Despite staying up til close to midnight Sunday night watching cruisers go wild and crazy singing Karaoke in the Degas Lounge, we awoke around 6:40 a.m. Monday and emerged onto our balcony to find the ocean had changed. Gone was the gray-blue of the Texas near shore waters. Gone were the dozens of oil and gas production platforms, which had continued to bristle for hundreds of miles all around us into late Sunday night.
Instead we found a new world where the sea had gone cobalt blue--a startling, deep, royal blue--and the sky was splattered with cumulus clouds of gray and white that puffed by close overhead or lined the distant horizon in linear bands that piled up into billowing hills above and flattened into wide, gray lines with occasional fingers of dark rain coming down to the sea below. The rising sun shone through the cloud mass to the east, sending rays of light breaking through holes in the vapor. The horizon was unbroken, limitless, a sweeping arc from left to right, ocean meeting sky, the rim of the world clearly made visible, with no trees, no hills, no telephone poles or buildings or anything to break the sight lines. Transitory shadows of clouds were stark and obvious here and there across the otherwise uniform blue surface. Looking down from our stateroom balcony, the churning foam of the ship’s wake tinted the water nearest the hull a lighter, aquamarine tinge.
We did 8 a.m. yoga and found the young fitness center crew had a much more simple, active, approach, much different than what Lauren was used to at Yoga Yoga in Austin. This took place in the ship gym, high on the 12th floor above the prow, with windows all around showing the big blue sliding by way down below.
After this came breakfast, followed by the first power nap of the day. Then Tom headed off for an aerobic workout back at the gym on an elliptical trainer. Then we showered and dressed for the Park West company art auction.
The art auction was most interesting, not least because they were offering original works by Picasso, Chagall, Dali, Rembrandt and other famous “dead guys,” as the delightfully perky and charming ship’s art director Kelsey referred to them. After we strolled through the arrayed canvases sipping free champagne, we sat down and Kelsey rocketed us through the “fun ship” approach to art auctioneering, extremely fast and high energy, with lots of cheering and hooting. Nobody shelled out $14,000 for an original Dali piece done as a series of illustrations for Dante’s Divine Comedy, but several folks paid hundreds for the work of more current artists.
Lunch followed, and afterward the second power nap of the day (are you sensing a pattern?). This little snooze was truncated by a sudden announcement from the captain, whose strongly-accented voice was unmistakably different from the hoarse British huskiness of the cruise director’s frequent announcements. The captain’s message shocked us. A tropical storm named Gustov was heading northwest into the Western Caribbean, they had made a decision to drop our Jamaica port stop entirely, and instead go straight to Grand Cayman, then Cozumel, and add a new stop in Progreso on the northern coast of the Yucatan Peninsula. No Jamaica!? Huh?! Lauren (and about 3,000 other fellow cruisers) were most bummed, as Jamaica mon had been one of the whole points of the trip. Oh well. Our swimming with dolphins shore excursion at Ocho Rios in Jamaica had been automatically cancelled. We decided to switch our Tulum trip at Cozumel to instead do a dolphin swim excursion there, and added a Mayan ruin trip at Progreso. Que sera, sera.
This sobering news, landing like a grenade in our stateroom as we groggily emerged from nappage, required immediate additional coffee for Tom, who had taken to mixing hot chocolate and coffee from the many 24 hour beverage bars, since there was only one place aboard ship that claimed to have good coffee, and it was suspect, since they had no organic beans and seemed to be searching for a clue when the topic was probed. News of the itinerary change and Gustav’s onset buzzed through the ship for the next few hours, and lines formed at the shore excursions desk as cruisers tried to shift plans.
Nonetheless, the evening unfolded as delightfully pleasant. We chose this moment to pop our bottle of Vino Verdhe and downed most of it in our stateroom, then carried full glasses up to the sky deck on the stern to see a spectacular sunset. The wind had died and the sea was like molten lead, smooth and liquid. We then stepped smartly back to our stateroom and donned our nicest togs for assigned dining, which for us occurred every night at table 222 in the Renoir restaurant. This was one of two nights at sea when the dress code forbade shorts and T-shirts and called for elegant attire. Tom wore the 1950s vintage shawl tuxedo jacket acquired for our wedding in 1988, stored in the closet all these years. Lauren wore a beautiful crimson dress, set off by a newly expanded and restrung pearl necklace which Tom had lengthened as an anniversary surprise.
