They are major league trivia players and are heading a team in major leadership contention in the progressive trivia. Me? I know all sorts of useless bits of this and that. Nothing that is usually asked in trivia.

Combining our efforts, it turned into an interesting challenge. There were a few things that I knew absolutely to be correct and a couple of things of which Thom was sure. Lynne had a couple of others cold. GIven the way things worked out we managed to get 16/20 questions right. It would have been 17 had not Thom been sure he knew which ship in the fleet had the highest gross tonnage (Lynne and I were right – it was not the same as the longest ship).

Most importantly, we beat out the other teams. A totally amazing (I guess it helps to know that Steffi Graff is the godmother of one of the ships, the train in Alaska is called the Wilderness Express, and horses bring bad weather to sea voyages) fact considering the number of 50 cruises or more participants in competion. So today I have a keychain (slot pull), a casino coin (didn’t put it in the slot) and a fairly decent wallet in which to put our first place medals!

Treasure!

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