Love the Silver Suite, Kristin - thanks for answering my questions ahead of time. The ship is simply beautiful. I visited one of the verandah suites yesterday. Outside of a few minor differences in layout, it's a Voyager suite with a little less room. Loveseat instead of three person couch; end tables on either side. The table in front of the loveseat is identical.

Susan - so nice to hear from you! Baby camels are awfully cute, too. There was one being weaned from its mother. He was going overboard trying to be creative to avoid weaning. She was kushed on the ground and he was crawling all over her. It was pretty funny to watch.

Fujairah is in the early stages of tourist development. The shore excursion was scheduled for 9 to 12 (I think). It was tough for them to find 3 hours of stuff to show us. There's a deep canyon where we stopped for a few minutes, a museum that was at most a 10 minute stop, a fort they didn't want you to get close to and a drive by the Indian Ocean and some huge, some gaudy hotels. Interesting to see how they are progressing the tourism business, but not much infrastructure to support it that we could see.

If I understood the guide correctly, the tribe members get pretty much a free ride from all the oil wealth in the emirates. Free housing (and we are talking ample, beautiful, new housing), medical, education, etc. The locals insist on 51% ownership and import workers to run the shops, etc. Locals raise families, shop, are engaged in their religion. A fascinating place to visit but why return?

The final stop was at an ancient mosque around the time of noon prayers. The guide said 20 minutes at the stop - umm, the ship was supposed to sail in 20 minutes. She was urging the driver to hustle and fielding phone calls about where were we. She's telling the person calling we're nearly there while the driver is shaking his head. No one was worried the ship would leave without us, but time management should not have been a factor since there's not much to do or see here. Anyway ... most of the other tour buses / dune ride 4x4s were late getting back to the ship. Michele & Don got a quick chance to see their dune ride driver from the prior evening, which was a fun encounter. We expected the restaurants to be overrun once aboard; it was a pleasant surprise to find no trouble or crowds for lunch.

We had a 45 minute spanish lesson with the social hostess. That was worthwhile, but was one reason I missed trivia. Evidently trivia is not run for daily wins by the team. Hmm .. we may have to come up with our own trivia scorekeeping system. A jewelery designer from Jordan is aboard, so we enjoyed chatting with her at the welcome aboard party.

Dinner was with with the house keeper, Marilyn and Suzie last night and a recently retired Kaiser physician from the west coast and his wife. We were thinking of Masaki and Amanda after we met them. The housekeeper is South African so we had a delightful conversation and lots to talk about. She's been on Silversea for 6 years and has worked her way up from cabin stewardess to her current position. The lobster main was terrific; the appetizer so-so.

Le Champagne offers two options: $30 per person plus buy your own wine or $200 per person including wine pairings. It's all personal choice, but I'm hard pressed to see the value in that proposition.

Tomorrow's a sea day. After the Dubai and Cairo pre-cruise activities, I think we are all ready for relaxation.

Cheers, Anne