The honeymooners
May. 26th, 2008 10:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
leujinOkay, so I’ve had a bit of time to recoup from the ordeal that was Miami International Airport and I’m no longer riding the high of being on vacation. So, you know what that means: it’s time for Nathan’s update about the honeymoon (Don’t worry, it’s PG. PG-13 at worst)! Rather than actually having journaled about it ever day, I decided to just take notes so we would have more time to enjoy ourselves. But, it’s still conveniently broken up into what I’m dubbing “Day Chunks.”
Day 1 – departing Miami and sea day
So, as I mentioned, this was the first time I’ve been to the ocean in at least a decade, and I have never actually left the country. It was pretty exciting sailing away from the port, being able to say “Wow, I’m world traveled now!” The cruise director had us make a point of being extra boisterous when we passed the Royal Caribbean ship (ours was Carnival), so that was fun. I took a whole bunch of pictures as we left (the Miami skyline, the last spit of land we would see for two days, that manner of thing).
Oh, before we actually departed, we had to go through the safety “in case the ship starts to sink” exercise, which I understood. It was annoying that we had to wait for everybody. What was annoying was that the cruise director (Matt. If I say Matt, that’s who I’m referring) said EVERYONE MUST ATTEND, yet they still had to go cabin to cabin to make sure nobody was there. That took like a half hour, and then the actual safety exercise took less than 5 minutes. At that point we were really aggravated and ready to start the vacation.
Back to the fun stuff. We ate lunch (free food: awesome), and there was a bit of confusion as to where it actually was. There was a band doing calypso covers of popular songs which was… interesting. After hanging around on deck we went back to our cabin. We hung out there for awhile while we got ready to go have fun around the ship. In that time we watched Batman and Robin, which I had forgotten just how terrible of a movie it is. We hit the casino for awhile. You’ll be pleased to know we won $80! And lost about $120. We both played slots, basically, and when we got bored with it we left.
We decided at that point to check out the duty free shops. I had no idea just how badly we as American’s get ripped off in terms of buying alcohol. There was stuff that was something to the tune of 75% of what we would have paid for it ashore. We went back on deck and decided to have dinner, and afterwards went downstairs to see a show. It was basically the dancers being silly, and during this we each bought our one and only alcoholic drink on the boat, because they were like $6 apiece for what couldn’t have been more than 20 oz of drink.
Day 2 – First full day at sea
At this point I would like to mention how hard it is to wake up with no natural light. We decided an inside cabin would be okay, but man… you wake up in the middle of the night and you can’t tell if it’s 3 am or 11 am. Definitely will be getting a window cabin next time (30 years from now).
If you’ve ever been on a cruise, you know there’s not a lot to do on the ship during the sea days if you don’t like being around people, so for this day we basically had breakfast, lunch, and dinner on deck. We laid on the deck for awhile, and we each got a bit of a tan. Liz was wearing a shirt with a collar on it, so now for the rest of the trip she had a square shaped tan line just on her boobs. It happens a lot with her. We went back to the casino again, played some more slots, and I played blackjack. I was doing well until Liz left, then I lost big time.
Some time in the middle of the day was an info session about Cozumel, Mexico, our first stop. We thought it would be nice to go to find out information about the shops and hopefully they would give us good information, but it was all about gems. Apparently that’s what people do on cruises, is buy gems at WAY cheaper than you could state-side. It was eye opening, but I don’t give two craps about tanzanite. The guy also told us that the sales people would be really pushy and tell us to come in a billion times until we couldn’t hear them.
There was a comedian guy who I guess does shows on every one of their ships. It was pretty funny. He basically just called on people in the audience and picked on them to make the rest of us laugh.
Today was also a landmark occasion for me: It’s the first time I’ve ever seen Liz in a bathing suit. I understand why she didn’t ever want to, but I was able to convince her that nobody cared and they had their own problems, and even if the did care we would never be seeing them again after a week. It was very fun, and we were being generally silly. There was a group of Germans(?) who were in the pool, too, constantly talking in German. We were convinced that they were talking about us, but we didn’t really care since we were being stupid and deserved to be made fun of (we were pretending to be each other’s babies).
