After the excitement of being on land, today we are once again confined to the ship as we continue our trip west through the Pacific.

After the illness, today marked my triumphant return to Zumba and luckily for me and due to a culinary
demonstration that was scheduled during our normal class time, it was only a 30 minute power class .

After lunch I tried my hand at creating a gift bag with a dog on it. I thought it was going to be a normal ‘art and craft for fun’ session, where there is a little bit of gluing and then you’re done. I was wrong. Within about 2 minutes of walking in the room, I realised that I had made a terrible mistake. I had walked in on a full blown serious art and craft session (which included cutting material, using a paper pattern and sewing!) with several members of the very serious art and craft group – many of which have their own scissors and craft packs.

The magnitude of the mistake sunk in even further, when the ladies on my table started discussing what kind of stitch they were going to use to create their animals feet. My plan of attack was to go back to my high school sewing lesson and just put some thread through the material in a straight line then try to make it look like the example.

People were taking the exercise very seriously . The communal glue on the table was horded and the communal scissors were not shared, even though the main culprit had told us all that they ‘should stay in the middle so we can all use them’.

Every so often you would hear a tense cry of ‘who has the example, I NEED to see the example’ go out across the room.

My dog ended up being brown, with white/brown ears, a white/brown tail, a black eye patch and an orange collar. Embracing my inner artist, I ‘borrowed’ someone’s left over red material and made my dog a tongue (no one else had a red tongue). While it has slightly wonky feet, it looks like a felt dog stuck on a cloth bag and I think it’s cute.

After my adventure in craft group I felt I needed to calm my nerves and I was a little on the hungry side, so I headed up to the buffet for a cup of tea and a couple of scones.

My final activity before going to dinner was sitting outside on the pool deck and watching the Billy Joel concert that they had on the big screen. I’m not a fan but it beat going back to the cabin to watch ‘World’s Cutest Animals’ for the fourth time… I mean I know which one wins!

Fun fact:
The Cook Islands is an island country in the South Pacific. It comprises 15 small islands whose total land area is 240 square kilometres.