Day 109 through Day 115

I'm going to wrap up the last 8 days of the cruise, all of them were at sea, in one big entry. I had the days broken out, but I just found myself saying the same exact things. Went to breakfast. Played poker. Went to dinner. Wash and repeat. There were other things that were intermingled like going to dinner with Kim and Deidre of Cruise Specialists or attending a cocktail party with Cruise Specialists. I'm just going to create a list of bullet points and add some discussion around them.

After I finish this section, I will include a section on what happened with disembarkation. We disembark about six hours from now. I'm writing this at midnight before we get off the ship.

After I talk about getting off the ship, after I've thought about it for a few days, I will write and release a section on afterthoughts. What this will entail, I'm not sure yet. In no particular order:

In the eight days that we were at sea we played Texas Holdem tournaments every day, except one. We missed that day because we were too late to get into the tournament. I've mentioned it earlier that there are only 10 slots and that you had to sign up for a slot. If you go to the window too late to sign up and you weren’t one of the first ten, you didn't play. Over this last stretch, we probably played 14 times. Of the 14, I was in the money maybe four of them. Mary made the money on the last day in the first tournament of the day. She won $250. I placed third on the last tournament of the last day, making $60.00. I did not keep a hard record of what we won and lost. I know that in the segment before this segment I won quite a bit. I took home almost $800. In this last segment, I took $117.00 out. To be realistic, we probably broke even playing poker. If we were lucky, we might have actually made some money. Either way it was not a lot of money. We both enjoy playing it. If there is one downside to it, it requires a lot of time. This time could have been doing other things like swimming in the pool or pushing on the 7th floor or taking naps.

I want to talk about the food. When you go on a cruise that is one of the things people most talk about. How was the food? That to me is a pretty simple question. The food was very good. I should be more specific and say that the food in the main dining room was very good. I would say that the food in the specialty restaurants was good, but not so good as to justify the additional $45 per meal. Because of our elite status we got to eat there free a few times, but it was not worth 45 extra dollars. As you can see throughout this log I ate everything I could get my hands on. I even ate eggplant. I did not shy away from one thing on the menu. Did I eat too much? Yes. I will just work it off. My shirts no longer button at the neck. My pants still fit. Do I look physically bigger? I would have to admit it. Mary, on the other hand, lost 9 lbs. She was a little more consistent in her eating. Because we had breakfast in the dining room situation, we had availability to everything breakfast related. Throughout the log, you can see that I tried several different breakfast items. I would say that they were all good. We did not eat lunch except for onshore. Actually, we did go to a couple of the specialty luncheons but neither of them was fantastic. Early on, we went to O’Malley’s Pub. That was OK, at best. Later, we went to the seafood lunch, I cannot remember what it was called right now. This, too, was OK. In both cases, I don't think they were worth the extra money you had to pay to eat there. We ate in the dining room 90% of the time for dinner. I would say that 99% of the things we ate were good if not very good. If you figure we went to 100 dinners and there were four courses with each dinner, we had 400 items - of course, this is not 400 unique items. There were several items, especially towards the end, that were duplicates from earlier in the cruise. So, best guess, I would say that we had 250 unique items. Of the 250 I would say 240 were very good or good. We couldn't expect them all to be good, obviously. The other thing is not only did I eat things I have not eaten before, but I'm also eating them in strange combinations. This requires that the chef has some unique experiences. I’ve already rambled too much, so I will say that overall, the food was good to very good.

The ship itself was very good for us. Our room was near perfect for us. The bed was soft. The room was big enough. When we booked the room, we were told that I could not get out onto the balcony. That turned out to be not true. We were able to get out on the balcony. If there was one thing that I regret is that we did not spend enough time out there. I took six minute videos with the GoPro of just the ocean. I will have to fire them up and see how closely they resemble being on the actual balcony. I know it will take a great stretch of my imagination, but it might work. You never know. The other complaint I have about the room was the carpet. It was too thick. I could not get from my desk to the door in less than 15 minutes. It was just too thick. It was probably good for Mary because she could walk around in her bare feet. Another good thing is that if she did fall the carpet was soft enough to cushion her fall. Other than that, it was just too thick. My other regret is I did not have a fan of some sort. When I sleep, which isn't often, I am very temperature sensitive. An actual fan blowing wind would have helped. We might have to buy a small box fan or similar. The ship itself was very wheelchair accommodating. They had recently redone the ship to make it more wheelchair friendly. They got rid of a lot of the barriers that we're not wheelchair friendly. In the past, getting out to the 7th floor required a pretty big bump. Now they had automatic doors on the 7th floor so getting in and out onto the 7th floor area where I could push almost around the ship was very flat and easy. On the 7th floor, I could easily get in and off. These easy transitions were not easy previously. The conversions were done very nicely. They did a good job making them wheelchair friendly.