Day 3 – Cozumel!
Very exciting day. It was a really great day to be hanging around on an island. The first thing we did was buy souvenirs for everybody (in our families. Sorry, guys, we’re not made of money), and man… it got old having every single person shout “Hey, amigo! Come in my store! Pretty necklace for the pretty lady!” We did end up getting some rather nifty gifties, including a chess set for my brother, a surfing pirate for my mom, color changing nail polish for my sister, a couple of glasses for my brother and his girlfriend, gobs of t-shirts, a rather neat sculpture made of scrap metal, a shot glass, a picture frame, a teapot, hot sauce, and a partridge in a pear tree.
We had breakfast at a genuine Mexican restaurant. I had something that I can’t remember the name of, but it looked like bat barf, but holy crap was it delicious. I also got a lemonade in a margarita glass. Why, I don’t know. This is also where we discovered pesos are a really crappy exchange. It’s something like 10.40 pesos to $1 American.
We did the rest of our shopping, and headed to Margaritaville afterwards for lunch. The logic being that you can’t go to Mexico without having a Margarita. It was zany. Very noisy. There was a balloon animal lady that gave us funny balloon hats, and a pretty rockin’ band on stage. Every once in awhile the whole staff would have to do a dance, depending upon which crazy song came on.
We had planned to go to the beach, but there were no actual beaches anywhere near the port, so we just got back on the ship and waited for our shore excursion. Liz bought the first two without me knowing it, and I got to pick the one for Jamaica. Basically this one involved getting on a catamaran and watching the sun set way off shore. It was very nice and relaxing, and it probably would’ve been more fun if we had a) wanted to get drunk, or b) nobody else wanted to get drunk. We got some pretty nifty pictures that I could probably use as book covers next month.
After that we basically just got back on the ship and waited to depart, and I think that was also the only night we ordered room service. We figured we might as well since we didn’t have to pay any extra for it. Beautiful sleep followed.
Day 4 – Another boring day at sea
Not much really going on today either. There was a lot of hanging out in the cabin. There was a thing called The Not So Newlywed Game. Basically Matt got three couples: a newlywed couple (who claimed to have been married only 3 days, which I still don’t believe), a couple married for 25 years, and one married for over 50. It was really funny to see the fun answers they came up with and the “you could not be more wrong” faces that the wives gave.
We played in the pool some more. It was more fun today since we didn’t have to worry about anybody else. Oh, I neglected to mention that the pools were salt water. That was a horrible surprise the first time I went under water.
There was also an after dark magic show. There was a kid friendly version before, but we didn’t go, but the differences were pretty obvious, namely the half-naked dancer assistants and the cartoon frogs doing lewd things to each other for the title sequence. It was pretty neat, and it was the first magic show I’ve ever seen. It was unfortunately short, but it was still amusing.
Also, apparently the room stewards clean the rooms something like 3 times a day, which is pretty awkward when you’re in there trying to sleep and you don’t hear them knocking to tell them to go away. Only when they open the door do you hear them to tell them to stfu and go away. They do, in fact, leave little towel animals on your bed, too. It was weird.
Day 5 – Grand Cayman
This was a pretty interesting day. Since there wasn’t actually a port large enough to take a cruise ship, so we had to do what is called tendering. Basically this means they had smaller boats that carried 30 people and ferried us to the actual port. They told us it would take 45 minutes, but it only took 10, so we waited around for an hour for our shore excursion to start.
