Bonnie and I have had questions about what it’s like on our cruise ship. And how we’re holding up after 20 days with still 44 ahead.

Answer: expectations surpassed.

With 600 passengers and 400 staff members, we are very pampered.

Our excellent steward, Komang from Indonesia, straightens our stateroom and more while we are eating breakfast and dinner. The stateroom is just big enough, so we are not frustrated and, surprisingly, the closets and drawers hold pretty much everything we dragged along in 8 suitcases. The shower is extra small. That’s the only complaint.

The WiFi has been better than advertised except for uploading and downloading videos. The ship provides movies, tv series and live U.S. stations but we barely watch. (We did watch Belfast and urge everyone who hasn’t seen the movie to do so.)

Oceania’s trademark food service lives up to its vaunted reputation. There are two small specialty restaurants that we can make shared-table reservations for 22 nights at no extra cost that are gourmet. The main dining room has white tablecloth service three meals a day. There’s a complete buffet restaurant for every meal. Near the pool, there’s a burger grill open until late afternoon. There is also 24-7 room service with many selections.

What’s there to do when at sea? Plenty.

The No. 1 activity is reading by the pool, in the library and many nooks and crannies on the ship. I spend my time at the Barista working on blogs, photos and videos while sipping many decaf concoctions. The ship offers a big pool, three hot tubs, a large fitness center, a spa, ping pong and a putting green. There’s music in many places during the day and other activities. For example, they have two enrichment speakers in the first segment, and we’ve become very friendly with Lowell Fox, who does 45-minute talk-photo-video presentations on great comedians like George Burns, Lucille Ball, the Marx Brothers and others. Turns out he graduated Missouri a year ahead of me. (Doug Grow: he grew up with Jerry Stack.) Lowell was a cheerleader at football and basketball games, and I was a football equipment managers and basketball statistician, so we saw each other often without meeting until this cruise.

Our biggest surprise has been the other passengers. We’ve only met about 10% of them, but all are seasoned travelers who have been to many parts of the world often. None have been boastful about their adventures. They are all full of information about places we’ve never been and have experienced everything Bonnie and I have usually more than once.

Many have interesting back stories. Today we met Marilyn who lives 20 minutes from us and has been a dental hygienist for 40 years. For the last 15 years, on every trip she and her husband take, they bring along used children’s picture books collected from school kids in Palm Beach County, which they pack up and bring along. They arrange for a guide from a tour service to find a village with children who have nothing. They pass out the books and other things they bring. They never give money, but they have often bought cows, toilets and other things for impoverished natives.

Just amazing.

There’s plenty more to come on this trip, but what we’ve learned is that we will eventually see what we expected to see (lions, elephants, lemurs) and we’ll also see the unexpected (dung beetles, Lowell, Marilyn).