Wednesday, November 10
Right now, my laptop is resting on a footstool and I’m looking out the window at sunny Belize. Obstructing my view of Belize is a giant cruise ship called Norwegian Spirit, but that’s quite all right. Neither my wife nor I got off the boat in Belize.
There are many reasons why we didn’t get off the boat, so I’ll settle on the most interesting one. Apparently, the coast of Belize is home to the second largest coral reef in the world, next to the Great Barrier Reef. Therefore, there are no large docks built that would be suitable for a cruise ship. As a result, anyone wanting off the boat has to take a tender – a craft with a maximum occupancy of about 100 people. Which is great, except this vessel has 2500 passengers.
This would leave us at the mercy of tender service, and one of my rules was to try not to be too dependent on someone else’s transportation. Combine that with the fact that there wasn’t anything we wanted to see in Belize, and that was enough to keep us on board.
I’m going to tell the story of what we’ve been doing since our departure on Friday, but by this time I barely see the point. I had started a blog that served as a personal diary a long time ago, but it fell into disuse. This previous blog can still be found on line by the intrepid searcher, but I don’t even read it. I have various starts and stops of diaries started here and there but all of them were quit at some point and I suspect that this one shall be, too. However, for those of you still reading, I’ll make another go of it.
On Friday, my wife and I made it down to Florida to the Hialeah-Miami Lakes area in anticipation for the wedding of the daughter of a good friend of my wife’s. Returning to south Florida reminded me of the horrible “signage” as my wife calls it – road signs are labeled in misleading and confusing ways. Add to this the fact that drivers from south Florida are truly, truly horrible – we saw several crimes against common traffic courtesy. The turn signal is an afterthought in south Florida.
Part of the problem – so I understand it – is that in south Florida there is no state agency that verifies driving proficiency. If you attend a certified traffic school and can pass their test, you shall be licensed. This is merely one example of turning a government function over to the free market in the mistaken belief that laissez-faire capitalism can do things automatically better, that one merely has to say “free market!” and magic happens like the sorcerer waving his wand. Since a traffic school doesn’t want to get the reputation of being a place that is tough on students, this has resulted in market pressure to pass every student. And trust me, some of these drivers deserve to be failed, multiple times over.
Because drivers are so bad, there were a lot of divided roads – roads with an artificial raised concrete barrier between their northbound and southbound lanes. These partitions had few gaps – if one wanted to turn into a driveway on the other side of the street, one had to drive to the end of the block, turn left (or pray there was a left turn signal), and then drive down in the opposite direction to reach one’s final destination. The alternative would have been letting people cross across two lanes of opposite-going traffic at will, and trust me – there were some drivers that would have been stupid enough to dart across traffic and narrowly avoiding collision.
We managed to reach the local La Quinta Inn, which is part of a national franchise of low-cost motor inns in the United States. The particular inn at which we stayed was the #2 La Quinta Inn in the U. S. and was very desirous of being the #1 Inn. It’s the only motel I’ve ever stayed at where they gave you candy. It was clean, efficient, and we were well treated there.
One of the terrors of long-distance travel is the fear that you might forget something. In this case, my wife forgot some critical medication. Part of the problem was that she had recently ordered a refill from the health plan of her previous employer, but she did not bring the refill bottle – instead, she brought the bottle that only had two pills in it. Therefore, we had to make several trips to the local pharmacist to get things sorted out.
In every place we went – pharmacy, hotel, gas station – we discovered that the service workers were all bilingual, being either the children of Cuban (legal) immigrants or Mexican (illegal) immigrants. Out of all of the arguments advocated against immigration a common one is that the new immigrants don’t speak English and tend to self-segregate. (In Atlanta, some right-wing city commissioner proposed that the signs of the restaurants on Buford Highway should be English-only – until his opponents pointed out to him that even if the signs were English only, his kind of voters would never patronize those restaurants anyway.)
But in Hialeah, I saw a flip side to the argument – if immigrants learn to speak very good English, then they’re going to be the ones getting all of the service jobs because they can speak two languages – putting ‘Mericans out of work, of course. (“THEY TOOK OUUUUR JOBBBBSSS!!”)