This is another one Liz surprised me with. We went on a pirate ship! It was really exciting. Apparently Grand Cayman was a pretty big safe haven for pirates back in the day, so there was a lot of piratey nonsense going on. Basically they behaved like scalliwags and staged an attack on our ship as they passed it. Then they called all the kids to the lower deck and made them scrub. They also found 3 of those stereotypically cute girls and made them scrub the decks, too. It was amusing. After sailing around for awhile and doing pirate things, they stopped and had everyone walk the plank and swim in the ocean for a half hour. They made us wear life vests, so it wasn’t all that terrifying or anything, but we did keep drifting away from the ship.
After we got back, we had another couple take a picture of us in front of the pirate ship. It’s the only picture that wasn’t professionally taken of us that isn’t taken by us. So, then we decided to go to the beach. 7 mile beach, which I guess is world renowned or some such. We played in the water, and I pretended to wash myself up on the beach, and once we got tired and loafed on the beach for awhile. This is when we got our massive ridiculous sunburn. See, we put sunscreen on, but neither of us put any on the areas that would be exposed when we were swimming, so for the rest of the trip I looked like I was wearing a red t-shirt. So it was unpleasant trying to sleep that night.
Day 6 – Jamaica
I had been looking forward to this since we started planning the cruise. See, I’ve been promised a number of times to be taken to Jamaica, and then at the last minute it was changed to “just us,” so… yeah. So, apparently, all the stereotypes about Jamaica that you’ve heard about how they talk is all true. They really do say “mon” all the time, and apparently “Yeah mon” is like “yes sir.”
Basically for our shore excursion it was a big tour of the island followed by rafting down one of the rivers (the town we ported in was called Ocho Rios. I bet you can’t guess how many rivers they have), so it was very educational. The official language is English, but they also have another language called Patois, which is a combination of English, French, Spanish, and various African languages, but it’s considered a dialect of English. They also grow basically everything you could think of.
The rafting thing wasn’t what I had expected when I signed up for it, but it was still pretty fun. They basically stuck each couple on a raft made of big things of bamboo, and the guy in charge of the thing rafted us down. The river was very slow moving, so it was really romantic and we got a lot of pictures of the foliage. As we were going down the river, there were little shops that people sold handmade crap. They were WAY pushier than the people in Cozumel. Basically they would throw the things at you and then tell you to buy them.
The guy on the raft was actually selling stuff, too, so we decided to buy one of his hand carved gourd things. It’s called a calabash, but it looks a lot like a coconut. He wanted $35 for it, which it was WAY not worth, especially considering he wrote “Lix and Nathan” on it, but we talked him down to… um… $30. Yeah, we suck at haggling.
It was another short day, and our thing took almost the whole day, so we were only able to buy a couple of shirts and a shot glass in one of the shops, because the ship was leaving in another hour.
Day 7 – Yet another boring day at sea
So our cruise was winding down finally. Today we packed up our stuff, and I have to say Liz is an amazing packer. She brought an extra bag in anticipation of us bringing back a bunch of extra stuff, and our suitcases were packed to the gills. We didn’t have room for the calabash, so we stuck that in Liz’s purse and stuffed it full of underwear.
We still had some leftovers from the casino, so we dropped the rest of our quarters into the slot machines. We also played more bingo, which was way more infuriating than usual, because each of us was one number away from winning multiple times.
We also played TV Theme Song Trivia, which we thought we would be good at. We didn’t do terribly, but not as well as we thought. Everybody knew the theme from Star Trek, but I was the only one who knew it was specifically from TNG. I felt like a big dork, and the MC and I bantered about it.
We sat in on the end of Slogan Trivia, too, because we wanted to play battle of the sexes. That was pretty fun. It was broken into 3 rounds: trivia, scavenger hunt, and a number game. The guys sucked at trivia, because our captain kept making answers that were dumb (although it was pretty hilarious when he said Janis Joplin’s favorite drink was vomit). We gained back points in the scavenger hunt, though, because we had to keep running back to cabins to get stuff, but we had a couple of super limber little kids on our team.
