I’m back! Mr. W is, as I type, scanning in the cruise photographers’ photos of us so that we can order multi-sized copies from Costco.com and pick them up in an hour. Much smarter than paying $20 per 8×10 and $7 per 5×7 from the ship. Despite buying only 15% of the professional photos of us, we still spent over $150 on ship photos alone. But I figure, professional photo sessions don’t have you go thru that many changes of clothing, and just the sitting fee alone would be almost $50 w/o any pictures, so it’s still cheaper to buy one copy of poses we like on a cruiseship and have them serve as souvenirs. (The ship has photo ops set up all over the place daily and when you walk by one, they wave you over to take some photos. The photos are printed out the next day and put on display, and you buy what you want, if not they get recycled.)

The cruise was fun, altho I felt like I started running out of things to do after the 2nd or 3rd day at sea. This is mainly because, “due to the port authorities closing the ports, it is not our fault” (captain over the loudspeaker early Monday morning), we did not stop at the Cayman Islands at all. The night’s storm, wind and choppy water conditions made it unsafe for us to stop there. We had prepaid shipwreck snorkeling excursions there, which was refunded, along with port fees of $25 each. Nevertheless, Mr. W was extremely disappointed, as he made sure everyone we came across knew every day thereafter. I personally didn’t care that much because to me, quality time with him is quality time anywhere. But I’m not a big snorkeling fanatic the way he is. We did get our snorkeling in at Ocho Rios, Jamaica, the next day. We paid a private boat to bring us out to a reef and we plopped in and took a bunch of underwater pictures with my camera in a waterproof camera bag. The camera bag came in handy also during our 3-mile innertube ride down the White River rapids in Jamaica. Photos to follow. My favorite thing about the cruise, however, is not the midnight standup comedy, nor the food (altho it was gourmet and delicious, I even had escargot as an appetizer the last nite), nor the excursions, nor the photos (altho the photos are a close 2nd). It was something we totally lucked out on. The ship makes assigned seating for the nightly formal dinners, and the people we were assigned to the same table with are awesome. We had things in common, we laughed, we goofed off, and we had a lot of differences which made for really interesting dinner conversation. Jordan (a Floridian nurse), myself, Nadia (a kindergarten schoolteacher), Nadia’s boyfriend Terry (I’m not sure I ever got what he did) were talking about Nadia’s bout with alcoholism, and at the time of the cruise, she was 5 1/2 years sober, and attended some of the stealthily named “Friends of Bill W” AA meetings onboard with Terry, who chose to stop his recreational alcohol consumption when he met her and decided to be with her a year ago. Jordan, of course, had seen a lot of substance abuse addicts go thru detox in her hospital over the years, and seen some of her coworkers get addicted to the readily accessible painkillers at their workplace. It was an intense, very real, very candid conversation. A very serious conversation during which I turned my attention briefly to Mr. W and Jordan’s boyfriend Jeff’s conversation, as they were not part of our conversation. Jeff’s eyes were blazing with interest and Mr. W was saying excitedly, “And the last Harry Potter movie’s coming out in March, can you believe it?!” Two movie fanatics. And “fanatic” is a euphemism for movie-obsessed geekazoids who own twelve gazillion times more movies than they can possibly watch. I love how everyone has these threads of common interest. Jordan and I bonded over bitching about how the average American man hitting on us over the internet, as my childhood friend Vicky had once put it, “can’t speel to save his lif.” For morning breakfasts in the formal dining room, we are just randomly seated with people who have space on their table, as directed by the dining staff as we walk in. There are a lot of holier-than-thou, snooty, judgmental, whiny, queasy-ab0ut-food people on the ship. I missed our regular dinner group whenever we attend one of these breakfasts. So of course I made sure to exchange email addresses with everyone.

We spent one night at Fort Lauderdale after the cruise returned to Miami so that we could have free time to rent a car, explore Florida and visit the Everglades. It was coincidentally a cold weekend in Florida this past weekend, and the Everglades, which is just wide swampland covered in reeds and overgrown grass, was cold and uncomfortable as we were blasted around up to 70mph by a loud airboat. By loud, I mean they handed out toilet paper as we got seated so that we could wad them up and stuff them in our ears. It didn’t make much of a difference, tho. It was also too cold to see any alligators or crocodiles, who were apparently all hiding out in bushes to stay warm. The Everglades tour did end in a ‘gator farm, and we saw some gators in captivity there. Mr. W later had alligator meat at the local cafe. Take that, stupid alligators, for making us go all the way out and freeze our tails off for nothing.

The flight back from Ft. Lauderdale to Los Angeles the next day was scheduled to depart at 3:46p. We got to the airport early, checked our baggage, and found out that the plane that was scheduled to come had technical problems and never left the previous airport. So they assigned another plane to get us, and that wasn’t expected to arrive until 8:10p. We made the most of it, hailed a taxi out to a beach, goofed off, Mr. W made a sand angel (photos to follow), hailed another taxi back to the airport around 6:45p, only to discover that the 2nd American Airlines plane also had technical problems shortly after departure and turned around. They were now sending a third flight to get us, and that one’s due at 11:20p. This time we stayed at the airport and I was actually really proud of Mr. W for maintaining his cool and rolling with the punches. We were supposed to arrive in LA yesterday evening at about 5:50p, but didn’t end up getting in until 5:30a this morning. Of course we weren’t going to call someone to get us a ride, so we rented a car and drove it back to his place.