Tuesday, June 16, 2009 -- At Sea

Days at sea are some of our favorites. They tend to be very leisurely, because, after all, you can’t go anywhere. The only thing you have to sweat at all is the need to dress up a bit for “formal night” at dinner.

The day for our group started differently for the various rooms. Mom and Dad have been missing all day as I write this (it’s about 1:00 p.m.), although I assume at their ages that they can adequately forage for food and sustenance in a place that is geared toward adding at least 15 pounds to each of it’s passengers during the week long excursion. I suspect that mom is in the Bingo games trying to get her share of whatever branded goodies they’re giving out as prizes.

The ladies opted to sleep in and have room service for breakfast rather than facing the buffet. Other than a brief merchandise handoff of some of yesterday’s loot, we haven’t seen them. Benita reported that she did bed check on the boys at 5:00 a.m. and all were present and asleep. Yet another day that we don’t have to throw any of them overboard seems to be on target.

The Fire Alarm

The boys had the most excitement. The ship had a fire / emergency drill for the crew at about 10:00 this morning. They didn’t hear the warning announcements that this was a “crew only” drill, not to be alarmed. Instead, they woke up when the alarm buzzers were going off announcing a “Code Bravo” in a specific location. Of course, since you really can’t understand much of the announcements (the Captains sounds like the Swedish Cook off of the Muppets when he talks on it) they did the typical teenager thing – they rolled over and went back to sleep. So much for emergency preparedness. Had there really been a fire, they would have ended up as a form of Cajun seafood.

We saw the boys, who travel as a cluster in most cases, stumbling out for breakfast about 11:15 when Eddie and I were on our way to the casino to see if the Slot Gods would be any kinder today. (They were to me, incidentally – my $20.00 turned into $115.00 when I stopped to go to lunch).

Other than wandering around, we’ve not done a lot. There’s a slot tournament at 2:00and we’ll both be in that just because you never know what’ll happen. There have been periodic check-ins when we’ve either crossed paths or through the use of the little dry erase boards that we put on each of our doors (well, except that someone stole the one off the boy’s door!) Fortunately, travelling together doesn’t mean that we have to be together 24/7 and everyone can have a bit of space.

It’s cold and wet out today – 57 degrees and cloudy, so there’s nothing going on outside by the pool. There are 3 pools on board, incidentally, one designated as “adult only” and it’s in a more protected area, with kind of a glass enclosure around it. Even though the pools are heated to 78 degrees, without the sun it’s still a bit nippy when you get out.

Tuesday Evening

Well, Eddie, Benita and I all crapped out at the slot tournament. It was fun to play, though. Tonight is the first formal night – everyone has to get all dressed up in their fancy eatin’ clothes to go to dinner. This means that the iron / steamer which I’ve smuggled aboard despite strict restrictions will be in heavy use since clothes wadded into a suitcase and shipped across the country over the course of several days seldom look as though they just came from the cleaners.

Note to self – all juveniles get ironing lessons this summer.

We traditionally meet as a group for happy hour before dinner and then afterwards everyone goes their own way. Eddie and I made a pass through the casino again with the kids and the other adults went to see the show. Later the kids went to see the comedy show that started at 11 (past our bedtime).

It’s great that they can go off on their own to some extent at this point. It’s made travelling much easier. The only thing that we wish is that we’d brought our walkie talkies so that we could communicate a bit. While some of our phones continue to work on the ship (I suspect we’re just about the line of site off shore, plus a tiny bit more to get us into international waters), theirs go to roaming. Once we explained the charges for text messages to them, suddenly the need to communicate with that special someone in Hickory became a little less important!