Liz and I both managed to get roped into the third round. Basically there were 5 people for each team, we each were assigned a number 0-4. The MC would call out a number and we would have to scramble around to get ourselves in the right order for the point. The reason Liz got in was because she was the only one with the right answers to the trivia, and the captain decided she deserved it. I got in because the kid who was 0 was bad at it, and the MC was like “Yeah, you have to be 18.” I got picked because I was the only one who was willing to take his place. Being the 0 was awful, because the MC kept calling out 4 digit numbers, so the 0 had to be at the beginning.
Eventually the women won buy one point, despite the guys having a 5 point lead, and Liz got a medallion. She let me wear it, though.
Day 8 – Debarking and heading home
Customs sucks. I thought the security at the airport sucked, but no no. There were two large lines that diverged into about a dozen smaller lines with individual customs agents. We were the next in line to get out, but the guys in front of us were taking forever. They were probably Canadian and were having a hard time of it, because the rules for customs are a lot stricter for Canada (eg: American’s can bring in 1 liter of liquor duty free, and any more they have to pay for it, whereas Canadians can ONLY bring in 1 liter of liquor, and that’s it). They took no less than 10 minutes, and the people in all the other lines were going through at lightning speed, so Liz and I were getting pissed.
We finally got out, got shuttled to the airport, and made our way through security. Did I mention how much I hate MIA? It is an awful airport. The lines were terribly long and they didn’t make sense. Our first line wrapped around two others, took us into a section where we got our tickets printed, and then we were trapped in a little area, not knowing where to go. We finally figured it out, got in one of those lines we wrapped around, and eventually got to the actual security area.
Remember how I mentioned Liz’s amazing packing job? Well, she put all the breakable stuff in our carry on bags, because we’ve seen how much the earmuff-tarmac guys throw bags around. One of those things was a snow globe. We didn’t really think about the fact that there was liquid in it, so the security guard had to stop us and told us to check the bag. We really didn’t want to, so we told him to just throw it out, which sucked, and I’m still pissed about. Homeland Security FTL.
I was thinking about it later, and it would have been a lot easier to break the snow globe and kill someone with it than it would have to make a bomb. WTF number 1. WTF number 2 comes in the fact that after security, you can buy other liquids (including liquor, which you could easily make a molitov cocktail out of) AND TAKE THEM ON THE FREAKING PLANE! WHAT THE HELL!?!
So, I was mad. I guess the world just wanted to make sure we knew we weren’t on vacation anymore. So, now we waited in the airport for 5 hours until our plane came. Which was an hour late. There was also another dude there who had a HORRIBLE sunburn. He had 2nd degree burns, and we didn’t really believe it when he said it. Then, however, he showed us a picture of the half dollar sized boil on his back. He was basically wrapped so tight he had to hold his arm up as though it were broken. He told us he had to sleep sitting up. That’s a lesson learned right there: Don’t spend 8 hours unprotected in the Bahamas sun.
The plane ride back wasn’t awful, it was just uncomfortable having to deal with the sunburn (I can’t imagine how that guy must have been dealing with it), and we got to Dallas in time to grab a hamburger and get on the plane. We got home around 11:30pm, and crashed.
Day 9 – Damn, now we’re not on vacation
We unpacked all our crap today. Despite our best efforts, some things still got broken. We bought drinks on the boat and they came in little souvenir cups which we kept. They were plastic, so we didn’t think they could break, but the earmuff-tarmac guys made sure they did. The bag chucking the did managed to break one of them and the container my hair gel was in, so Liz’s makeup was covered in it. We’re going to call and bitch at them, even though we’re pretty sure it won’t actually do any good, but it will make us feel better.
That’s it. That was our grand adventure. I typed this up in a word document, and it’s about 6.5 pages, so I really don’t expect anybody to have read all of it. Just rest assured it was the best vacation I’ve ever had.
