Day Eighty Eight - April 3

Today is the second of three consecutive sea days as our itinerary has been changed yet again.

"Due to adverse and severe weather conditions that will result in unsafe sailing conditions, we have made the prudent decision to bypass the ports of Gibraltar and Melilla." We were informed of this by the General Manager of Insignia on the evening of April 1. With the exception of our stop in Funchal we will have had ten sea days in eleven days.

As you can see, we are not only dealing with Covid and a war but adverse weather conditions affect our itinerary as well on a daily basis. It's part of cruisiing life.

Rather than visiting Gibraltar today we sailed by it at 05:30 this morning while entering the Straits of Gibraltar and the Mediterranean Sea. We will continue onto Cagliari and be docked on April 5.

The first sea day had all the deck chairs on the pool deck and on Deck Five tied down in expectation of the strong winds. They have even closed the Veranda in Terrace Cafe as well. It is strange looking at the pool deck and not seeing any chairs as they continued to be tied up.

At Trivia we managed to come in second again. One of the questions today dealt with the number of US Presidents that have been in office during the reign of Queen Elizabeth II. I wonder how many will get the right answer.

Also at Trivia we were informed by the cruise director that we should expect to receive direction from the CDC and Oceania's Head Office that face masks will become mandatory once again in public spaces. This might annoy some passengers as very few of the passengers either getting on in Barbados or Miami were wearing masks. This is due to the fact that although there has not been any cases on the ship many of the countries we are to visit requires the use of face masks. As an example, Cagliari our next port requires the use of FFP2 masks (KN95 masks should be OK) as mandatory on public transportation and taxis.

You also may be required to provide proof of vaccinations in restaurants, inside bars, or museums.

As a final note, our trip planned for Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, Monday and Tuesday next week will be delayed as the Israeli government requires local health authorities to board our ship in Ashdod, April 10 to perform mandatory PCR tests on all guests. Once all guests have been tested the passengers will be required to proceed to the cruise terminal to receive your passport and meet with immigration. We will then return to Insignia and wait for all guests' PCR results. The ship will not be cleared until all steps are fully completed and everyone on board has tested negative. If there is one positive case we will be denied entrance to Israel. This process could take up to six hours and we will certainly have our fingers crossed as this port was going to be the highlight of our now magical mystery cruise.