We spent time over the interim with my wife’s cousin and her husband who live in an apartment in Miami Lakes. He works as a funeral director and my understanding is that she works in a bank but is about to retire. (For a long time, they were unmarried until she got cancer and they realized that if anything serious happened to either of them, it might make sense to be covered on each other’s health plans.) Ruth states that her cousin has a hoarding problem. I don’t think she deserves to be on America’s greatest hoarders – not yet – but looking at her collections of DVDs and her collection of bottled soda, I think there might be some truth to those accusations.
Thursday, November 11
Right now, we’re off the coast of Costa Maya, Mexico. The seashore looks a little more desolate, but I suspect this is due to being docked on the opposite side of Costa Maya’s port.
Anyway, that Friday night Ruth’s cousin took us out to eat at an Italian restaurant. Nice enough, except that we were seated front and center during what must have been their live performance night, where a man in a pork pie hat belted out Frank and Dino’s greatest hits. It made it very hard to have a conversation.
That Saturday, Ruth and I took our first big trip of the vacation – we drove all the way from Miami Lakes to Key Largo, Florida for M.’s wedding. M. and her betrothed, E., had spent some time in Atlanta and M. vetted our clothing. I was wearing something Cuban men wear called a “wyabeta” shirt (I have no internet here to check spelling) and a pair of tan slacks. This wouldn’t have been appropriate for most weddings, but this was going to be a beach wedding, so we assumed that I was going to look okay.
We drove down US 1 into Key Largo and for those considering a vacation where Bogie and Bacall frolicked – don’t. The place looks like a dump, filled with tourist trap shops and other rickety constructions. (When the local high school is the best-looking building in town, you’ve got a problem.) I despaired of making it in time because the “signage” wasn’t that great but Ruth got us there, no sweat.
Speaking of no sweat – due to a cold front moving in from the north, the temperature on this south Florida beach must have been in the low 60s. I was freezing in my Cuban shirt. Ruth, who was wearing a lightweight dress, was cold as well.
Some background about the wedding. M. is a second/third generation Cuban (her mother was an infant when she left the island). E. is a first generation Peruvian. I don’t know if this says anything about either Cubans or Peruvians, but all of the men dressed in suits and all of the women dressed in skimpy little dresses with bare shoulders and high heels. I suspect that the men were warm and the women were…not warm.
The Protestant pastor came out and as it turned out not only did he conduct the entire ceremony, beginning to end, in Espanol, but he…mumbled through a lot of it, so there was no support for any nascent bilingualism. There was a delay to the wedding as the bride was still getting her hair put together – and when she came out, a strong gust of wind undid her effort. However, it was a very nice (but long) ceremony and everyone had a good time.
During the wedding reception, Ruth and I thought that as Anglo non-relatives we’d be seated with all of the 14 year old cousins. Imagine our surprise when we learned that we’d be sitting at the mother of the bride’s table. (We’ll call the bride’s mother “N”.) N. is Ruth’s good friend from Florida, and her goal was to seat all of the “interesting” people at her table, a high compliment. An old friend of N.’s (W) was sitting there with her husband, a gay male couple was there, and N’s creepy looking boyfriend was there.
Whenever N. – and her boyfriend – were not at the table, the conversation turned to what a disaster N.’s boyfriend was. N. and M. – mother and daughter – are virtual clones of each other. As N. had M. in her early twenties, N. is still in her forties and still an attractive woman so no one could figure out why she was going out with this mooching schlub. (I learned that part by listening to Ruth and W.’s conversation.) My time at the table was holding up my part of the conversation and listening to the gossip.
On Sunday, we spent a last bit of time with Ruth’s cousin and made it down to the Port of Miami to get on the boat, the Norwegian P____. Our berth was something called an “owner’s cabin”, something which we lucked into with this cruise and shall probably never luck into again. It is a two-room cabin with a king-sized bed in one room and a couch-table-flat screen TV in the other room. Furthermore, this cabin has access to the private swimming pool on Deck 14. I felt like a venture capitalist while on board.
