En Route To Athens, Greece

Last evening at 12:00 midnight, our ship sailed from Alexandria en route to Athens, Greece. We will be a sea all day today and we will reach Athens tomorrow morning. We have been to Athens, Greece two times previously, most recently when we disembarked the ship in October, 2005.

We awoke early this morning even though we had moved our clocks forward one hour last evening to account for the new time zone that we are once again traveling in. We had breakfast in he Lido Café which was not very busy since many passenger’s were sleeping a bit later this morning given the time zone change and given that several of them had been on full day excursions of Cairo yesterday. After breakfast, we worked out in the Fitness Center as we had throughout the cruise. Anne Marie worked out on the treadmill and Keith worked out on the elliptical machine. We were there for about 90 minutes. Like the Lido Café, the Fitness Center was not very busy either.

After breakfast we changed and took care of some errands. Later in the morning we attended a presentation, which was followed by a question and answer session hosted by the President of Crystal Cruises, Gregg Michel and the Senior Vice President of Hotel Operations, Thomas Mazloum. They first began with a presentation which was an overview regarding the state of the cruise line. They had a record year in 2006 which was their first record year since 2000. They are the first cruise line to have eliminated trans-fat oils from all of their food items. They completed a refurbishment of the other cruise ship in the fleet; The Crystal Symphony. They have expanded their cruise shore excursion and land packages and have continued to expand their project excellence program. In terms of the future, they continue working on a design for the next ship for the fleet and hope to have the design finalized later this year so that it can go out to bid. They also plan to dry-dock the Crystal Serenity in the Fall of 2008. And, when they have added the third ship to the fleet they hope to go back to Alaska by offering San Francisco to Alaska cruises as they used to. The question and answer session was very productive and both Mr. Michel and Mr. Mazloum were very thoughtful in their answers.

We attended Team Trivia following the Q&A which is the next to last trivia session for this segment of the cruise. At this point we are still in second place for this segment but it is highly doubtful we can do any better. In today’s session we did correctly answer twelve of fifteen questions. Afterwards we enjoyed a nice lunch in the main dining room with two wonderful couples.

In the afternoon, we took care of a few errands including getting utilizing the laundry room. The laundry room was quite busy as others were also utilizing the time at sea to get their laundry washed.

This evening we attended a dinner that we had been invited to with the Senior Vice President of Hotel Operations, Thomas Mazloum and his wife, along with two other couples. One of the couples we have gotten to know quite well during the world cruise and the other couple we have met several times before so that was nice. We met for dinner after the second of the two Captain’s Farewell Receptions, which was held this evening. We ate in the Prego Italian Specialty Restaurant and had a wonderful dinner and an outstanding conversation with our hosts and tablemates.

Keith & Anne Marie