The big family cruise for my father-in-law's 80th birthday came and went. It was... fine. I enjoyed it, and it was good to spend time with everybody as a family like that, but I'm not super eager to hop back on another cruise ship anytime soon. It's kinda a weird concept: Hey, let's all hang out on this floating resort. It's not as nice as a regular resort, and there's a pretty good chance you'll get motion sickness at some point to boot!
The motion sickness is a really thing too. Don't let anybody tell you otherwise. Those ships are so big you don't even notice it! Nah... I always noticed it. It didn't always bother me, but I always noticed it. And weirdly, I handled it much better than S. I'm the one who gets nauseous at Hollywood Studios, and she's the one who lived at sea for a semester in college. But somehow she was really starting to feel it toward the end of the trip, and I was pretty much good to go. The first night was brutal (the choppiest night of the trip by far), and then after that I acclimated to it. Lil' S2 got it the worst. He would have to lie down from time to time because he felt seasick.
He still had fun though. We all did. They had a water park, a pool, a gym, a spa, a mini golf course, and a bunch of lounges and bars. The nightlife looked pretty cool -- so much live music. You could just pop in on somebody playing the piano Billy Joel style, or an '80s cover band, or a salsa club, or a variety show, or what have you. I didn't really partake because I went to bed very early by my standards, usually around 10:30. Everybody in S's family is fast asleep an hour and a half before that, including S and the boys, with whom I was sharing a very small cabin, so when they woke up (very early) I pretty much had to wake up too. Once I got up in time to watch the sunset, so I did, but it was cloudy and not very beautiful at all.
Actually the final night we were there, we did do something at night. S, her sister, and I went to see a comedy show -- some woman named Thea Vidale. It was terrible. We literally walked out after 10 minutes it was so bad. I looked her up online afterward, and I think she was pretty funny once, but she mailed it in big time when we saw her. (To be fair, she did like ten shows total the four nights we were on the ship.) She was doing what's known in the NBA as "keep getting dem checks." She just rambled with little point and no punchlines. Her whole shtick was being an overbearing vulgar loudmouth, which gets old super quickly if there's nothing clever undergirding it. I knew we were in trouble when she came on stage and sat down in a chair. It's never a good sign when you get the standup who doesn't actually stand up.
The best thing I did on the ship was get a deep tissue massage. It hurt so good. I don't know how a 97-pound woman can make her arm feel like a rolling pin flattening your muscles, but this massage therapist did it. This wasn't one of those relaxing "aah that feels good" massages -- those aren't my type. I like the massages that dig deep into your soul, confound your sensors of pleasure and pain, and leave you feeling sore the next day. The only problem with it was that she made me feel guilty for having knotty muscles -- like, she'd feel tightness in my back and tsk-tsk and say something like "can tell you don't soak in tub enough." It reminded me of that Seinfeld episode in which Brad Garrett plays an auto mechanic who chastises Jerry for not taking care of his car.
The worst part about the trip was the cost -- not of the cruise itself, but of everything else. It's "all inclusive," with the exception of espresso drinks, seltzer water, alcoholic beverages, soda, arcade games, casino games, bottled water, sushi, surf & turf, internet service, spa treatments, photos, souvenirs, shore excursions, and service gratuity. If you want any of those things, you have to pay separately, and they are not cheap nor are they high quality. I dropped $65 on internet for the trip, and I could barely check my email it was so slow. I gave the kids $10 each to spend in the arcade and it didn't even last them 15 minutes. That's how they get you.
The second worst part of the trip was the shitty country music they played nonstop in the main dining area. God, I loathe that pop country garbage: My whiskey's brown, my truck's a Ford, got some country girls to come on board, them country girls all flock to me, cuz my gee-tar's hot and my land is free... It's my least favorite musical genre by far. Here are my top-5 in order from most to least tolerable.
