A bit of a rough seas night last night but we continued to make progress from Japan up past the Russian coastline:

I’ve included the entire route so far from Otaru as a small red line in the middle of the ocean doesn’t really provide much context!

The sky was brighter today - even some patches of blue - but the seas remained rough with the ship occasionally sounding like a plane suddenly touching down on tarmac!

Progressive trivia at 12:15pm resulted in us continuing with our incremental improvement - now up to 13 out of 15. We’re still not in the top 4 teams, though. Maybe after adding today’s score? We’ll find out tomorrow.

This afternoon, my wife was due to have a massage in the ship’s spa until last night when we looked at the Viking Daily and realised there was a gin tasting session this afternoon. Thankfully, an early visit to the spa this morning secured the opportunity to reschedule the massage to Monday #1 next week … freeing her up for the gin tasting.

There were four gins to be tasted, with water to drink and coffee beans to sniff in between to clear the palette.

Speaking of Monday #1, sometimes it can be difficult to keep track of which day you are on within a holiday and, frankly, skipping forwards an hour each day is making it really tricky! The time difference between us and home continued to grow and will do for a couple more days until we have that double Monday and suddenly snap to being behind home.

There was no doubt, though, that today was a special day. Special, I think, regardless of what one thinks of the British Monarchy or, perhaps indeed, monarchies in general. This was the first coronation in 70 years for the UK.

For dinner, the ship presented a grand British menu in the World Cafe:

So much to choose from! In the end, I had a Cornish pastie, the steak pie and fish & chips:

At 7pm, BBC HD (which is the BBC channel carried via satellite to the ship) showed the coronation and the ship showed it on the big screen in the pool area. It was rather surreal, though, watching such pagentry and solemnity with the water in the pool sloshing around as the ship swayed and making such a racket!

In the end, though, we retired to our room to watch the actual Coronation service. The time difference between here and the UK made it really quite late for us.