Cruising at Sea

Me, Gloria, Denise and Dad at piano, originally uploaded by quimerizar.

Sunday October 14
Today was sea travel only - no ports. Despite going to bed early, I woke up late at 9:30. I guess 12 hours of sleep was what my body needed. I went to the gym and worked out and the coolest thing happened. Earlier that morning, the captain had made an annoucement that he had spotted whales close to the ship. I was still in bed when this happened, so I didn't get outside fast enought to see it. But, when I was working out in the gym, the big panoramic window faced the front of the ship. Midway through my workout I got to see a whale blow water. It was really neat!! Today I fully took advantage of the steam room and sauna after my work out. I spent a pretty good chunk of the morning at the gym and it was relaxing.

To completely ruin all that hardwork at the gym, my dad and I went to Johnny Rockets for lunch. I really like the burger joints that will substitute a veggie patty for any one of their specialty burgers. I don't eat burgers, but a veggie burger with all the trimmings will do me good any day. I also must have eaten 3/4ths of the basket of fries and onion rings. You would have thought that I hadn't eaten either of them in years.

Later that day, I attended my first ever art auction - partly because I wanted to see what they had on board, and partly because they were handing out free champagne and a free work of art for attending. I had no false ideas in my head that I would be able to afford anything there, and I was correct. There were Dali's, Rembrant, Picasso, Peter Max, Matisse, and Kincaid - along with several others. The highest bid that day was 38k - and many of the pieces went for what I would consider "larger" sums of money (over 5k). The rest of the crew played in a slot tournament while I became artsy fartsy.

After the show, I was a bit tipsy from the Champagne and had decided to look for my dad and Kenny. I had heard that they might be playing golf. Only problem was that I didn't know where the golf simulator was on the ship. I wandered around for a while looking for it, but got lost. I was wearing this cute plaid miniskirt that I had gotten in Atlantic City and wool tights. I was out on the ship deck when I saw one of the crew memebers talking to an older man. I walked up and asked if they knew where the golf course was. Right when I did that, a huge gust of wind came up and blew my skirt up to my chest. I shrieked, and then did my best to hold it down. The guy was midsentence telling me where the golf place was. I started holding my skirt down and walking away - he seemed offended that I wasn't listening to his directions but I had just had my skirt blown off of me and I wasn't sticking around for it to happen again.

Later, we had dinner in the dining room and the boat was really rocking. I felt dizzy and almost like I was drunk half the day. This was the night that we took notice of the Cackler and the Hackler. At the table to our left was a woman who hacked and hacked all through dinner. She continued to do this the rest of the cruise, sounding like she had smoked a pack and a half a day for the last 20 years. To my rear, there was another woman who had this horrendous laugh (and she was ALWAYS laughing) and we named them the cackler and the hackler.

After dinner we went to see the on ship entertainment - purposefully catered to the older crowd on board. "The Happenings" had a a few hit songs - like "See You in September". One of the singers looked like Marlon Brando, the other looked like the Geico Caveman. One looked normal but smiled way too much. The funniest thing was that there were two people to the right of us that were there together to see the show and they were sleeping. The best part of the show was when they played Sweet Caroline. We all chimed in on the chorus - adding our "so good, so good, so good" and I think we seriously annoyed some of the other people next to us.

After the show we headed again to the piano bar. Tonight they were playing a trivia game - our team was one of the winners and dad got a free luggage tag (woo hoo). We met up with Jocelyn and Maureen, two gals from England. We had a lot of fun chatting with them and ended up challenging them to a game of Scrabble after a discussion about which country uses English properly (US or UK).