Day 1 – departing Miami and sea day
So, as I mentioned, this was the first time I’ve been to the ocean in at least a decade, and I have never actually left the country. It was pretty exciting sailing away from the port, being able to say “Wow, I’m world traveled now!” The cruise director had us make a point of being extra boisterous when we passed the Royal Caribbean ship (ours was Carnival), so that was fun. I took a whole bunch of pictures as we left (the Miami skyline, the last spit of land we would see for two days, that manner of thing).
Oh, before we actually departed, we had to go through the safety “in case the ship starts to sink” exercise, which I understood. It was annoying that we had to wait for everybody. What was annoying was that the cruise director (Matt. If I say Matt, that’s who I’m referring) said EVERYONE MUST ATTEND, yet they still had to go cabin to cabin to make sure nobody was there. That took like a half hour, and then the actual safety exercise took less than 5 minutes. At that point we were really aggravated and ready to start the vacation.
Back to the fun stuff. We ate lunch (free food: awesome), and there was a bit of confusion as to where it actually was. There was a band doing calypso covers of popular songs which was… interesting. After hanging around on deck we went back to our cabin. We hung out there for awhile while we got ready to go have fun around the ship. In that time we watched Batman and Robin, which I had forgotten just how terrible of a movie it is. We hit the casino for awhile. You’ll be pleased to know we won $80! And lost about $120. We both played slots, basically, and when we got bored with it we left.
We decided at that point to check out the duty free shops. I had no idea just how badly we as American’s get ripped off in terms of buying alcohol. There was stuff that was something to the tune of 75% of what we would have paid for it ashore. We went back on deck and decided to have dinner, and afterwards went downstairs to see a show. It was basically the dancers being silly, and during this we each bought our one and only alcoholic drink on the boat, because they were like $6 apiece for what couldn’t have been more than 20 oz of drink.
Day 2 – First full day at sea
At this point I would like to mention how hard it is to wake up with no natural light. We decided an inside cabin would be okay, but man… you wake up in the middle of the night and you can’t tell if it’s 3 am or 11 am. Definitely will be getting a window cabin next time (30 years from now).
If you’ve ever been on a cruise, you know there’s not a lot to do on the ship during the sea days if you don’t like being around people, so for this day we basically had breakfast, lunch, and dinner on deck. We laid on the deck for awhile, and we each got a bit of a tan. Liz was wearing a shirt with a collar on it, so now for the rest of the trip she had a square shaped tan line just on her boobs. It happens a lot with her. We went back to the casino again, played some more slots, and I played blackjack. I was doing well until Liz left, then I lost big time.
Some time in the middle of the day was an info session about Cozumel, Mexico, our first stop. We thought it would be nice to go to find out information about the shops and hopefully they would give us good information, but it was all about gems. Apparently that’s what people do on cruises, is buy gems at WAY cheaper than you could state-side. It was eye opening, but I don’t give two craps about tanzanite. The guy also told us that the sales people would be really pushy and tell us to come in a billion times until we couldn’t hear them.
There was a comedian guy who I guess does shows on every one of their ships. It was pretty funny. He basically just called on people in the audience and picked on them to make the rest of us laugh.
Today was also a landmark occasion for me: It’s the first time I’ve ever seen Liz in a bathing suit. I understand why she didn’t ever want to, but I was able to convince her that nobody cared and they had their own problems, and even if the did care we would never be seeing them again after a week. It was very fun, and we were being generally silly. There was a group of Germans(?) who were in the pool, too, constantly talking in German. We were convinced that they were talking about us, but we didn’t really care since we were being stupid and deserved to be made fun of (we were pretending to be each other’s babies).
Day 3 – Cozumel!
Very exciting day. It was a really great day to be hanging around on an island. The first thing we did was buy souvenirs for everybody (in our families. Sorry, guys, we’re not made of money), and man… it got old having every single person shout “Hey, amigo! Come in my store! Pretty necklace for the pretty lady!” We did end up getting some rather nifty gifties, including a chess set for my brother, a surfing pirate for my mom, color changing nail polish for my sister, a couple of glasses for my brother and his girlfriend, gobs of t-shirts, a rather neat sculpture made of scrap metal, a shot glass, a picture frame, a teapot, hot sauce, and a partridge in a pear tree.