Here are our ports of call:
Sunday: departure from Miami
Monday: at sea
Tuesday: Roatan, Honduras
Wednesday: Belize City, Belize
Thursday: Costa Maya, Mexico
Friday: at sea
Saturday: Key West, Florida
Sunday: back in Miami
Our goal – or at least, my goal – was to spend most of this cruise entirely on board. There’s nothing we want to shop for in any of these ports of call. There are excursions to various ruins but I can’t imagine spending hours of time – and money – to be trucked around to see what’s left of the ancient cultures. There’s nothing in any of these cities that met a specific goal – there was no specific museum or cultural site that was something that we hoped to see. Truth be told, we just took the trip because it happened to be leaving from Miami that weekend.
“So CINCGREEN”, you might ask, “if you don’t really want to see any of these places…then why go on a cruise at all?” The answer is that a cruise offers the ultimate get-away-from-it-all experience. We’re on a boat in the Gulf of Mexico. We can’t be reached by phone except in the case of absolute emergency. We don’t have to drive to work. We don’t have to cook our own food. It’s all done for us. We can do whatever we want to do, and in this case, what we want to do is nothing.
What I really, really hate about vacations is that in a lot of cases, they’re extremely hectic with every hour micromanaged to squeeze in every bit of culture/history/socializing whatever. Before I started to go on cruises, I actually needed a vacation from my vacation. You’d return to work and you would never be rested – you’d just be utterly and completely exhausted, not good for anything.
So what did we do that was noteworthy in any way? Sunday was sort of a wash. The point of Sunday was to figure out where everything on the boat was. Among the many amenities of the P____ is something called the “Stardust Theatre” that provides shipboard entertainment. One of the rules of shipboard entertainment is that it is universally horrible. These are the dancers who weren’t good enough for off-Broadway and who might be working double-duty on board – food handler by day and dancing the light fantastic by night!
Ruth and I watched the tribute to South Beach culture and trust me – it was one of the worst things I’ve ever seen. When the dancers can barely kick their heels above hip level, you know it’s going to be one hour of solid boredom. Ruth and I treated it like an episode of Mystery Science Theatre where we make snide comments to each other about what we’re seeing.
There were only two dancers that seemed to have any talent. The first of these was a woman who had clearly had some ballet training and a lot of physical flexibility. Obviously, as the major talent she was showcased a lot, even though she belonged more in a circus than in a hot Miami nightclub. The other talented dancer was…her handler, whose job it is was to provide a base for her while she intertwined her body around him or when he put his hand on her hip and lifted her above his head. He had a chest built like Wayne Boring’s drawings of 1950s Superman – solid barrel chested and a man looking out of place among the other slim and trim male dancers, almost as if a bare-chested longshoreman had inadvertently stumbled on stage.
Example of the night: A young dancer writhes (or tries to) while three worshiping young men pull her skirt away – for better dancing of course.
Me: “Ooo.”
Ruth: (looking at fey dancers) “Trust me, you couldn’t find three young men on board less interested in her legs.”
On Monday, we ended up at sea. When we woke up, we were off the coast of Cuba. Ruth and I tried taking pictures but the pictures came out blank. We figured it must be some sort of picture-negating technology that only existed on the yachts of paparazzi-avoiding Russian oligarchs. But no, it just turned out that the settings of our cameras were wrong.
Monday night’s big thing was that we were invited to eat with the captain. This presented a bit of a problem as this vessel specialized in something called “Freestyle Cruising”. The last cruise we went on, for example, had a formal dinner every night where everyone attending was expected to wear suits or dresses. However, in Freestyle Cruising passengers can wear what they want to dinner – as long as you’re not going barefooted and wearing only a jockstrap.
The problem was that we came close to having nothing to wear suitable for eating with the captain. So for about $25 we had my wedding clothes pressed again on board and the white Cuban shirt was repurposed as formal wear.
For those of you wondering what kind of scintillating conversation takes place at these dinners – you’re not missing anything. The passengers seemed pretty closed mouthed and the captain, for all of his skill in running a cruise line, didn’t seem like much of a conversation starter. (I think he preferred to monologue – don’t even ask about the staff captain who was also in attendance.) The captain definitely eats well but I suspect you have to be a Swede to get the full range of his conversational firepower.