5. Weird experimental avant-garde shit
4. Punk/metal in which the leader singer screams all the lyrics, especially insufferable if the members of the band are straight-edge and/or vegan
3. Easy listening, Kenny G stuff -- I heard an interview with Kenny G and really like him, so I listened to some of his music on YouTube; it's not good
2. Gospel -- once I took a Lyft to the airport at five in the morning and my driver listened to a radio show called "Praise Jesus" at 100 decibels the entire way; it was absolutely brutal
1. Pop country
Mainly I dislike pop country music because it's an aural atrocity, but, I will admit, another reason is that I associate it with people I would probably not want to hang out with. People who defend Deshaun Watson but hated on Colin Kaepernick, who think "Let's Go Brandon" is the cleverest slogan ever created, and whose attire consists primarily of cargo shorts and tee shirts with stylized American flag iconography. I actually was a bit worried that this type of person was going to be overly represented on the cruise, but they weren't really. They were definitely there, but almost every type of person was there. It was a pretty diverse group. Lots of old people of course, but also lots of families and seemingly lots of single people. It wasn't just a bunch of straight, cis whiteys either. There were a good number of Black and brown people onboard and seemingly a strong LBGT contingent as well. I guess people from all walks of life want to party on a floating skyscraper.
Plenty of kids around too. The hot tubs were filled with teenagers by 9:00 pm. Lil' S1 made a few friends, because of course he did -- some little boy named Magnus or something like that who is apparently a YouTuber. They met at the water park and then hung out at the "Kids Club." That's actually the best part of the cruise: They have a place you can dump your kids. It would have been really nice if I had a wife who could stay up past 8:30 in the evening.
One funny moment happened when both my boys were in the hot tub with a few other kids, and I got in it with them and Lil' S1 gave me a strange look and said, "Uh, daddy, I think the adult hot tub is on the other end," and pointed to the other hot tub which happened to only have adults in it. Then he put it to a vote, and I got booted from the "kid" hot tub by unanimous decision. One of the kids in there was, like, 13 too. He seemed too old to be hanging out with a 9-year-old, but he was by himself, which really matters. Kids are so much nicer to other kids when there is nobody around they are trying to impress.
The best thing about a cruise, in theory, is that you get to vacation during your travel time to destinations. In practice, this didn't work out so well for us because our destinations, Honduras and Mexico, didn't really feel like destinations because we got such little time there. We didn't even make it to mainland Honduras. We spent a few hours on the island of Roatán. Our guides (a couple dudes with a van) were cool, and they took us to a zoo of sorts, where the kids got to pet a sloth and hold a macaw and stuff like that -- things that surely would have been illegal in the states. Then we went to a chocolate factory (very different from Willy Wonka's), and then went to a lookout point and snapped a few nice pics.
The next day we went to Mexico. We docked in Cozumel, and then took a ferry over to the mainland (Playa del Carmen). We went to a nature park called Xcaret and swam/floated down this "river." It was cool, but it was super rushed and really expensive, and S's parents are too old to do anything too active anyway, so they basically just sat on a bench the entire time. Also, the ferry ride was kinda long (45 minutes each way) and super choppy, which is exactly what we didn't need at that moment. Thankfully, Lil' S2 slept both there and back or he would have been really suffering, I think.
Oh, and I lost S's water bottle. That might not sound like that big a deal, but it was this expensive, hard-to-find water bottle that "purifies" the water after you put it in. I mean, it's probably total BS -- what does it even mean to "purify" tap water? -- but somehow pointing that out to S only made things worse. She couldn't get too mad at me though, because after we finished the river at Xcaret, she wanted to go to lunch, and I insisted that we look for her parents because the guide told us to meet them afterward (the whole scene was very hectic). She was hangry and already walking with the kids toward the restaurant, but I made her stop and wait while I looked. Lo and behold I found the guide who took me to her parents, who were in fact waiting for us. If we had listened to S, we would have totally dissed them. So, you know, you win some, you lose some.
Alright a few pics and then I'm out.
Until next time...
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