We had breakfast at a genuine Mexican restaurant. I had something that I can’t remember the name of, but it looked like bat barf, but holy crap was it delicious. I also got a lemonade in a margarita glass. Why, I don’t know. This is also where we discovered pesos are a really crappy exchange. It’s something like 10.40 pesos to $1 American.
We did the rest of our shopping, and headed to Margaritaville afterwards for lunch. The logic being that you can’t go to Mexico without having a Margarita. It was zany. Very noisy. There was a balloon animal lady that gave us funny balloon hats, and a pretty rockin’ band on stage. Every once in awhile the whole staff would have to do a dance, depending upon which crazy song came on.
We had planned to go to the beach, but there were no actual beaches anywhere near the port, so we just got back on the ship and waited for our shore excursion. Liz bought the first two without me knowing it, and I got to pick the one for Jamaica. Basically this one involved getting on a catamaran and watching the sun set way off shore. It was very nice and relaxing, and it probably would’ve been more fun if we had a) wanted to get drunk, or b) nobody else wanted to get drunk. We got some pretty nifty pictures that I could probably use as book covers next month.
After that we basically just got back on the ship and waited to depart, and I think that was also the only night we ordered room service. We figured we might as well since we didn’t have to pay any extra for it. Beautiful sleep followed.
Day 4 – Another boring day at sea
Not much really going on today either. There was a lot of hanging out in the cabin. There was a thing called The Not So Newlywed Game. Basically Matt got three couples: a newlywed couple (who claimed to have been married only 3 days, which I still don’t believe), a couple married for 25 years, and one married for over 50. It was really funny to see the fun answers they came up with and the “you could not be more wrong” faces that the wives gave.
We played in the pool some more. It was more fun today since we didn’t have to worry about anybody else. Oh, I neglected to mention that the pools were salt water. That was a horrible surprise the first time I went under water.
There was also an after dark magic show. There was a kid friendly version before, but we didn’t go, but the differences were pretty obvious, namely the half-naked dancer assistants and the cartoon frogs doing lewd things to each other for the title sequence. It was pretty neat, and it was the first magic show I’ve ever seen. It was unfortunately short, but it was still amusing.
Also, apparently the room stewards clean the rooms something like 3 times a day, which is pretty awkward when you’re in there trying to sleep and you don’t hear them knocking to tell them to go away. Only when they open the door do you hear them to tell them to stfu and go away. They do, in fact, leave little towel animals on your bed, too. It was weird.
Day 5 – Grand Cayman
This was a pretty interesting day. Since there wasn’t actually a port large enough to take a cruise ship, so we had to do what is called tendering. Basically this means they had smaller boats that carried 30 people and ferried us to the actual port. They told us it would take 45 minutes, but it only took 10, so we waited around for an hour for our shore excursion to start.
This is another one Liz surprised me with. We went on a pirate ship! It was really exciting. Apparently Grand Cayman was a pretty big safe haven for pirates back in the day, so there was a lot of piratey nonsense going on. Basically they behaved like scalliwags and staged an attack on our ship as they passed it. Then they called all the kids to the lower deck and made them scrub. They also found 3 of those stereotypically cute girls and made them scrub the decks, too. It was amusing. After sailing around for awhile and doing pirate things, they stopped and had everyone walk the plank and swim in the ocean for a half hour. They made us wear life vests, so it wasn’t all that terrifying or anything, but we did keep drifting away from the ship.
