Day 7: Day at Sea (Part Two)

After four days of ports and sightseeing, a day at sea was a very welcome break. I had gotten pretty accustomed to waking up early, so I was awake before 9 o clock. This was great because it gave me just enough time to get dressed and go upstairs in time for the 9 o clock Walk a Mile and get Vitality Points for doing so. I dragged my mp3 player along with me and had a nice and refreshing start to my morning. While doing my laps, I saw Nonny and Nonno sunbathing, so I said hello.

After doing my mile, I went downstairs to see if anyone else was awake. Umma and Halmony were, so they dragged Mia out of bed and had everyone start getting ready for breakfast/lunch. I watched Into the Wild and caught up on blogging while they all got ready. It was around 11 by the time we were done getting ready, which was around the time that they started closing breakfast but thirty minutes too early for lunch. To solve this problem, we decided to go save us spots up in the Windjammer Café and wait around for them to open the lunch buffet. We’re such a weird family. Really. We did exactly that and had a great lunch.

At one o clock, we went downstairs to the Schooner Bar for our afternoon trivia, which we very sadly lost (a common theme throughout this trip). We had gotten a note the night before that said that we had to pick up our passports from the Romeo and Juliet restaurant in preparation for the trip out to Egypt the next day. This was set to start at 2 pm. We all assumed that there would be a huge line to get the passports, so immediately after the trivia ended, we got our stuff together and went upstairs prepared to wait in line for a long time. We got there five minutes before they were scheduled to start passing out passports to find that they had not only already started passing out the passports, but that there was absolutely no line. This wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, though, but it did leave us with a lot of spare time that we did not know how to fill.

Half of the group went downstairs, but I managed to convinced Chabba, James, Andrew, and Oppa to walk a mile before the next trivia session. We did just that. It was nice and there was a nice breeze to cool us down, which is always a good thing.

After walking the mile, I lost James and Andrew. I wanted to go hang out in the Schooner Bar to save good spots for trivia, so Oppa and I headed downstairs around three, stopping in the library on the way down to pick up our daily Sudoku. We waited around for the next fifteen minutes to wait for the trivia. This one was US TV theme songs. No one showed up to help us. Umma came a couple of songs into it and Uncle Alex came towards the end, but it was mostly Oppa and me trying to figure it out during this one. While I do admit that I watch a lot of TV, I guess I am not that much of a mainstream TV watcher and all of the themes were from mainstream shows so I did not fare too well. Andrew was around when they did the answers and said he probably would have gotten most of them right had he been there, but that was a little too late.

I left early to help Umma with the Bingo stuff that was starting almost immediately after Name that Tune. We stood in line to get our Bingo cards and then found places to sit in the theater in wait. I also had to find Halmony who was lost in the casino. Anyway, not much to say about Bingo. They do it a little differently on these cruises. Instead of getting game packs with multiple playing cards, you get one. They look for different patterns though. So in this case, they were first looking for the X and then looking for a blackout. Essentially you are playing two games on one card. I guess it’s pretty cool. It saves paper. We lost. Nothing more to say about that.

Umma and I walked a mile together after we lost Bingo. After doing our mile, we went downstairs. I changed clothes and dragged Oppa back upstairs to go work out in the gym for a little while. I spent that time on the elliptical, but was very sad when I realized that I had forgotten my mp3 player. Very sad, I know.

I went downstairs after I worked on and got ready for the show of the evening. After incorrectly claiming that the last few shows were comedy shows, this one was actually billed as one. I think it was more of a variety show, because it included a lot of dancing and singing in addition to the comedy. If you call what was comedy, comedy. The actual dancing and singing was pretty good, but the jokes were bad and the slapstick stuff they tried to pull was not good. We had the Welcome Back cocktail party scheduled before the show ended, so we managed to use that as an excuse to escape the bad entertainment of the night.

The cocktail party was good. Even though we were just about to eat, we all ate a lot of the little appetizers they had set out for us. They had these really good hot mini hot dog things out there and chocolate covered strawberries. Good times. We also got free alcohol. A lot of fun. The captain came out to answer questions people had about the ship and they had the couple of the night brag about going on some absurdly high number of cruises.

While they were closing up, we realized that we were kind of late for dinner, so we rushed over to eat some more. I wasn’t going to eat a lot, but they had gazpacho, so I had to. I was very full after that.

We had liked the guy who played the piano on the Name that Tune the night before so much that we wanted to actually go and see him play, so we did just that after dinner. Mia and Gianni were very happy about this and spent a lot of the night requesting songs for him to play. I was enjoying myself as well, but I was just starting to get sick (right before Egypt, I know), so all of the smoke in the lounge made me feel very unhappy. I could not breathe well. Umma got us all little fruit juices, which made it a little better, but I eventually just went downstairs and got ready for bed. We had to be up early for Egypt anyway.