Then followed Tom’s wild night of Karaoke. Originally, we wandered down thinking to sing one tune, and Tom signed up to sing Saw Her Standing There by the Beatles, but never got to it, as he was swept away by an impulse to join a competition to be James Brown in some kind of ship show, and instead sang I Feel Good, going up against two other guys. Unfortunately, the first guy smoked Tom and the other young fellow, who watched in dismay as this guy not only sang his ass off, but pranced around doing some pretty cool JB dance moves, including the famous splits. After witnessing this, we knew it was all over, and tried to concede, but the Karaoke director, a strangely stiff and rule-oriented young gal named Allison, required us to get out there and go down in flames. So we all hammed it up and there emerged a wild, back-slapping, friendly camaraderie among the three would-be JBs.
We finally returned to our stateroom close to midnight once again, to find that the housekeeping crew had left another one of their incredible towel critters on our freshly made bed. Unlike the strange but somehow cute little shapeless ghost from the night before, this was a far grander creation, a quickly recognizable cute little rabbit lying prone with long ears flopping back. We had never heard of towel critters before (!?), and pondered whether the finer hotels did this sort of thing.
Perhaps because of all the power napping, or maybe it was the extra coffee in the afternoon, or the fact that we had turned the A/C temperature up at bedtime and the room had warmed, but Tom awoke at 3:30 a.m. and couldn’t get back to sleep. This had a fortuitous turn, as the moon had risen, a horned new moon hanging above the horizon straight out from the stateroom balcony, sending a spectral glowing shine of moonlight across the water to the ship…supernatural, ghostly, beautiful. Tom prowled up on deck and had pizza and chocolate frogurt on the Sky Deck before going back down, discovering there were several cruisers still up and rowdy on this ship, parts of which clearly never sleep.
Instead we found a new world where the sea had gone cobalt blue--a startling, deep, royal blue--and the sky was splattered with cumulus clouds of gray and white that puffed by close overhead or lined the distant horizon in linear bands that piled up into billowing hills above and flattened into wide, gray lines with occasional fingers of dark rain coming down to the sea below. The rising sun shone through the cloud mass to the east, sending rays of light breaking through holes in the vapor. The horizon was unbroken, limitless, a sweeping arc from left to right, ocean meeting sky, the rim of the world clearly made visible, with no trees, no hills, no telephone poles or buildings or anything to break the sight lines. Transitory shadows of clouds were stark and obvious here and there across the otherwise uniform blue surface. Looking down from our stateroom balcony, the churning foam of the ship’s wake tinted the water nearest the hull a lighter, aquamarine tinge.
We did 8 a.m. yoga and found the young fitness center crew had a much more simple, active, approach, much different than what Lauren was used to at Yoga Yoga in Austin. This took place in the ship gym, high on the 12th floor above the prow, with windows all around showing the big blue sliding by way down below.
After this came breakfast, followed by the first power nap of the day. Then Tom headed off for an aerobic workout back at the gym on an elliptical trainer. Then we showered and dressed for the Park West company art auction.
The art auction was most interesting, not least because they were offering original works by Picasso, Chagall, Dali, Rembrandt and other famous “dead guys,” as the delightfully perky and charming ship’s art director Kelsey referred to them. After we strolled through the arrayed canvases sipping free champagne, we sat down and Kelsey rocketed us through the “fun ship” approach to art auctioneering, extremely fast and high energy, with lots of cheering and hooting. Nobody shelled out $14,000 for an original Dali piece done as a series of illustrations for Dante’s Divine Comedy, but several folks paid hundreds for the work of more current artists.