However, we got lucky. We were seated next to a couple from Wales who ran an Italian restaurant. The wife was Welsh and the husband was Italian, an interesting combination and we spent most of our time in conversation with them. She’s apparently a member of the British Bird Society as well, and our topics of conversation included ducks, magpies, rooks, crows and other various birds. Despite her politeness, I worried a bit when the topic of conversation turned to cooking and Gordon Ramsey. “Oh, I’m much worse than Gordon Ramsey,” the woman said, smiling, talking about how either she or her husband have had to whip employees into shape. They didn’t talk about it long, but I suspect that they weren’t kidding.
We’ve kept running into this couple, and they gave us their e-mail address -we definitely intend to write them. Our owner’s suite – all 780 square feet of it – might be indeed a thing of beauty but my understanding is that there are even bigger suites on board. They are virtual apartments up on Deck 14, which is where the private pool is. The two are a lot more adventurous than I am, making all sorts of walking excursions during our visits to foreign ports.
Before writing about Roatan, let’s take a brief look at the private pool on Deck 14. The pool is maybe about 30 feet by 10 feet and is surrounded by deck chairs…and things which really couldn’t be called deck chairs but deck beds, resting perfectly flat and taking up the space of six deck chairs in width. These little beds are bedecked with pillows and have little canopies that are supported by plastic poles.
There are a few tables here for the serving of breakfast, but we’ve always had breakfast in the room. Ruth enjoys the swimming pool; I come for the treadmill. I’ve managed to clock my 3.5 miles a day on the treadmill all but one of the days that I’ve been on this cruise.
As for Roatan, Roatan seemed to be a port surrounded by very touristy shops. If you dared venture outside of this little touristy barrier of buildings, you went straight into a very poor part of Roatan, Honduras. I was reminded of the song by The Clash called “Safe European Home” about not daring to venture beyond the Sheraton Hotel – I don’t know if The Clash’s song condemned others or was a self-condemnation regarding their experiences in Jamaica (their life was threatened there) but I interpreted it as the latter. All I know is that I had had enough of Roatan and Ruth and I returned back to the ship. At least I can technically say that I’ve been to Honduras in the sense that I was technically in France for about an hour during a trip to Lake Constance (Bodensee). It is the southernmost country that I’ve ever visited, but if I were to tell you that I’ve truly experienced Honduras I would be lying.
That was Tuesday. Today, we felt that we had to get off the ship again and visited Costa Maya in the most perfunctory sense. For a sense of at least my experience, see the previous paragraph. It seems that that’s all there is on this cruise – little resort villages surrounded by poverty. Is Belize the same? I don’t know. Is Key West the same? Well, you might feel more comfortable there but I’ve been to Key West and it’s a dump of a city. If you like to drink a lot of cheap beer you’ll like Key West. Key West does have live chickens in the streets and it has Ernest Hemingway’s house with his six-toed cats, but other than that? Not much. We’ve resolved that for future cruises, us Ugly Americans are going to Europe.
Most of my interest on this cruise has come from the interesting people we’ve met. The majority of contacts have come from a group of messageboard users (not the PP-MB) who provide criticism of cruise lines. (Ruth is a part of this community.) Rather than sending Ruth and friends hate mail – like the kind you get if you review fanfic - the ship seems to have bent over backwards to make this group feel at home. Unfortunately, like most message board inhabitants, they might be great at socializing on-line but they have virtually no social skills in the real world. So our contacts with this group have been limited and I suspect that Ruth is greatly disappointed.
When it comes to starting conversations, Ruth is a master. It’s almost like a super power, one that comes from years of working in sales. This group has not given Ruth much to work with but there are a couple of exceptions. One exception comes from a couple we ate with in a ship restaurant called the Summer Palace. The décor of the Summer Palace attempts to evoke the pre-Revolution period in Russia – Edwardian fixtures with a lot of paintings of Czar Nicholas II and his doomed family. We met a couple of what appeared to be one of those May-December romances – young woman marries old man.
Shows what I know. The young woman was approximately the age of the older man but was in a lot better shape – the older man had Type II Diabetes (no shots) and had recovered from a stroke. She was a graduate of Weight Watchers and was in great shape. We discussed our dreams of emigrating to Canada but the couple told us that health care in Canada isn’t what it’s cracked up to be – Canadian doctors didn’t diagnose the man’s stroke properly but American doctors did. They didn’t think much of Canadian health care. (As opposed to the ship’s captain, who had nothing but praise for Sweden’s social welfare system.)
