It's Thursday, May 8th and we’ve arrived in France and the weather is absolutely miserable. It’s very cold, windy and rainy here. Because we didn’t arrange for any formal tour here in Cherbourg we’ve elected to stay onboard today and relax. T&J were tentatively booked for a tour so I guess they’ve got off as there is no answer in their room. They were a no-show for dinner last night so we’re hoping that they made the boat after their tour in Portland.

Other than a few events on the ship we’re pretty much waiting for our dinner at the Specialty restaurant tonight at the Pinnacle Steak House with T&J. It really has been a quiet day here on board – the weather has just not let up. In fact, the Captain just announced that we will be staying in Cherbourg beyond our scheduled 5:00 p.m. departure because of high winds.

What I can see from the onboard radar is that the wind is gusting from 24 to 30 mph, which apparently is outside our safety zone for departure from Cherbourg so we’ll be held up, tied to the pier until the winds diminish. It seems that we can remain on schedule if we depart prior to 7:30 p.m. – beyond that some of the tour events in Zeebrugge, Belgium will have to be changed.

We caught the "Spinettes" tonight before dinner at the main stage theatre – three young girls who regaled us with songs from the 40’s. From there we headed to the Pinnacle for a fantastic dinner – filet, rib eye and more rib eye except for J who had the ravioli. Just as we were finishing up with dinner, the shore started to move past the window – we were finally leaving but 5 hours late which will put us in Zeebrugge about 10:00 a.m. Guess capitano had the pedal to the metal as we sped through the water at about 21.5 knots/hour last night to make up the time.

It was a good night all around – I even left the casino up $400.00 with a very positive “set” in three card poker which paid out at 30 to 1. We have a driver set to meet us in Zeebrugge who will take us the one hour or so to Brugge where we’ve planned a walking tour on our own. I purchased a micro-sim in Portland for my unlocked iPhone, but just can seem to get it to connect – I’ll take it into Brugge with me to see if I can get things working or say goodbye to 10 quid. We’ll update things tomorrow.