It is Monday, October 7th, Day number 8 of our New England cruise. Today is our last sea day of the trip. We have 3 port stops remaining in Sydney, Halifax, and Portland, Maine. We don’t have any excursions booked in Sydney so we may just stay on the ship tomorrow. We had to set forward the clocks 1 hour last night so we slept in. At 10:30 we grabbed a coffee from Caffe el Baccio and headed to the theatre for the port talk on Halifax. The guest speaker this week has been really good and I enjoyed hearing his overview on Halifax. This is different than ships I have been on that are trying to promote ship excursions and the speaker was very educational about what to do in the port.
We decided to have lunch in the main dining room today. They offer breakfast and dinner in the dining room everyday, but they only offer lunch on sea days. I ordered a mushroom appetizer and a scrambled egg croisant panini. There is a special music piano performance theatre at 2pm that we will go to in the theatre. Tonight we have our final specialty dining night and will be going back to the Tuscan grill.
We enjoyed our second port day in Quebec city yesterday. We decided to spend some time walking around the lower old town and then took the funicular to the upper city. There was a marathon in lower Quebec city both saturday and sunday so it made it difficult to cross over to where the funicular is. While we were waiting, we grabbed a beer at the Archibald brewery. The funicular costs $5 per person each way, there is no exchange rate applied and you must pay in cash. You can also bypass the funicular and walk up the stairs, but there are quite a few stairs.
When we got to the top, we walked through the Fairmont Hotel Frontenac to explore the lobby of this great hotel. We walked down some of the local streets lined with many restaurants and stores. We decided to walk over to the St. Jean area of the city and check out the local liquor shop, SAQ. Liquor is regulated in Quebec and must be sold in one of their designated liquor stores. We had walked a ways away from the ship and funicular at this point so we decided to take uber back to the ship. We boarded and went up to the Oceanview cafe for a late lunch and then wached the 4pm sailaway back in our cabin.
Dinner last night was in the dining room. I ordered shrimp cocktail and a Caesar sald and for my entree ordered a mushroom pasta with goat cheese. I really enjoyed the meal and was more impressed with the pasta dish than I expected. The sommelier was able to open the last bottle the dining room had of the special Frescobaldi Chianti specially packaged for Murano. If I want it at dinner again, I will have to visit the wine bar on the way to dinner.
There was a new piano player on board so we went to the 7pm show. We also went to an 8pm show in the sky lounge. All in all, it was a great day. We loved Quebec city as a port stop and were so glad to get to visit it on this itinerary.