I'm going to title this section “the people”. For starters, GeDe was our room steward. Every day, and I mean every day, he cleaned our room. He came in two or three times during the day to freshen things up. It took him about 20 minutes in the morning to clean our room up. Obviously, this means changing the sheets etcetera. He would come in at least twice after that and spend maybe 5 minutes. The thing is, he had anywhere from 12 to 15 cabins he had to do this routine on every day. When we left our cabin we're going to walk about 100 feet or more of hallway to get to where the elevators were. If GeDe had his cart in the aisle we would have to tell him to move it. I could not fit by the cart. He would have to stop what he was doing, move the cart, let me by, move the cart back and then go back to doing what he was doing. It had to have been a pain in the ass. Nonetheless, he did it every time with a smile. He’s simply a good guy. Chances are, he's already forgotten about us. We will not forget him anytime soon. The waiters we had for the last segment, Sorocco and Sonic, were good guys. Neither of them were very good waiters but they were good people. The pessimist in me wonders if everyone wasn't happy just to get tips at the end. There's a certain amount of truth to that idea, but it can't be the only idea. We spent a lot of time with the sommeliers. Maya and Tenne visit us almost every night at dinner. We talked to them about wine, mostly, but they also talked a lot about their home lives. I would not say we became friends, but more than acquaintances. The other area that I think stands out was the photo gallery people. We spent a fair amount of time with them. I did not get the final count, but I believe we're near 500 pictures of Mary and me. When I get them all, I'm going to put up a specific web link for anyone interested in looking at 500 pictures of the ugly boy and the cute girl. The staff on the ship was very good.

We also met several people that were passengers. We've mentioned them throughout. It'll be curious to see if any of these acquaintances reach out in the future. They all have our business card with our e-mail addresses. The two ladies from Arkansas - Karen and Laurie. The couple from New York - Brenda and Rod. The couple from Vermont - Laurel and Ron. Kim and Diedre - the cruise specialist people. I'm sure there are others. When you're with someone for four months you do build some sort of a friendship. I liked having people to stop and talk to in the aisle or the dining room. Mary is more of a social butterfly than I am. I know she gets off on talking to people. Me, not so much.

In the last 8 days besides eating, playing poker and sleeping we did attend another international wine dinner. It was very similar to all the rest. They had different wines, but the food was the same. I will have to go back and count, but we probably went to 20 different wine events.  Separately, we attended a cocktail party held by the Cruise specialist people. This was nice.

Last, but hardly the least, I want to talk about this log. I had intentions of creating a website all along. I underestimated the amount of work that it would require to maintain. This is not a negative thing. It definitely gave me something to do on those at sea days. Admittedly, I got behind and I scrambled to get back in line. In the back of my brain, I was always working on the log. I was thinking of new things to say while experiencing them first hand. I think that the log turned out better than I had intended. I've created a Word document from all of these entries. As written, we are over 100,000 words. That means if you've been reading along, you have read the 200 page book. You can now check off that New Year's resolution that said read a book. I know adding the pictures helps tell the story a great deal. Honestly, they were a pain in the ass from the get go but I'm glad I did it. Not only for you, but for me. If I were ambitious, I would comb through it and try to fix as many errors as I could. I know there are lots of errors. If I was really ambitious, I would add pictures to the Word document then get it published through Amazon Books. Not that anyone would buy it, but I could say I wrote a book. That sounds awfully ambitious. Probably even too ambitious for me even though I'm retired. It might impact my online poker playing. Then of course we always have my friend Mr. Procrastination. He will do anything in his power to prevent me from making any progress. Or, what I could do is just publish it as is seeing as though I will be the only reader. I'm always looking for the shortcut. Anyway, it boils down to what I enjoyed writing the log. I enjoyed building and maintaining the website. I learned a lot about website building. I probably know too much. I've already had a couple of people asking me if I could build a website for them. I probably could although I'm not necessarily offering my skills just yet. The log will serve as a reference for the trip. Did I capture everything we did? Hell no. But it does capture a lot of what we did see and what we did do. The log and pictures will rebuild the trip in our minds for us when we look at both years from now. We've already had conversations where we quiz each other. What do you remember about the tour in Los Angeles? We both could come up with a couple of things, but when looking at the log we did a lot in Los Angeles. It was good to read that page or two to take us back to that early January day. We can do this with any of the 50 some ports we stopped at. That is the beauty of this log. I hope you enjoyed reading it.

I think this adequately covers the last eight days at sea. I did not cover the whole topic of packing. I think I will cover that in the disembarkation section which follows next. The 8 days went extremely fast. They went almost as fast as the 108 before them.