As it turned out, this was her fourth marriage – her last, she promised. She kept horses. Very pleasant conversation, but looking at the guy I suspect that she’ll be on Husband #5 sooner or later.
Last night, however, we hooked up with the messageboard group again. We ate at a Benihana’s type Japanese restaurant where the food is served in front of you. There were about fifteen people there including ourselves, most about as talkative as rocks. But it was then that we discovered the great secret that I shall impart with you….
…just as it was said in the Old West that “God did not make men equal, Colonel Colt did”, the man who has the power to break the barriers of social skills or life experience or class is not named God. His name is Jim Beam. Or Jack Daniels. Or Guiseppe Martini. A few of the message board patrons had a couple of martinis on a two-for-one special…and after that, you couldn’t shut them up. (We should have been sitting next to those guys.)
The high point of last night wasn’t the display of culinary skills from the chefs. It was when one of the Canadian board posters returned to the table and conversation turned to the Canadian national anthem. Someone asked him if he knew the words, and as it turned out he did know the words and sang the Anthem “every Thursday” because he belonged to some sort of military service club.
With that information, two sloshed message board posters stood up and began belting out the lyrics to “Oh Canada”. Everyone who remembered the lyrics – or at least everyone who remembered 80 percent of them, like us – stood up and began singing our hearts out for the Great White North.
After we had finished “…we stand on guarddddd…forrrr…THEEEE!!!” the adjoining table of restaurant patrons – who were not affiliated with the message board – could not let that stand. They stood up and began to belt out the American National Anthem. So, everyone in the restaurant – us and them – began singing “Oh say, can you see?/By the dawn’s early light…!” All of the singing must have given the piano bar downstairs some consternation.
Jingoistic? Maybe. I was tempted to start singing the only words I knew from the second verse of the National Anthem. “On the shore dimly seeeeeen/In the midst of the deeeeep….!”
Friday, November 12
We’re now back at sea. Last night was the worst night of the trip as far as the motion of the boat was concerned. On a large vessel, motion is virtually minimal. However, if you’re at the front of the boat you’re more likely to feel the boat’s motion, and we’re at one of the fore-most cabins. Besides, even if your boat is skyscraper-sized the sea is a lot bigger than your boat and if the sea’s going to be very choppy the boat’s going to move, period.
Ruth had a lot of trouble sleeping. She took a couple of Bonine for motion sickness and moved out of the bed (with its soft mattress) and on to the much-firmer couch. As for me, the motion of the boat doesn’t really affect me. Maybe I would have made a great sailor in some past life.
Last night, the entertainment on board was the cast of Second City, the comedy troupe. Well, okay, not the Second City in Chicago or Toronto – I’m assuming those guys aren’t coming onto a boat. I suspect that this Second City troupe is some sort of B-team Second City, the way the Groundlings in Los Angeles have a B-group. There’s a real possibility that some of the performers I saw last night might be major stars on the order of Mike Myers or John Belushi. Or possibly, well-known character actors like George Wendt – all of whom are alums of Second City. Or possibly…they’ll become nobody at all.
Anyway, they were all very funny. They performed most of their sketches as “blackouts” – a short vignette would be performed, the lights would go down and the performers would set up for another scene. There was an improv scene based on one of the couples in the audience, the conceit being that the particulars of how the couple met would be turned into a romantic movie. For some reason, the guy in the couple picked was ludicrously vague about what he did. Despite the fact that he and his wife had been married for 30 years or so, the only details given were that he worked with umpires in major league baseball. Of course, being professionals the Second City staff took the premise and ran with it, turning their male protagonist into a complete cipher. (“I’m having thoughts and feelings right now!”) The improv was the funniest thing all night and we’ll probably see them again.
As bookends to our improv experience were the screening of a Disney short subject called “Destino”. Destino was a planned short film by Walt Disney and Salvador Dali. The storyboards of the movie were created and Dali painted several scenes but the project never came to fruition and was believed lost until the storyboards were discovered a few years ago. Disney finally put together an animated short which won some awards. It was visually interesting, but I suspect that Disney whimsy and Dali’s bizarre subversions of reality don’t mix well – people forget about how smart Disney was; he knew when something was going to work on screen and when something wasn’t.