Lunch followed, and afterward the second power nap of the day (are you sensing a pattern?). This little snooze was truncated by a sudden announcement from the captain, whose strongly-accented voice was unmistakably different from the hoarse British huskiness of the cruise director’s frequent announcements. The captain’s message shocked us. A tropical storm named Gustov was heading northwest into the Western Caribbean, they had made a decision to drop our Jamaica port stop entirely, and instead go straight to Grand Cayman, then Cozumel, and add a new stop in Progreso on the northern coast of the Yucatan Peninsula. No Jamaica!? Huh?! Lauren (and about 3,000 other fellow cruisers) were most bummed, as Jamaica mon had been one of the whole points of the trip. Oh well. Our swimming with dolphins shore excursion at Ocho Rios in Jamaica had been automatically cancelled. We decided to switch our Tulum trip at Cozumel to instead do a dolphin swim excursion there, and added a Mayan ruin trip at Progreso. Que sera, sera.
This sobering news, landing like a grenade in our stateroom as we groggily emerged from nappage, required immediate additional coffee for Tom, who had taken to mixing hot chocolate and coffee from the many 24 hour beverage bars, since there was only one place aboard ship that claimed to have good coffee, and it was suspect, since they had no organic beans and seemed to be searching for a clue when the topic was probed. News of the itinerary change and Gustav’s onset buzzed through the ship for the next few hours, and lines formed at the shore excursions desk as cruisers tried to shift plans.
Nonetheless, the evening unfolded as delightfully pleasant. We chose this moment to pop our bottle of Vino Verdhe and downed most of it in our stateroom, then carried full glasses up to the sky deck on the stern to see a spectacular sunset. The wind had died and the sea was like molten lead, smooth and liquid. We then stepped smartly back to our stateroom and donned our nicest togs for assigned dining, which for us occurred every night at table 222 in the Renoir restaurant. This was one of two nights at sea when the dress code forbade shorts and T-shirts and called for elegant attire. Tom wore the 1950s vintage shawl tuxedo jacket acquired for our wedding in 1988, stored in the closet all these years. Lauren wore a beautiful crimson dress, set off by a newly expanded and restrung pearl necklace which Tom had lengthened as an anniversary surprise.
Then followed Tom’s wild night of Karaoke. Originally, we wandered down thinking to sing one tune, and Tom signed up to sing Saw Her Standing There by the Beatles, but never got to it, as he was swept away by an impulse to join a competition to be James Brown in some kind of ship show, and instead sang I Feel Good, going up against two other guys. Unfortunately, the first guy smoked Tom and the other young fellow, who watched in dismay as this guy not only sang his ass off, but pranced around doing some pretty cool JB dance moves, including the famous splits. After witnessing this, we knew it was all over, and tried to concede, but the Karaoke director, a strangely stiff and rule-oriented young gal named Allison, required us to get out there and go down in flames. So we all hammed it up and there emerged a wild, back-slapping, friendly camaraderie among the three would-be JBs.
We finally returned to our stateroom close to midnight once again, to find that the housekeeping crew had left another one of their incredible towel critters on our freshly made bed. Unlike the strange but somehow cute little shapeless ghost from the night before, this was a far grander creation, a quickly recognizable cute little rabbit lying prone with long ears flopping back. We had never heard of towel critters before (!?), and pondered whether the finer hotels did this sort of thing.
Perhaps because of all the power napping, or maybe it was the extra coffee in the afternoon, or the fact that we had turned the A/C temperature up at bedtime and the room had warmed, but Tom awoke at 3:30 a.m. and couldn’t get back to sleep. This had a fortuitous turn, as the moon had risen, a horned new moon hanging above the horizon straight out from the stateroom balcony, sending a spectral glowing shine of moonlight across the water to the ship…supernatural, ghostly, beautiful. Tom prowled up on deck and had pizza and chocolate frogurt on the Sky Deck before going back down, discovering there were several cruisers still up and rowdy on this ship, parts of which clearly never sleep.
1 comment:
What a bummer, no swimming with dolphins in Jamaica. I just did a check on Hurricane Gustov and he seems to be coming your way. Hopefully not near Mexico. I have done the dolphin swim in Cozumel. Its great. You both should enjoy it.
Have fun!!
God Bless,
John
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