[Ed. note: The next several entries I’ll be posting were actually from my cruise journal from last week.]
June 16, 2007 @ 10:26 PM
Ok, so…first night at sea. My initial impression is that all people do on cruises is eat and play bingo. None of the events scheduled really interest me, but laying on the deck with the cool ocean breeze is divine, so I’m ok with that. The evening shows were highly recommended by some of my co-workers, but considering that the last show for the day starts in four minutes and my mother and I are snuggly curled in bed, I’ll have to take Scott’s word for it for now.
Speaking of snuggly curled in bed (kindofish), my mother made it in this morning with plenty of time to spare, but she boldly decided to sleep in the terminal in Houston instead of getting a room. She hung out with another woman who was in a similar situation, and said woman coerced Continental to give her a stack of pillows and blankets, so I’d say that my mother lucked out considering the situation.
Tangent…this side of my blog is weird. I’m so unused to actually fleshing out thoughts instead of condensing them into 140 characters via twitter. I think I’m much better at the latter, but I’ll bravely forge through blogging about the rest of the day anyway.
The actual process of getting on the ship was uneventful, although quite different than I expected (based on movies and whatnot). There wasn’t a crowd of people bidding us bon voyage from the dock, and nobody on the boat was waving scarves and blowing kisses. (for the record, I think we were all trying to find the buffet). One think I did find interesting though is that there’s some crazy law that states everyone has to go through a life vest drill before the ship can disembark. This involves the pleasant British cruise director coming over the intercom (there’s an intercom in all rooms and public areas) and announcing that when the siren sounds, we’ve all gotta grab our life vests and gather in one of the 5 lounges to verify that we were all successfully able to grab our life vests. Life vests are itchy and make me quite claustrophobic and I hope I never have to use one (aside from the obvious reasons), but the photos I got of herds of people looking like they’ve been told to abandon ship almost makes up for the inconvenience.
So after all that got settled and we got back to the room, I pulled out my laptop and Dave’s GPS receiver and started working on getting my geotracking setup situated. I’m not able to get a GPS fix even though our room has a decently sized window, so I’m pretty disappointed. Dave’s uploader app says it was able to get a position though, so I’m going to trust it over the angrily blinking red light on the GPS device because it will help me sleep better at night. This whole geocasting plan kinda went to shit after I learned Internet access would cost .75/minute, so I’m honestly not surprised I’ve run into more problems. I’m hoping for the best, though.
Or when all else fails, you can always fudge the data. ^_^
After giving up on the GPS signal, we went to the main sundeck for a while. My mom’s just now past the point of being uncomfortable getting drunk around me, which is definitely interesting. Drunk Lisa’s mom giggles a lot and has an even worse sense of direction than usual (I swear she’d be lost on this damn boat without me), and also has a penchant for buying the $8.95 photographs that are constantly being taken of the guests. There’s a photographer for every 10 passengers, I swear.
Another tangent…my teeth grind more and in synchronization with my fingers when I type.
Nothing else has happened that I’ve found stupendously interesting. VERY relaxing, but “I laid out in the sun and had the best nap ever” doesn’t exactly make a great blog entry. I’m taking a TON of photos with the new Nikon D80 Dan got me. I’d really like to review them before tomorrow to make sure I’m not royally screwing something up, but the ship’s engines are so convincing at trying to lull me to sleep…