After the improv, we went to the piano bar to play “Name That Tune”. God, what a disaster. You got the impression that the piano bar player didn’t really care to be there – it seemed that he really struggled to keep his omnipresent grin alive and every now and then he’d say something marginally inappropriate. (“Drink up, people, we have to keep our bar staff busy.”)
Earlier this week, we had won a Trivia challenge – it was no contest, as most of the ship was at shore – and we won a few prizes like…a beach ball…and a luggage tag. The “Name That Tune” game was offering similar prizes. Twenty tunes would be played and we’d have to guess what those tunes were. Here is the list of tunes, so see if you can pick these out:
1. Take Five, the Brubeck instrumental
2. On Broadway
3. You Are the Sunshine of my Life
4. California Girls, by the Beach Boys
5. Dancing in the Moonlight
6. Teach Me Tonight
7. Sailing, the Christopher Cross tune
8. I Only Have Eyes for You
9. Cabaret
10. Don’t be Cruel
11. Margaritaville
12. The Gambler
13. There Will Never Be Another You
14. Girl from Ipanema
15. Achy Breaky Heart
16. Hotel California
17. Unforgettable, the Nat King Cole standard
18. Strangers in the Night
19. My Girl
20. Music of the Night, from Phantom of the Opera
If your taste is eclectic enough, you should know all of these tunes. (#6 and #13 might throw you.) We didn’t even bother to hang around for the judging. We slam-dunked the competition, and needing no more luggage tags or decks of ship playing cards, we left.
Ruth and I walked through the casino, a very popular place on board a cruise ship. One of the games there – a game neither of us have played – involves shoving change into a slot. The change bounces around and lands on a shelf in such a way that it lands on the back of the shelf, and has the potential to push the change in front of it forward, as the shelves slowly shuffle back and forth. If the change in front is shoved forward enough, it falls off one shelf and lands on another, where the same process takes place. Any change falling off the final shelf due to this chain reaction is won by the player.
A woman won one of the bundles of currency that had been placed on the bottom shelf by the casino and which had finally been tipped off the edge. The problem was that the money was stuck and the customer couldn’t reach it. So while the player kept guard, Ruth and I called in the casino staff and they freed her winnings. The outer bill on the currency wad was a ten-dollar bill. Underneath it were…two ones. Twelve dollars total.
So Ruth had to do this as well, particularly after she shoved in a quarter and got four quarters back. Knowing probability, I just can’t watch this happen – it’s like watching someone set fire to their money. I left Ruth to play and retreated back to the room. Ruth returned later, and I asked her what happened to her change.
Me: “Did you quit while you were ahead?”
Ruth: “Yes.”
Me: “Really?”
Ruth: “No.”
Saturday, November 13
We are now at Key West, Florida and officially in the United States. This morning, we were forced up out of bed before 9 am to pass through U. S. Customs – we’ve been to three countries between leaving Miami and showing up at Key West and this is the first time we’ve been asked to file by Border Patrol. The disadvantage is in having to deal with it; the advantage is that we won’t have to deal with it in Miami.
We actually made it out of the boat this time. Ruth has been to Key West several times; this is my second time. Unless you’re a real fan of Jimmy Buffett or unless you have a severe alcohol problem, there’s no real reason to spend any time in Key West although there are a few attractions worth seeing like the Ernest Hemingway house. Our goal was to find a pharmacy and an ATM, and sure enough we found a CVS pharmacy and purchased thank-you cards for our various gratuities.
Yesterday, a select group of suite holders were given a tour of the bridge. I imagined that it would be something out of an old 1940s movie, with twenty guys running around like mad, bells ringing and a wizened captain at the helm. Instead, I find out that there are only three people on board the bridge. Oh, there’s room for more but it only really takes three people to stir the ship.
The bridge looks more like that of Captain Picard’s Enterprise rather than that of The Hunt for Red October. There is indeed a navigation/helm station front and center which can seat two, and there is a small understated black chair behind it. There are some other stations around the bridge for radar, but there’s also a kitchenette, and a clear table at the port side of the bridge with four chairs where ship officers undoubtedly play poker.
