Today was the first of many consecutive days at sea while we sail across the North Pacific heading towards Alaska.

In the absence of talking about excursions, I thought I’d share some information about the ship we’re on and the Viking Ocean ships in general. Who knows … typing this out might help our trivia team if we get any more questions about Viking!

We’re on the Viking Orion which was built in 2018. All of the current ocean ships are largely the same - 227m (745 ft) long with a gross tonnage of 47,842 tons, 465 staterooms and 930 passengers. All of these ships have been built by Fincantieri and are registered under the Norwegian flag.

Note that I said current ocean ships. Beginning in 2024, Viking will have slightly longer ships - 238m instead of 227m - because they are using hydrogen fuel cells instead of diesel. There will be 490 staterooms but Viking have not yet confirmed the passenger count.

Here is a 360 degree view of The Living Room, including a view of decks 2 & 3.

Trivia today starts to be a progressive series - our daily scores are now tallied and there will be a highscore table to track our progress. We did slightly better today than the two previous rounds - 11 out of 15.

The day has been slightly frustrating in that both my wife & I had our own wish lists of things to do … but they were all “tasks” involving using the Internet and, for some reason, the quality of the Internet service has been lower today than previous days. Never mind … we’re supposed to be on holiday! Still … they were tasks that we don’t normally have a lot of time for at home due to otherwise busy lives.

Today was the first of many days where we put the clocks forward, so we’ve shifted from UTC +9 to UTC +10, leading up to having two Mondays next week …

We went to the Explorer’s Lounge for pre-dinner drinks. My wife had a Negroni (gin, sweet vermouth, Campari, soda), which she didn’t like too much as she felt that some of the flavours overwhelmed the gin. I had the pear cider again which I only sipped a bit before taking it with us to dinner.

For dinner, we ate at the Restaurant. We both had Beef & Barley Broth with root vegetables as a starter. For the mains course, my wife had Fettuccine Fresche alla Carbornara while I had Roast Free Range Poulet de Bresse with mash potatoes and steamed vegetables. For drinks, my wife had the Vinologist Swartland Syrah again.