After we got back, we had another couple take a picture of us in front of the pirate ship. It’s the only picture that wasn’t professionally taken of us that isn’t taken by us. So, then we decided to go to the beach. 7 mile beach, which I guess is world renowned or some such. We played in the water, and I pretended to wash myself up on the beach, and once we got tired and loafed on the beach for awhile. This is when we got our massive ridiculous sunburn. See, we put sunscreen on, but neither of us put any on the areas that would be exposed when we were swimming, so for the rest of the trip I looked like I was wearing a red t-shirt. So it was unpleasant trying to sleep that night.
Day 6 – Jamaica
I had been looking forward to this since we started planning the cruise. See, I’ve been promised a number of times to be taken to Jamaica, and then at the last minute it was changed to “just us,” so… yeah. So, apparently, all the stereotypes about Jamaica that you’ve heard about how they talk is all true. They really do say “mon” all the time, and apparently “Yeah mon” is like “yes sir.”
Basically for our shore excursion it was a big tour of the island followed by rafting down one of the rivers (the town we ported in was called Ocho Rios. I bet you can’t guess how many rivers they have), so it was very educational. The official language is English, but they also have another language called Patois, which is a combination of English, French, Spanish, and various African languages, but it’s considered a dialect of English. They also grow basically everything you could think of.
The rafting thing wasn’t what I had expected when I signed up for it, but it was still pretty fun. They basically stuck each couple on a raft made of big things of bamboo, and the guy in charge of the thing rafted us down. The river was very slow moving, so it was really romantic and we got a lot of pictures of the foliage. As we were going down the river, there were little shops that people sold handmade crap. They were WAY pushier than the people in Cozumel. Basically they would throw the things at you and then tell you to buy them.
The guy on the raft was actually selling stuff, too, so we decided to buy one of his hand carved gourd things. It’s called a calabash, but it looks a lot like a coconut. He wanted $35 for it, which it was WAY not worth, especially considering he wrote “Lix and Nathan” on it, but we talked him down to… um… $30. Yeah, we suck at haggling.
It was another short day, and our thing took almost the whole day, so we were only able to buy a couple of shirts and a shot glass in one of the shops, because the ship was leaving in another hour.
Day 7 – Yet another boring day at sea
So our cruise was winding down finally. Today we packed up our stuff, and I have to say Liz is an amazing packer. She brought an extra bag in anticipation of us bringing back a bunch of extra stuff, and our suitcases were packed to the gills. We didn’t have room for the calabash, so we stuck that in Liz’s purse and stuffed it full of underwear.
We still had some leftovers from the casino, so we dropped the rest of our quarters into the slot machines. We also played more bingo, which was way more infuriating than usual, because each of us was one number away from winning multiple times.
We also played TV Theme Song Trivia, which we thought we would be good at. We didn’t do terribly, but not as well as we thought. Everybody knew the theme from Star Trek, but I was the only one who knew it was specifically from TNG. I felt like a big dork, and the MC and I bantered about it.
We sat in on the end of Slogan Trivia, too, because we wanted to play battle of the sexes. That was pretty fun. It was broken into 3 rounds: trivia, scavenger hunt, and a number game. The guys sucked at trivia, because our captain kept making answers that were dumb (although it was pretty hilarious when he said Janis Joplin’s favorite drink was vomit). We gained back points in the scavenger hunt, though, because we had to keep running back to cabins to get stuff, but we had a couple of super limber little kids on our team.
Liz and I both managed to get roped into the third round. Basically there were 5 people for each team, we each were assigned a number 0-4. The MC would call out a number and we would have to scramble around to get ourselves in the right order for the point. The reason Liz got in was because she was the only one with the right answers to the trivia, and the captain decided she deserved it. I got in because the kid who was 0 was bad at it, and the MC was like “Yeah, you have to be 18.” I got picked because I was the only one who was willing to take his place. Being the 0 was awful, because the MC kept calling out 4 digit numbers, so the 0 had to be at the beginning.
Eventually the women won buy one point, despite the guys having a 5 point lead, and Liz got a medallion. She let me wear it, though.
