Please note that these opinions are my own!!!
We set the alarm to wake us up, not something that I like doing on holiday, so that we could have breakfast before going to Guernsey for the day. Breakfast was in the Buffeteria (named by Beth), not quite a buffet, quite like a cafeteria. There appeared to be a huge range of food until we realised it was the same on both sides of the aisle and there appeared to be 4 starting points to queue (yes another queuing pen). We managed to get in the wrong queue but were alerted to this by the tuts and drawing in of breath of our fellow inmates, I mean passengers. I had a full English Breakfast, reminiscent of the day before at the Premier Inn, I am starting to get suspicious of the close relationship P&O and the Premier Inn share. If I see Lenny Henry doing an ad for P&O I wont be surprised. The breakfast was served with the animosity and resentment I had learned to expect from the waiting staff. OK, the positives about the breakfast were that the scrambled egg was reasonable and ….. no that was it. My breakfast wasn’t hot but I managed to eat some before the staff rushed over to remove our plates and wipe the table down. This may have been down to the ever threatening noro virus rather than personal animosity.
Next we were off on our first excursion, Guernsey. This involved getting on another much smaller boat, a tender, to take us ashore so we shuffled into another holding pen to wait. Beth had cleverly bought cards so we played my mums favourite game A*s+hole which Beth won with with triumph and glee. As always our family motto is ‘Gloating in Victory, Vindictive in Defeat’.
This was a wonderful excursion. I have a delightful friend, Duncan, who has been singing the praises of Guernsey to me for some time and I have to admit that he is absolutely right. The day was bright and sunny, we had places to go and things to see so the first thing we did was go to M&S, very exotic, where I bought some much needed Scooby snacks just in case. Next we went to a coffee shop because it had WIFI!!! At last, we could connect with the rest of the world. There was no talking between us once we had that wifi code.The coffee took over an hour to drink. We facebooked and emailed and were generally very happy bunnies. After the staff at the coffee shop were clearing our plates and their throats more and more loudly we realised we had to leave the virtual world and explore the real one. Guernsey was lovely, quite like Jersey with lots of nice shops and restaurants. In the family way that we have we studied every single menu, and I mean EVERY single one until we decided that the best place to eat was Pier 17, right where we got off the tender.
Hurray hurrah! We experienced the best food of the entire trip. We had one course each, I had the most amazingly fresh mixed seafood starter, lobster, crab, prawns and smoked salmon with a potato salad, a beetroot salad and new potatoes. The fish was so fresh and delicious it could have ambled up the gang plank outside by itself that very morning. Beth and Ruby had turbot which looked magnificent and Rachel had filet mignon and lobster, her first introduction to lobster and blast, she loves it. Why do I keep introducing her to expensive food? Isn’t there something in the parenting manual that warns you to keep the kids on gruel. The surroundings were delightful, the service was great and if this had been the last meal of the day it would have been the perfect ending. Sadly it wasn’t.
Turbot with prawns and potatoes
  
My wonderful seafood platter, every bit was perfect
We caught the tender back to the boat, happily there were some loose hens on the tender, still singing but looking a tad more exhausted as they leant on each other and complete strangers.
We were starting to flag and tonight was the Gala Dinner. We had already seen so many fellow passengers with their bags containing suits and other fineries and could feel the excitement and buzz on the ship, in the corridors, in the lifts and the passages. Everywhere except for our cabins. To be honest we were just a tad resentful at being made to dress up for what had been, so far, very average food. Still, stiff upper lip and all that. We dolled up and went to our restaurant, The Peninsular, for our gala meal. We saw a long and winding queue and realised that we were to join the end of it. Not to get into the restaurant but to get a bleeper to tell us when to get our meal. Another holding pen. To cut a very long story short, we ended up getting our meal, it was ok in a good cafeteria type way and some of the waiting staff weren’t so resentful.
      
The starters
           
The mains, they look like twins dont they
Now we had one of the highlights of the cruise, we went to see the film Paddington and it was fab. Afterwards we didn’t bother with the buffeteria but instead went back to the cabins and asked for tomato soup on room service. The room service menu was really quite good until you looked at the detail and realised only a tiny percentage was for our ship and that they did NO hot food except soup. Luckily soup was just what we wanted, Rachel had been whining in her whiny wanty way for tomato soup for days so at last we could get it. Oh we were so excited, a desperate need for tomato soup about to be fulfilled. What eventually came bore no relationship to the tomato soup we know and love, it was like an instant soup but with the chemicals timed by 10 and no taste of tomato. At this point the phrase that came to sum up the whole cruise came to us “For the love of God get us out of here” we wailed as we tore our nightwear and tried to suffocate in the pillows (sadly they were foam and not feather so that was another ambition thwarted). Our wailing must have echoed down the corridors.
Finally, you may not know this about me but I find it very hard to sleep at night. I dread bedtime and do everything to put it off. I cant stand just lying there trying to sleep so Rachel chose tonight to teach me relaxation techniques. It went like this:
Rachel ‘mum try to think about each part of your body to see where your tense areas are so that you can work on them to relax them’
Leila ‘what do you mean, WHICH area?’
Rachel ‘concentrate on your tense spots’
Leila ‘EVERY CELL IN MY BODY IS IN FLIGHT OR FIGHT MODE, EVEN MY FISTS ARE CLENCHED’
Rachel, after a moments thought ‘mum do you think you may need professional help’
Sigh
More of my own opinions to come, nearly there folks