What an incredible 6 weeks it's been so far! Just as I suspected, time is just flying by here on the Voyager.
This week we have the install team for the Dreamworks parade onboard, they are here to ensure everything needed for the parade in terms of props and costumes gets loaded on properly and has a place to live onboard the ship. The costumes for Dreamworks are massive and in most instances there are more than one per character as one is reserved solely for parades and the other is to be used for all other Dreamworks character events around the ship. As well there has been a lot of worked involved with removing the previous parade, Party Around the World. Everything from that parade has been all packed up and is ready to be landed when we reach New Orleans for the last time on Saturday.
Speaking of our last time in New Orleans, we will be setting sail at 9pm with a massive party up on the pool deck in place of the usual welcome aboard show. This will be a great final sail-away from NOLA and we are all looking forward to it. The 6 week repositioning cruise to Asia will be long and challenging but so far it looks like everything is coming together nicely in order to make the transition as smooth as possible.
This past week we had FUNA and LCL Engineering onboard to install our new Barco projector for our upcoming Dreamworks 3D movie experience. We are all really looking forward to this new offering and so far we have only been able to watch short 2-3 minute trailers on the new system and are already blown away. It is quite remarkable how few pieces of hardware were really needed in order to upgrade our existing sound system to Dolby 7.1 surround sound, and add the 3D projector. Our new projector is the Barco DP2K-20C with Dolby 3D installed. The projector itself is large but still remarkably small for the image it produces. We were able to install it alongside our existing Christie projector and still have room for ventilation and whatnot. An interesting fact is that the 3D color wheel needed to produce a 3D image actually reduces the brightness of the projector output quite a bit. For that reason, this projector is actually overly bright when watching regular 2D content but since 3D content will be played the majority of the time, the extra brightness offsets the difference created by the 3D color wheel. The resulting image and sound is simply unbelievable and has breathed some new life into our 13 year old La Scala theatre.
Around the ship, lots of other changes are underway as well. Currently the Deck 4 outdoor promenade is receiving a new floor surface installation (same as was installed during the Explorer drydock when I was there) and all rooms are receving new LED flat-panel TVs. Coming up in the next couple of days the casino will also begin undergoing a huge revitalization.
