Sorry folks, life got in the way of posting on our recent vacation, "Melissa Do (it on) the Pacific 2006." However, I'm back for today with more gory details.
Royal Caribbean, and cruise ships in general, are missing the marketing boat (ha ha! get it? marketing boat - cruise ship ... man I slay me!), instead of pointing out all the cool shit you can do on their tug boat while sailing the seven seas, they should pimp the sleeping qualities of the subtle rocking off the ocean and gentle slaps of water as the ship cuts through the blue waters. If I knew it would only cost me $600 bones to get the best 7 days of sleep in my life I would have signed up decades ago.
So with choppy-sea inducing seasickness behind me (I'll stick with seasickness until the day I croak, yeah, that's what made me sick) and the time being on the long side of 10 a.m., Wife, Chris and I rushed to clean our sea-drenched butts so we could make it to the breakfast buffet. We catch it at the right time, too, as the crew is in a meal change - going from lunch to breakfast. There's nothing mixing hash browns, water-logged scrambled eggs and lox with crab salad, rigatoni in marinara and crab salad. My stomach, grumbling and disoriented at the same time, may or may not be ready for the brunch celebration but that doesn't stop me from piling the free (again, the greatest word in the English language) chow. I'm not even deterred when Wife hands me a hunk of turkey sausage that she and Chris described as tasting like toe jam. I taste the link, agree there is a toe jam-quality to Mr. turkey sausage, and then finish it off. Why? Because I can, plus there are starving kids in this world who would give their eyeballs for a little piece of Toe Jam Sausage. I can't let good food - or bad food - go to waste.
It's not a vacation if I can't gamble (scuttling away personal finances is more accurate) on something, and lucky for me Royal Caribbean provided such an outlet - a blackjack tournament with a $20 buy-in. The blackjack pit is a scurrying mess, which consists of three whole tables when there isn't a tournament, with throngs of hostages/losers (myself included) huddled around the ONE tournament table like we were Philadelphia dock workers crowded around a trash-can fire for heat. There are seven seats and each sucker is given $500 in chips to bet how they want in seven turns. After those seven shots, new suckers are given life. Of course, getting that life is harder than playing the actual game. It's survival of the fittest, so the blue hairs are getting pushed to the back where us youngsters whallop them a few times so they don't try to snake our spot at the table. However, some of those old fogies bite, so we had to steal their teeth to guard against them chomping on our achilles tendons. Once all the suckers have been given a shot, you can either re-buy (i.e. get screwed again, this time with lotion) or take the losers' walk of shame back up to the pool deck for some comforting buffet food and soft-serve ice cream (again, all free ... whoopee!). I fell in the latter category and didn't last the full seven turns in the round. It took three - 3 - hands to spin my ass out of the chair. The dealer nailed 20, 21 and 20 again, and the last time I played blackjack 17, 15 and 19 were not the higher numbers.
Fretting over the Melissa family "fortune" being $20 lighter, we brainstormed some ideas on how to win back the cash. Knocking over a bar on the ship wasn't going to work - the getaway would be messy, and likely wet. Working as a crew member wasn't appealing because I knew how hard Wife and I made these shmoes work, and I didn't want to be put through that test. The last option was selling my body for sex in the Viking Lounge. I thought it was a good idea, but Wife didn't think I'd make enough. Then, as if she was the voice of God but funner and bubblier, the blonde activities planner (or the fun nazi as we chose to name her) for the cruise gets on the loud speaker: "Just 30 minutes until Bingo. Get your tickets now." Wife, Chris and I unsuture our butts from the comfy lounge chairs and shove every walker-toting blue hair out of the way so we could nab the lucky bingo cards. Little did we know bingo was Royal Caribbean's biggest scam. For the paltry sum of $35 you can buy a packet of five bingo cards for the five different bingo games they'll play that day. Do the math. One card (with six different bingo combinations) for one game. There's no reusing these cards for the other games that day or durin the week, and if the blonde bingo lady catches you doing so, she takes you behind the bingo stage and feeds your extremities to the whales they keep in an aquarium on the ship before releasing them for 30 minutes around into the ocean so us hostages believe there are really wild whales out there. I know better. I saw through that scam.
"Hell," I say, "bingo is easy. We should clean up at this game." I think we hit two numbers during the five games - total. We should get a prize for not getting within sniffing distance of a bingo. But no, instead, we take it in the shorts while an inbred couple from West Virginia wins the big prize - a Royal Caribbean t-shirt and a free teeth whitening in the spa. Damn, I wanted that because I didn't like the way bleach tastes when I whiten my choppers.
We had our first formal dinner of the cruise, which meant tuxes and fancy evening gowns for some, and the Dodger tie with my blue (at least Wife tells me it's blue) suit. That's right, I'm the snazzy shit. I feel like I'm at oscar night. Wife sure knows how to dress me.
Mustafa opens the menu and it's like Christmas morning. I really wish they just made dinners a buffet in the dining room, it would save us all a load of time. I finally decide on a pair of appetizers - escargots (if I knew snails tasted this good, I would have taken them from the garden to the kitchen instead of crunching them with shoes) and my favorite - lobster bisque. For dinner, I go with Daffy Duck. Never having water fowl of any kind for dinner, I wasn't sure what to expect. Mustafa (who always looks at me like I'm Cousin Eddie in the Vacation movies) slides a plate under my greedy chops and there lies some meat that looks an awful lot like chicken. I taste the dark meat, and yep, it's chicken masquerading as duck. It tastes phenomenal, don't get me wrong, but I can't shake the feeling that someone mislabeled the meat as duck when really, we were eating Foghorn Leghorn.
For dessert, you can't go wrong with a good cheesecake, and I wasn't disappointed. Robert (Mustafa's poor lackey) forklift over what the menu called Double-Strawberry Cheesecake, a brick of cake with it's own strawberry patch slathered on top. They had a low-fat version on the menu which seemed about as out of place on the menu as a ham and cheese sandwich at a Jewish delicatessen.
With dinner over, and the seas finally calm, we take it easy for the night and make it to bed early. We needed our rest anyway, Cabo was coming up and we'd want to be energized for some heavy lifting at Cabo Wabo.
Next up - Day 3 and how the Mojito changed our lives forever.
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