Lima to Pisco



We stayed on the ship!  We have never done that when a ship was in port but three months ago we went to Paracas, which is near the port of Pisco, flew over the Nazca Lines, took a boat to the Ballestas Islands and had a desert adventure complete with racing through the dunes and having a dinner in the desert under the stars.  So, we are here again and stayed on the ship. 
 All in all, it was a wonderful day.

We had an appointment with a personal trainer to go over the equipment and provide us with a program we could follow over the next several days and spent the rest of the afternoon relaxing and getting organized!

One of the  Oceania perks is that all the specialty restaurants on-board do not charge an extra price (except La Reserve which is run by Wine Spectator and is a dinner/wine pairing evening).  However, the number of times you can visit these restaurants in controlled by the type of state room you have. Before boarding, we were informed that we were only allowed to reserve one night in each of the specialty restaurants (Red Ginger – Asian, Jacques- French, Toscana – Italian, and Polo Grill – Steak) and then could possibly get additional reservations if there was availability .  Before going down to our meeting with the personal trainer we wandered down to ask the Dining Representative if we could reserve additional nights (Oceania had told us we may be able to reserve more after a few days if there was availability).  To our great surprise, we were able to reserve five more nights so we now have 10 of our 18 nights at one of the Specialty restaurants!  We loved our dinner at Red Ginger so much, we have 2 more nights reserved.

Tonight our dinner was at the Polo Grill.  The food was excellent but not quite up to Red Ginger.  As in past trips, we had a small problem with getting our before dinner drinks.  The lead sommelier failed to take our order, appeared to realize his mistake and sent one of his assistants over to take care of us.  The assistant then gave us an out of date list of the wines we could order and then, when asked, reluctantly, and with a poor attitude,  lived up to the fact that it was the wrong list.  It took her the rest of the evening to become somewhat cordial.

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