Cruisecation: Day Nine

And then we got up ass-early for expedited ship-leaving, because if you're not off the ship by 7:30 you have to wait and have your bags taken by the stewards and then returned to you later and somewhere else, instead of just hauling them off yourself like a champ.

We had one last tater-totty breakfast at 5:30 and were off the ship by 6:30, at the airport checking our bags by 8 and driving around, looking for anything to be open at 9 on what we'd forgotten was a Sunday, until we finally just went for second-breakfast.  Joel and I bought bad-ass neon South Beach souvenirs for his siblings, as one does.

We were weirdly separated on the Miami-Houston flight, with Joel sitting way over there beside a shrieking infant, and me, mom and dad back here behind three drunken, singing hooligans, and Matt and Gillian directly in front of said hooligans and beside a Consummate Chatterer, and boo and Darren somewhere else (in front of the shrieking infant, I believe).  It was the worst flight for all of us, but especially Gillian, who had both drunken singing and incessant photo-showing to contend with.

But at least it was the short flight, and at least the flight from Houston to Vancouver was sparsely populated, and at least the limo got us home safely, and at least we managed to squeeze a cruise into the two-week window between when Joel finished school and when Joel started school again, and at least everyone found time off work, and at least this baby is still self-watering.  Vive la vacation!

Cruisecation: Day Eight

This was our last day on the boat, so all of the things we'd planned to do before our cruise was over came a-calling.

Get burgers and fries and onion rings and shakes at Johnny Rockets?

Check.

Ride the carousel?

Check.

Take photos by the expensive car while the photographer is on lunch so that he doesn't charge us to take photos by the expensive car?

Check.

Browse the shops for over-priced souvenirs, including $3000 bottles of whisky?

Check.

Eat at the cupcakery, even though we were already too full to live?

Check.  Oh cupcakes, you were such a dry disappointment.

Climb the climbing wall?

Check for everyone who wanted to, except for me because I was too fat to fit into a harness.

Between the burgers and the bottomless onion rings and the cupcakes, I was the least hungry I'd ever been.  But that has never deterred me from a pineapple and raspberry soup:

a bacon gnocci:

and a key lime tart.

And then we all went back to our rooms and moaned over our bellies and mournfully packed up our things.

Cruisecation: Day Seven

Day six, so boring.  I mean, so fun to do, so boring to read about.  Day seven, so much things!

Ok so we had signed up to go to Chichen Itza because it's one of the Seven Wonders of the World.  Rad, right?  Except that once we got on the bus, the driver is all, Sad face, Chichen Itza is closed today for political reasons.  I mean, we could drive the three hours there just to see if it's open...  And everyone was like, Grumble grumble but I paid for Chichen Itza grumble, but in the end we went to Tulum instead and it worked out better, at least for me.

Because it was HOT, you guys.  And I am very fat and I generate heat from the inside, and it seems that the fatter I get, the lower my tolerance for being hot gets, so I am always TOO HOT TO LIVE.  So while the ruins at Tulum were no Chichen Itza, they were pretty ruinous (and contained, as advertised, muchas iguanas)

AND were immediately adjacent to this:

Like, you come around a corner and BEACH.  Some of us pulled off our clothes while we raced to the water, since we had opted for swimsuits instead of underwear (too hot), and some of us just went in in our clothes, and we were all of us immediately less crabby.

Chichen Itza is very inland and, one imagines, breezeless.  We will go back one day when I am not so pregnant and it is not so August, maybe.  I predict that it, like Tulum (and Greece), will not be Turkey, which is to say we will not be allowed to CLIMB on the ruins and will be disappointed.

We had a few minutes to wander around the market before our bus took off, and boo and I bought sister-skeletons.  The guy wanted $30 each but was willing to give us two for $50.  We talked him down to giving us both skeletons for $31.

Señor Bones is an avid reader

The ferry from Tulum back to Cozumel played an endless loop of internet-style cat photos, three Irish lasses singing Enya, and a commercial for a '100% monogamy' fragrance that seemed to borrow in all seriousness from Eric Zoolander's 'moisture is the essence of wetness' commercial.

