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The Cruise: Life Onboard

Deb and I booked our cruise a while back, which is somewhat uncharacteristic of our typical seat-of-the-pants travel planning, so we had both been looking forward to it for a while now. But the short story is: we loved it!

We spent 5 nights on the Empress of the Seas traveling from Ft. Lauderdale to Key West to Grand Cayman before returning back to Ft. Lauderdale. We took a couple of shots of the Empress, which always seemed gi-normous and quite nice—even after we found out it was the smallest and the oldest ship in the Royal Caribbean fleet.

The first thing we did when we got on the boat was to head straight for our (1) stateroom (sounds so fancy) (though as you can see below it was not so terribly fancy) (I felt a bit like steerage class and looked to see how they would lock us in if the boat struck an iceberg). It was if they were reading my mind, though—they had a mandatory safety drill immediately prior to setting sail the first afternoon. (2) Deb and (3) I book looked pretty suave in our (state-of-the-art, I might add) lifejackets.

(1) (2) (3)

Food was a huge (!!!) part of the cruise. I have to admit, though, that there weren’t as many buffets as I thought there would be; this is not to say there wasn’t lots of food and that we didn’t stuff ourselves silly, but it wasn’t quite what I was picturing. We really ate at two different places—the more fomal Carmen Dining Room (where we had all of our dinners and several lunches) and the casual (4) Windjammer Cafe on the pool deck (which did have some buffets, but our eating habits didn’t always coincide with the buffets having the widest selection of foods—but there was always lots of fruit to keep me happy). At dinner we were seated at a table with 3 other couples, all of whom were great. Ironically (though perhaps not surprisingly), there was a OB/GYN doctor sitting at our table who was ecstatic to have a pregnant woman at her table (”I can’t get away from work no matter where I go!”). We also had a teacher and two chefs. It was a cool table, and I liked the continuity of eating with the same people each evening.

(4) (5) (6) (7)

One of the evenings (mornings, actually, since it started at midnight) the kitchen crew hosted the Gala Buffet. This was an interesting spectacle (and I feel comfortable calling it that since the buffet was open from 11:30p-12:00a for photographing only before it opened for an hour for folks to actually eat). In any event, the staff had spent something like 300 man hours preparing the “gala” spread which included everything from chocolate dipped strawberries to bread baked into specific shapes to (5) monkeys made out of citrus fruit to floral arrangements made out of cut radishes to (6) watermelon aquarium scenes to (7) a rock band made out of lemons and chicken (with a carrot/cucumber guitar).

(8) (9) (10) (11)

We had four full days on the boat. Two of the days were spent in port, one at Key West and one at Grand Cayman. We spent the other two days, the “At Sea” days, just relaxing. It was wonderful. The (8) pool was shockingly small, and really one of the only disappointments of the cruise from my perspective, but it did have plenty of deck space on which to enjoy the sun and a bar serving delicious (virgin) Strawberry Daquiris. We spent part of the time playing (9) blackjack with our friends (and tablemates) (she’s the doctor) Holly and Paul—we even entered a blackjack tournament and did well enough to both be on the (10) leaderboard at the same time! Deb and I even took some time out one not-so-busy afternoon to play a game we brought from home, (11) Skip-bo!

The cruise also had some shows and other entertainment opportunities. We watched a cheesy Broadway-wanna-be show which was pretty enjoyable. The cruise director (a real position, not just one in the Love Boat television show) hosted a very funny rip-off of the Newlywed Game with three couples who were on the cruise. We also attended an art auction at which they were selling some relatively pricey works (a Rembrandt in the $17k+ range, as I recall). Before you go thinking we’re getting all snotty on you, please know we went (I went) for the free champagne.

The “towel animals” were one of the fun parts of each evening. When we would get back from dinner, the stateroom attendant had folded some of our clean towels into various animals. My favorite was the elephant, though I think the monkey wins for creativity.

I’ll write about the shore excursions tomorrow…

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The Cruise: High Drama on the High Seas

On the last day of our cruise, we had some—unscheduled—excitement courtesy of oppressive social and political conditions in Cuba.

