Gulf of Oman ~ Persian Gulf

19 Nov. Saturday:  We slept in very late, shocked to see it was 10:38am when we woke up!!!  I think that is a record for us!  The water is like glass this morning, just lovely, you would think you were on a lake.  We will soon leave the Gulf of Oman and enter the Strait of  Hormuz.  The water is only 300 ft deep here. Per Captain Henrik it is a wide strait with “two lanes” where we can be passed if other ships desire.  He also said that 33% of the oil that is transported on the sea comes though this strait. Iran is to the northeast and Oman to the southwest but soon the UAE (United Arab Emirates) will be to our south.  We are quite slow now as we have very little water to cover on our way to Abu Dhabi.  The captain’s joke was not to worry about us going slow, it is not because we are running out of fuel, we took on 100 tons of jet fuel for our engines so we will easily have enough to get there.  So in the middle of the day we will be leaving the Gulf of Oman heading to the Persian Gulf.  The US and UK, people in the north call it the Persian Gulf but those in the south call it the Gulf of Arabia, interesting.

Anyway in the early afternoon we posted the blog and had a small lunch.  They had some lovely seafood paella, which I had a small taste of, it was delicious.  In addition, I had the tasty Tandoori chicken with a simple salad of Romaine and tomatoes.

Around 4pm we headed off to play bingo hoping we might be lucky today~that was not the case of course!  Anyway we had fun anyway! 

Dinner was for six including:  George and Tawny along with Stuart and Darlene.  I had a delicious manicotti tonight, a real treat as I love pasta.  This was my third pasta dish for the cruise.  A couple nights ago they substituted cherries jubilee with grapes jubilee, Stuart was very unhappy about this. lol  So after many comments our head waiter Joey said he would do his best to have it for us tonight, which he in fact DID!  That was very sweet of them to make the extra efforts for us.  George also treated us to some delicious lemoncello with our dessert.  We have had such a good time at dinner and hate to see it come to an end.  I am thinking we may see George and Tawny again even though they are from the UK as they travel a lot and plan a trip to the US maybe next year.  Tomorrow is our last full day on the cruise.  We will be in Abu Dhabi for the day.