I hadn't been hungry in days, but slothing sweatily around ruins and, more importantly, being off the boat for the day will give you an appetite.  Behold my roasted butternut squash, white bean and arugula salad with lime vinaigrette!

Behold my foccacia bread salad with buffalo mozzarella!

But whither the fruit soups today?  Alas.  Behold instead my insanely delicious and filling spinach and ricotta pasta with pesto and marinara!

And my mile-high lemon meringue tart!

Mom and dad had found a bottle of champagne in their room, which we thought might be due to the Chichen Itza mix-up, but was instead to compensate for the buttons on dad's suit that the laundry people chipped.  So we had a champagne party.

the towel-pig drank mine

And then maybe we went for second-dinner at the trough for tempura and cobbler before heading to Blue Planet: The Most Unexplainably Terrible Show On Earth.

I can't even...it was cheesy but not on purpose?  The dancing was terrible?  The singing was operatic and also terrible?  It was made up entirely of singing and dancing, and was therefore completely terrible?  A girl came out and sang 'What A Wonderful World,' a song that never needs to be sung again unless it's going to be roughed up a bit, AND changed the first line to 'I see trees that are green' which is somehow even more banal than the original 'trees of green'?  Another girl came out in increasingly hideous but all eerily similar Renaissance Fair gowns?  Both guy-singers were skeevy?  They ruined Higher Ground for me?

And then we all went for a night-swim and laughed about how terrible it had been.

Cruisecation: Day Six

Cruise day!  Naps!  Reads!  Pools!  Drinks!  Moving elsewhere for more different naps!  Dad met his doppelgänger and they ping-pong-battled for hours!


Literally nothing happened on this day except that I ordered badly for the first time and then did not want my flabby roast beef, so I ate Gillian's moussaka instead, which she did not want because Simon had also brought her a curry, because he was like that.

I also had roasted peach soup

and a disappointing and mis-labelled 'red-berry tart.'  I expect my red-berry tarts to be both tart-like and containing red berries!  Whatever, Gillian's first order of cherries jubilee came accidentally with almonds, so I ate that as well.

Thank goodness Gillian was there, or else I would have starved (except no, we went for pizza at late hours because we could.  And because the potato-chicken pizza was amazing).

Cruisecation: Day Five

More and then!  This post will be light on photos because our day was waterlogged and my camera spent it somewhere else.

Ok so we were told there'd be crepes at Johnny Rockets, and ALL WE WANTED WAS SOMEONE TO MAKE CREPES-TO-ORDER IS THAT SO MUCH TO ASK. There were, needless to say, no crepes.  Our lives are so hard.

But we were in Jamaica and excursing as a family and so we trooped off to our van, and proceeded to sit in the hot sun for twenty minutes while we waited for two more - who ended up being Joel and me, since we had neglected to offer the girl our tickets when we got on the bus.  Sometimes counting is hard.

SPEAKING of counting being hard, the Thing That Tells You What You're Getting Into was all, It's a 20-minute bus ride to the river, but as the van took off, our guide LaTanya was all, This ride will be an hour and two-thirds.  And then attempted to entertain us with a lecture on Jamaica's annual rainfall and national flower.  We may or may not have been conversating in the back of the bus because NO ONE'S annual rainfall is worth knowing, which prompted our other guide Antoinette to scold, ACTUALLY she is talking, ok?

Jamaican fruit would like you to shut up and listen

Despite this inauspicious beginning, despite a brief but torrential downpour, and despite the Real Housewife in the front row complaining about the smell of her life-jacket and refusing to sign a waver because she wanted to have the option to sue, tubing down a river in Jamaica is as lazy and joyous as you want it to be.

dramatization, but just barely

The staff kept us from bashing into rocks or drifting into the reeds, and SERENADED US with American pop songs, being rather casual with the lyrics.  We ambled past wacky trees (I would totally know what kind if I'd been paying attention to LaTanya) and people gutting fish.  It was the very best.

From there we went to Dunns River Falls, and in my head this was going to be a hike up to some falls and then a few minutes of Ooohing and plashing and then a hike down, and I was hot and sleepy and not up to trudging.  But it was less that and more this:

I mean, minus the monks but plus maybe a thousand people and about half that volume of water.  They must scrape the rocks down daily to keep them from accruing slime, because they were sturdy and pleasant to walk on and nobody died.