Debra and I were enjoying the late afternoon (me at the blackjack tables and Debra relaxing in the cabin) when the captain came over the loudspeaker informing us that the ship was turning around since we had spotted a boat of Cuban refugees headed towards the United States. The Empress had immediately reported the sighting—per U.S. law—and been asked by the Coast Guard to stay in sight of the boat so when they arrived, they would know where to find it. This meant two things: everyone rushed to the top deck to try to catch a glimpse of the unfolding drama and we were going to be late into port the following morning.

Both Deb and I searched the web to find articles about the situation, but only came up with this link from a South Florida NBC television affiliate.

(1) (2) (3)

We never got closer than a mile or two, so the photos aren’t the best given I was taking them with my little Canon digital camera. But photo (1) shows the crew members trying to re-locate the boat after we turned around and got back in the vicinity of where it had been originally sighted, (2) is the closest shot I got of the Coast Guard boat as it passed our bow on its way to the refugees and (3) shows the little dinghy deployed by the Coast Guard making actual contact. (By this time, we were already resuming our trip back to Ft. Lauderdale, so we didn’t see if they actually brought everyone on board the Coast Guard ship or how it was all “resolved.”)

The last we heard of it was when the captain came back on the loudspeaker informing us the Coast Guard had “thanked” us and were unwilling to share more information given the “sensitive” nature of the situation…

We actually talked about it at dinner that night with our table mates and had somewhat similar reactions to our fellow passengers’ reactions as we listened to the conversations among those on the top deck watching. I thought it was fascinating—and an interesting object lesson—how people’s professed politics (”don’t let any damn illegals in the country—they’re taking our jobs and costing us money!”) don’t always play out when faced with a “real life” situation. The general sentiment seemed to be of sadness for the Cubans who were so close to getting to the U.S. and were now apparently going to be sent back. Ask many of those same people a week before the cruise what their feelings about illegal aliens were and you would likely have sparked some vitriolic comments about keeping “them” out. But when you put them in a situation where the humanity is unavoidable, it appears more (morally?) challenging to be as absolute on the topic. Interesting.

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Pardon Our Dust

As you may be noticing right now, we are in the middle of updating the blog here at ellsworthlink.net. The look-and-feel you see now is an interim step to what amounts to a mostly under-the-hood upgrade. I will be updating the template you are used to seeing so that it works with the new version of WordPress (version 1.5.1.3), but it may take me a moment or two. As a result of spending time with the long-neglected code side of the blog, however, I may tinker with the look and feel a bit to see if I can come up with something new.

I will also be working to enable the functionality we had before the upgrade such as email alerts and recent comment listings—and hopefully some new things as well. In the meantime, please let me know if you see something that is flat-out broken. I may have missed it.

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Colin Reed Ellsworth

Here’s little Colin in all his glory. If you look closely you can just make out the big dimples his daddy gave him. Unfortunately Colin was having too much fun doing somersaults that most of the other pictures we got weren’t very clear. Hopefully we will have some good ones later this month.

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Gender Check

It seems we have conclusively proven the scarcity of “X” chromosomes among the Ellsworth Boys. Debra and I are having a little boy!!!

We’ll now be able to change the “Baby E” category on the blog to “Colin Reed” and shortly Debra will be posting some of the ultrasound photos (once her lazy husband gets them scanned in); but we wanted to post this lil’ piece of news as soon as we had a chance.

While we didn’t get an ultrasound photo of Colin’s “man bits” in the same way that John and Amy immortalized Jacob’s masculinity, we do have a funny story about the first images we saw on the ultrasound today. Literally the first thing we saw on the screen as the technician began the measurements was that which proved Colin was indeed Colin and—much to our amusement—a little baby hand grabbing at it. I think there are two takeaways from today’s ultrasound: (1) he’s not terribly shy and (2) we may have to share Grandma and Grandpa’s famous “maturation books” with Colin earlier than we may have originally planned.

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