If you think about it, this makes perfect sense. This ship is a floating hotel, and they’re going to make this vessel as much like an airplane as possible – hyper computerized and almost capable of piloting itself. If there was any drama to be gained, that drama was systematically eliminated through years of cruise ship design. It’s all “press a button and go now”. The computerized displays of ship position looked interesting, but I’m sure there’s a version of Microsoft Cruise Ship Simulator which has the same displays. To me, the most interesting part of the tour was the telephone where the ship’s most crucial officer could address the passengers.
There is an array of cameras throughout the ship where the pilots can monitor various locations, ships thrusters, etc. There are two locations on board where the bridge can view the goings-on 24 hours a day – those cameras never change. They are focused on the ship’s laundry and the ship’s bakery, which are probably the most likely locations of a fire.
Is this where the captain talks to those on board? No, this is the phone used by A., the cruise director, letting us know that there’s an art auction in the Spinnaker Lounge.
After the cruise, we met the couple from Wales mentioned earlier for drinks. Six of us shared some drinks – Ruth and I, the couple from Wales and another couple from Australia. R., the husband of the Wales duo, ordered a bucket of Coronas and I had two of those while everyone talked about the various world locales they had visited on cruise ships.
R. told an interesting story of his trip to Honduras. R. and his wife M. are quite adventuresome, and they walked through the poor part of Roatan ending up at a bar they had been told about. The bar, apparently, is a stop for the ship’s crew. As R. put it, the bar is noteworthy in that…romantic affection can be purchased there. Crew members from various cruise lines can purchase this affection twenty minutes at a time – if necessary, as most of the time the crew members don’t need this much affection. However, one crew member disappeared behind the curtain for the entire twenty minutes. When he returned, the entire bar applauded him for his accomplishment.
I always wondered what the 1100 or so members of the crew did while they were not working. Now, I know. It’s also noteworthy that 600 of these crew members work in food service. Every restaurant we go to the passengers are asked to wash their hands with antiseptic solution; I hope the crew is doing the same thing.
We would have dinner with the Welsh couple and that dinner would help us solve 1/3 of a problem. We were given three free bottles of booze as a gift, but we were not given any corresponding way to transport it back to the United States – except, perhaps, to hide it in a suitcase. One of our free bottles was Moet et Chandon champagne, and we popped the cork with our friends in one of the ships restaurants. I finished two flutes of champagne to go with the two bottles of beers, and I was not safe to drive on either land or sea. We were going to watch some of the ship’s “entertainment” but we passed on that and headed straight to bed at about 10 pm – both of us tipsy and inexplicably quite tired.
Sunday, November 14
Right now, we’re in hurry-up-and-wait to get back to Atlanta. I woke up at 7 am in preparation for our planned departure from the boat. When I woke up, the boat was already docked and the staff was busy cleaning up.
The rule was that we had to be out of the room by 9 am and off the boat by 10 am. Believe it or not, at 2:30 pm the boat would be welcoming aboard the next group of cruise tourists. I’m shocked at the quick turnaround; maybe you need to have 1100 crew members for a turn-around that fast.
We gave a gratuity to Jongie, to Emelia and to Carlos – our housekeeper, butler and concierge respectively. When we hit the main dining room, the place was packed, and the hardest part of the meal was finding a seat. I had the last of my French toast this morning, and with the luggage already consigned to the bag program (the stewards have already packed it off to Georgia), the only things left to haul off the boat were ourselves.
All that was left was to take care of the process in reverse. Impatient, we took a taxi back to the Miami Airport. It appeared that a Haitian theology student was our driver, and Ruth and the driver had a nice chat about Miami landmarks. After that, through security, the X-ray, etc. and into the bowels of Miami International Airport with 3 hours and 40 minutes to kill.
The flights are all screwed up. Our flight was scheduled to depart at 1:40 pm, but it’s been delayed to 2:20 pm. I think I’ve had enough of vacation, or at least enough of Miami International Airport. I can’t get home soon enough.
So would I do it again? Hell yes. But next time, we’re doing it in Europe. Or we might even take that tour of Israel and the Holy Land, echoing the cry of a few of Ruth’s relatives, “Next year, in Jerusalem!” But it doesn’t have to be the Holy Land where Jesus made the stations of cross. If you give me cruise ship amenities with interesting conversation and without any requirement to get off the boat, then any dump of a port is Holy Land enough for me.
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