This afternoon at 4:00, Leigh and I departed from Galveston, Texas on the Carnival cruise ship The Conquest. As I’m writing this, we’re in the Gulf of Mexico, several hundred miles from Galveston. On Wednesday, we’ll make a stop in Montego Bay, Jamaica.
This is our first cruise, and it’s a little odd. Neither of us has felt sea-sick or anything, but the gentle pitching and yawing of the ship is a little disconcerting. I’m starting to get used to it now, but for a while it was a little like being a tad bit drunk without having had a drop to drink…more’s the pity.
But the ship is pretty damn amazing. It’s a huge thing, and there’s a ton of stuff to do. The ship has three pools, a water slide, several sets of hot tubs, discos, piano bars, shops, a casino, and far too many overly-friendly crewmembers. I understand that some folks respond quite positively to cheerfulness. I tend to view cheery people as dubious characters to monitor accordingly”¦which is a euphemistic way to say that I’m an asshole.
Unfortunately, I’m also a little too grumpy to be a good sport for ship activities. Tonight we went on a club tour of the ship, and the tour guides kept tying to drag people onto the dance floor. I am not easily pulled anywhere, much less on a dance floor filled with really drunk college students and sixty year old women. First off, I deal with sober college girls for a living, and dancing with drunken versions of my students makes me feel a little pedophilish. Secondly, I retch when sixty year old women try to dry hump me. Maybe I’m being ageist””I can deal with that.
The food has been pretty awesome, though. Excluding one very high class restaurant, which I will try before we leave, all the food on the ship is included in the price of the vacation. So we’ve probably eaten a week’s worth of calories in a single day. At dinner tonight, Leigh was having a difficult time choosing between a molten chocolate cake or the crème brulee for dessert, so instead of asking her to choose, our waiter simply brought her both of them.
The only truly shitty thing is the internet service. They’re charging me 55 bucks for 100 minutes of internet time. Apparently, Carnival is stuck in 1996 and AOL is their ISP.
Tomorrow we’re attending a wine tasting, and we might try out the swimming pools. I’ll stress might because if the same hairy bastard that was in the pool today is in it tomorrow, I’m going to abstain from swimming. I don’t like hair in my mouth in the best of situations, much less hair floating in a public pool from the back of a 300 pound middle-eastern man.
To be continued”¦