Since Simon the ace waiter had warned us that, if we wanted a night off from the fancy dining hall, this was the night to take it because the menu wasn't very good,  we ate at the Wingaling trough.  I went back for deep-fried bananas with caramel sauce more times than I feel is necessary to share with you.

But it was about this many:

We found the front of the boat so we could play Jack and Rose and watched a lightning storm and Matt and Gillian came upon a couple having sexual relations in a hot tub in the solarium, and we swore off of solarium hot tubs forever.  The end.

Cruisecation: Day Four

And then?  And then!

Joel and I woke up at 6:30 to watch the boat dock in Haiti (the rest of my family is already up at 6:30, so doing same hardly counts for them) and to eat free room service.  It gets an A+ for convenience and timelihood but was sadly devoid of Enough Ketchup For My Hash.

We scooted off the boat for our Snorkeling Adventure, which I blogged about here (as it was on my life-list.  For every 'snorkeling' that I check off that list, I add 'attend a masquerade' or some such and The List abides).

Did I mention that Dad brought along walkie talkies for the family?  Without which we would have wandered the beach forever looking for boo and Darren, since the only way to NOT DIE on a Haitian beach is to ensconce yourself in a cabana.  With your plate(s) of food.

The rest of the afternoon is lost to me in a haze of napping and showering and then probably napping again.  I believe dad and Joel went jet skiing?  Something watery and adventurous.  At any rate, I had a lamb shank for dinner.

And the strawberry bisque to start.  Cold fruit soups, who knew you had so many iterations?

And a warm chocolate cake with roasted pears and ice cream, which I would not have had except for our excellent waiter's excellent recommendations (Simon was never wrong), and a raspberry panacotta.

Oh my.  And then we took in OceanAria, an amazingly dichotomous show.  The acrobatics and high dives and strongmen and whatall were insane, but the dancing girls were, as Joel said, like the music they make you listen to when you're put on hold.

Cruisecation: Day Three

I told you it would be food-photo-heavy.  For breakfastses we ate at an enormous buffet called the Windjammer Cafe but which we referred to alternately as The Wingaling and The Trough.  Breakfasts were similarly delicious, ranging from oatmeal with add-ins to waffles with pile-ons.  There was always some sort of fried potato bit

and as much as it felt like a waste to be eating tots when there were shrimp omelettes lying untouched, they were the best tots of all tots.  I miss you, tots.

We spent our first full cruising day lying pool-side and pool-in

drinking fruited beverages brought to us by the sippy-sippy dudes.

And ok, your room card not only gets you into your room, it is your charge card for things such as pool-side drinks (and exorbitantly-priced sunscreen for mid-week when your bottle runs out), as well as your ticket into free events requiring reservation like all the shows.  Did I mention that I lost my room card within five minutes of being on ship?  And that they make it idiot-proof, because when any vendor swipes your card they get an image of your face on their screen so even if you lose your card, only someone who looks eerily like you would be able to charge things to it, and only until you realized it was missing and wandered down to Guest Services to get a new one issued, at which point the old one is nullified.  Also, they are very jolly about it, because this happens all the time.

Where was I?  Oh yes.  One can only spend so much of one's day lounging in the sun, especially when one is pasty-colored.

So we played mini-golf, because YOU CAN DO THAT ON THIS BOAT.

Some hooligan nine-year-old hit me in the shin with a ball, but Joel gave him what-for.  Where are these kids' parents?  Probably drunk by the pool.  Anywert.  Joel also tried out the wavejammermathing...the faux-wave where you could boogie board (there was also one for surfing).

The rest of us were too wilty or ambivalent or pregnant to try.

For formal dinner I wore the zebra-print dress Joel bought me for my birthday

and had escargots

and a papaya and pineapple soup

and roasted duck with cranberry cabbage

which I resorted to eating with my hands, because knives and bones are difficult

and a double strawberry cheesecake with a chocolate souffle on the side.

And then we cottoned on to the late-night swim (about two days before the rest of the boat did) and went prowling for late-night eatables (there's a sandwiches-and-cakes place open all night, and a pizza joint open until 3) and took our tired selfs to bed.  Lying by the pool will wear you out.