Day 8 – Debarking and heading home
Customs sucks. I thought the security at the airport sucked, but no no. There were two large lines that diverged into about a dozen smaller lines with individual customs agents. We were the next in line to get out, but the guys in front of us were taking forever. They were probably Canadian and were having a hard time of it, because the rules for customs are a lot stricter for Canada (eg: American’s can bring in 1 liter of liquor duty free, and any more they have to pay for it, whereas Canadians can ONLY bring in 1 liter of liquor, and that’s it). They took no less than 10 minutes, and the people in all the other lines were going through at lightning speed, so Liz and I were getting pissed.
We finally got out, got shuttled to the airport, and made our way through security. Did I mention how much I hate MIA? It is an awful airport. The lines were terribly long and they didn’t make sense. Our first line wrapped around two others, took us into a section where we got our tickets printed, and then we were trapped in a little area, not knowing where to go. We finally figured it out, got in one of those lines we wrapped around, and eventually got to the actual security area.
Remember how I mentioned Liz’s amazing packing job? Well, she put all the breakable stuff in our carry on bags, because we’ve seen how much the earmuff-tarmac guys throw bags around. One of those things was a snow globe. We didn’t really think about the fact that there was liquid in it, so the security guard had to stop us and told us to check the bag. We really didn’t want to, so we told him to just throw it out, which sucked, and I’m still pissed about. Homeland Security FTL.
I was thinking about it later, and it would have been a lot easier to break the snow globe and kill someone with it than it would have to make a bomb. WTF number 1. WTF number 2 comes in the fact that after security, you can buy other liquids (including liquor, which you could easily make a molitov cocktail out of) AND TAKE THEM ON THE FREAKING PLANE! WHAT THE HELL!?!
So, I was mad. I guess the world just wanted to make sure we knew we weren’t on vacation anymore. So, now we waited in the airport for 5 hours until our plane came. Which was an hour late. There was also another dude there who had a HORRIBLE sunburn. He had 2nd degree burns, and we didn’t really believe it when he said it. Then, however, he showed us a picture of the half dollar sized boil on his back. He was basically wrapped so tight he had to hold his arm up as though it were broken. He told us he had to sleep sitting up. That’s a lesson learned right there: Don’t spend 8 hours unprotected in the Bahamas sun.
The plane ride back wasn’t awful, it was just uncomfortable having to deal with the sunburn (I can’t imagine how that guy must have been dealing with it), and we got to Dallas in time to grab a hamburger and get on the plane. We got home around 11:30pm, and crashed.
Day 9 – Damn, now we’re not on vacation
We unpacked all our crap today. Despite our best efforts, some things still got broken. We bought drinks on the boat and they came in little souvenir cups which we kept. They were plastic, so we didn’t think they could break, but the earmuff-tarmac guys made sure they did. The bag chucking the did managed to break one of them and the container my hair gel was in, so Liz’s makeup was covered in it. We’re going to call and bitch at them, even though we’re pretty sure it won’t actually do any good, but it will make us feel better.
That’s it. That was our grand adventure. I typed this up in a word document, and it’s about 6.5 pages, so I really don’t expect anybody to have read all of it. Just rest assured it was the best vacation I’ve ever had.
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no subject
Date: 2008-05-26 10:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-05-26 10:46 pm (UTC)Question the first:
Okay, so I'm so not that serious. I'll just be impressed that you made it through the whole thing, considering how not interesting I know it must have been.
no subject
Date: 2008-05-27 11:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-05-26 11:06 pm (UTC)If swimming with stingrays was an available option, then shame on you for not taking it! If not, well then I guess pirate ships are acceptable.
Will your sunburn turn into tan or does your skin suck?
no subject
Date: 2008-05-26 11:51 pm (UTC)They did have the stingray thing going, but I really didn't have a choice in it. Liz picked the first two shore excursions, and I picked the one for Jamaica. She surprised me. I think she probably just didn't want to swim with people around.
My skin sucks in that Irish way, so it with either freckle or go back to being pasty white.