Anderson South America Misadventure Day 28 – Off the Coast of Cuba “Paper Airplane Day” April 1, 2020

This is Day 10 of confinement and we are both still alive, even if we did not get our Coke Zero delivery. I woke up at 3:47 am with a killer headache. I realized that I was dehydrated. I have been trying very hard to keep drinking water but I like really cold water. This room temp stuff is, well, it is wet. I got up to pour some water for myself. Our last water delivery was a 6 liter jug. This thing is not light. I do not know how they expected some of the little old ladies on this cruise to heft this jug. Of course I am doing all of this in the dark. I did not want to wake up Rob. I put my water bottle on our little table and grab the jug. Umph this thing is heavy. I get the cap off and make sure to put it down where I could find it. Now start to pour water, in the dark and not spill. I did it by sound and get the water bottle close to filled but did not spill any water. Put the lid back on the jug and put the jug somewhere that will not be tripped on. It takes me a while to get back to sleep. I wake up at 8:00 and the ship is very still. Um, are we in port somewhere? No, the waters have calmed. We are really making time. Today we did interviews with our local NBC channel, a news agency in Berlin and The Today Show Print Edition. Reporters who I have previously spoken too contact me for updates and to get more information. It gives us something to do. Uploading videos take a bit. You have to be patient and only send one at a time. I have also learned to keep the videos to 15 seconds. You answer one question at a time. We have a whole set up. Put my laptop on the little table, prop the phone up on the computer and sit on the edge of the love seat. Today while I was waiting for a video to upload I picked up a piece of card stock. We get one of these with each dinner. It has an inspirational statement on it with our cabin number. I started to fold the card stock into a paper airplane. I do not know what I folded but this one the nose was too heavy. I dug around on the desk and found one more piece and folded a new one. My goal was to throw the paper airplane from the bed to the door of the cabin. This one made a loop. Rob thought that I was not throwing it properly so he threw it. Yup, it made a loop. I found an old puzzle page and folded another airplane. This one got further but the second time it went right in the trash. Rob of course had to make a comment about this. TV is still sparse. One of the channels has videos of all of the great places that we will visit on this cruise. Kind of cruel at this point. We also get ads for the specialty restaurants. The food is good, in fact tonight we had surf and turf. When they serve lobster tail you wait for your waiter to come back to removed the meat from the shell. I looked at mine last night then looked at Rob and said “I am waiting for Romi to come take it out of the shell.” Romi was our waiter and if we missed a night in the dining room he would worry. I hope that Romi is not one of sick crew. I am sure that all of you have seen that picture of us with the penguins from the Falkland Islands. Rob is wearing a Wisconsin Badger hat and wow, news outlets in Wisconsin have noticed that. That is why Channel 12 in Milwaukee interview us. Today a Madison TV station contacted Victoria to get a Wisconsin connection. My sister Maggie has been tapped to do this interview. I do interviews all of the time and have no problem with it. Maggie on the other hand prefers to be in the background. Victoria sent her a script with talking points. She will do fine. I can’t wait to see the video of it. I can’t wait to see any of the videos. I cannot get them to play on my computer with this wifi. This afternoon Victoria listened to the Boward County Commissioners meeting. She did this for four hours to find out what they were going to do about our ship disembarking. I get a lot of information from her. The plan is that we will stay on the ship and then wearing masks we will be driven right to our plane. We will be isolated on the plane and flown home. Since we lost our ride home Douglas came up with this plan. He will have Michelle drive him to our house. He will get one of our cars then drive to the airport with Michelle following. They will wait in the cell phone lot until we have our luggage. He will pull up to the curb until he sees us then leave the car and go home. We will be required to self quarantine for two weeks. Not leaving the house at all. No walks for Rob. I was hoping that I could go home and sit on my swing, I will have to find out what the exact rules are. We are working on a grocery list for Douglas so that we have some fresh food. The captain tonight announced that we will be arriving in Ft Lauderdale on Thursday, but plans are still being firmed up. We have learned that plans change at the drop of a hat. He said that we should not make any flight arrangements, all of that would be made for us. OK, there is a light at the end of the tunnel.