Confessions of a Cruiser

Hey y'all! Beth Williamson here!

So I went on a cruise last week. A seven day cruise to the Carribbean on a ship that looked a bit like this one.

I had only been on a cruise once in 1998 and it was only three days and I was there for business. This was my first real "vacation" on a cruise. Oh, and yes, I did bring DH and my kids.

Hey, no screeching! My kids are 10 and 14 - old enough to have fun without having to take constant care of them. Feel sorry for the woman who thought it was a good idea to bring a newborn and her two year old on board. *shudder*

So after an inauspicious start at a hotel which we nicknamed "Planes, Trains, and Automobiles" (warning! don't ever stay at the Best Western Airport in Charleston SC), we got on board the ship.

I could feel the relaxation seeping through my body even as DH tensed up, waiting for the motion sickness to hit. We stood up on deck and waited to depart, watching the dolphins frolic in the water. They were waiting patiently too. The horn blasted - nearly scaring the hair off my head - and we were off! Sloooooowly of course. It is like a 1M pound ship!

DH is like "yeah, I'm fine. no problem." Until we went below deck while the ship was moving. I rarely see him run so fast, but he was booking down that hallway. Sigh... poor guy. He stayed in the cabin on the bed while the boys and I went back up top to explore.

I wanted to give you my impressions of why people cruise.

1. Vacation - that would be our reason. Ya know, no cooking, cleaning, errands, etc.

2. To show off their tits - really. I swear to God there had to be two hundred pairs of artificially augmented tits on that ship. They wore bikinis constantly. DH and my 14 YO nearly gave themselves a broken neck watching those bobbers.

3. To drink themselves into a stupor - a popular reason. These are the people who have a $2,000 bar bill when they leave the ship because they had $6 to $10 drinks all day every day. Hell, they even go around and serve morning drinks like Bloody Marys and Mimosas by the pool!

4. To gamble - you wouldn't think this is a popular reason, but it is. They had a purty nice casino on board. I could totally get addicted to slot machines. I think I won about $500, then lost probably $340 of it. LOL! But they had not only slots, but blackjack, craps, roullette, and poker.

The cruise was smooth sailing (so to speak) with our shore excursions in Grand Cayman, Cozumel, and Key West. I got two nicely shaped spots on the back of my shoulders in bright red when the 14 YO didn't put sunblock on them in Grand Cayman. But I also got to swim with wild stingrays. Cozumel brought a rash to my poor 10 YO after he spent hours in a pool at Playa Mia, but DH and the 14 YO went scuba diving and had a marvelous time. Key West? Wellllll, if you've ever been there, you know what it's like. I don't dig the whole chicken thing. There are wild chickens all over the island and you can be fined $250 if you kill them. Geez, spend $50 in the restaurant and have a chicken or two on the floor by your feet as you eat. Um... no.

The real excitement came on the last day at sea.... 7:45 am... what happened? Oh, the engines decided to stop working, then the generators did. That means no water, no electricity and worst of all NO TOILET FLUSHING. It runs on a vacuum system which is of course electric powered - OMG - you never smelled something so gross. So we are bobbing like a stinky cork in the Atlantic.

Oh yeah, it sure did happen! Three hours we struggled to avoid the bathrooms, find water, and some kind of food. To their credit, they broke out the $4 bottles of Evian to give us water, and any food they could find that didn't need to be cooked (fruit, cereal, muffins). The coffee they brewed must have been done in someone's hat... or sock. It tasted like mud.

Somehow they fixed the engines and we got air conditioning back (damn I was hot), water, and flushed all the toilets. Thank Gawd!

All in all, it was a good trip and I'm glad I went. So, all you cruisers out there... what's the most fun, strangest, or outrageous thing you've seen/done on a cruise ship? Anybody that posts gets entered in a drawing for a western book thong and a way cool bookmark (think sexy cowboy).

Ready, set, confess!!