The Cruise
So I got back from Texas on Sunday. I would've posted this right after we got home, but I didn't want to. My Spring Break ended up being totally awesome. A lot of stuff happened; most good, some bad, and almost all of it worthy of repeating here. Maybe I should just start from the beginning.
We left Monument at around 9 pm two Thursdays ago. That's when my family joined eight others for a 12 hour drive through the middle of the night in a motorhome to Gainsville, Texas. That's where we stopped over for about an hour and picked up our thirteenth member, and finished up the drive all the way to Galveston. Fitting all those people into a single motorhome without breaking any bones was a feat in and of itself. That we did it with thirteen people's worth of luggage for a seven day cruise is nothing short of miraculous.
Once we'd gotten on board, we had the opportunity to explore the ship. Un-be-freaking-lievavble. At the time it was built, the Grand Princess was the largest ship in the world. Right now, that record is held by another Princess ship, one which hasn't even been finished yet. It's ginormous. The ship is just under a thousand yards long. From my stateroom, which was very near to the front, it took several minutes to walk all the way to the back. (I refuse to use the correct nautical terms "fore" and "aft" because, well, they're stupid.)
One of the first things we did after the ludicrously unneccessary muster drill was go to dinner. This was my reason for comingon this trip in the first place. You hear stories about cruise food, but nothing quite prepares you for it. "I can eat steak every night if I want? What? I can order all entrees if I feel like it? I can get three desserts just like that? And it's all free? Strange. I didn't imagine heaven to be this crowded..." It was the greatest thing since the invention of kicking people in the face. Over the course of seven days' worth of dinner, I ate 13 entrees (including one day when I had three plates of crab), 11 desserts, 10 kinds of soup, and 8 appetizers. Life was good. Unfortunately, I didn't gain a single pound. I don't know what to do. I barely moved the entire week, so it's not like I was burning calories. Life is so unfair.
We met some interesting people on the ship. There was one group of middle-aged ladies and gentlemen who sat beside the "kids' table" at dinner one night, and while by all rights they should have been annoyed by us, apparently they loved us. They actually looked for us the next day at dinner time, and complained that we'd "ditched" them to sit at the other end of the dining room. One of them had decided that she couldn't wait to get back to civilization in three days to get her eyebrows "done." Of course, by "done," I mean tattooed on. Amercia is, I suppose, just too boring a place to get something like that done, so she chose to mix it up and got it done in Belize. Unfortunately for her, Belizian tattoo artists don't really have a concept of symmetry. One of her eyebrows was half an inch higher than the other. My brother took to calling her "Crazybrows McGavin" behind her back, as if she were a 1920's bareknuckle boxer. She looked like she was constantly trying to give someone a scornful look, even when she was smiling. Ah, the combination of stupidity, alcohol, and foreign countries... priceless.
The shows on the ship were awesome. The Grand Princess has a huge theater that seats probably 700 people, and there isn't a single column anywhere that could obstruct an audience member's view. Quite an impressive feat of engineering, I'm told. Whatever. Anyway, the first show we went to was the only bad one. It was a "comedy magician" named Doug Anderson. And when I say "comedy magician," I mean "a guy who learned a few sleights and combined them with some God-awful jokes that didn't even manage to make a roomfull of drunken idiots laugh." He was so bad, he gave me diarrhea. And not in a good way. The best show I saw was a guy who called himself The Amazing Fernandez. I'm not quite sure how he got that name. Maybe his full name if Fernando Hernandez and he decided to combine them to make it easier to remember. Anyway, as you could imagine, I was too distracted by his stupid name to be excited about seeing his show. I was even less impressed when I got to the theater and saw the sign on screen that announced we were about to see "Canada's premier comedy hypnotist." Canada sucks. Why would I want to see some Canuck telling a bunch of people I don't know and don't care about to run around clucking like a chicken? Well, I got my answer. Fernandez was absolutely incredible. If I try to describe what he made people do, I most assuredly would not do him justice. Suffice it to say that I decided I will never ever EVER volunteer to be hypnotized by a stage hypnotist. At the beginning of the evening, he said that we, the audience, would determine who got the award for best performance for that show (he did two that night). It was an 18-inch-high trophy. When the woman who won the award realized why she suddenly woke up back in her seat holding the trophy, she was so embarrassed, she ran out of the theater before the show was over; I can tell you right now, if she couldn't even stay in the same room with all the people in front of whom she'd just danced like Beyonce, then she definitely would have at least cracked a smile when she became convinced that she was the laughter police and started chastising anyone who laughed by screaming in Chinese gibberish. That night, I became a believer in hypnotism.
The cruise had four stops: Costa Maya, Playa del Carmen, and Cozumel (all in Mexico), and Belize City. The first was Costa Maya. Man, it was cool just to sit on a white sandy beach drinking Corona and... well, that's pretty much it. It was a bit cloudy that day, so we didn't get a whole lot of sun. Next stop was Belize. Belize is scary. The whole tourist area is just a few blocks long, beyond which are basically the ghettos of the city. I don't know how many times one of the natives yeleld at me through the giant iron gate that was erected to separate the riff-raff from the rich American tourists, "Hey boy! You want a taxi?" Apparently, I just give off this "I'm here to ride around in a taxi while I'm on vacation on a Caribbean island" vibe. Next up was Playa del Carmen, or as we came to call it, the place with all the naked people. Nude sunbathing is the thing to do in Playa del Carmen. It was the only one of our stops where we saw it, anyway. The water was beautiful there, and best of all, there was a bar not 100 yards from our spot on the beach. I don't know what kind of tequila they put in their margaritas, but I do know that that's pretty much all I could taste. Drunken body surfing is fun. Our final stop was Cozumel, which was devastated by Hurricane... uh... Something in late... uh... some month of last year. It's amazing how quickly some of the greenery had grown back. The beaches were still mostly covered in debris. While we were there, all we got to see was basically a shadow of Cozumel's former beauty. I'd love to visit the island again in a year or two and see it fully recovered. It mst have been gorgeous before the hurricane. We hired a guide for that day. His name was Dario. He kept trying to explain to us how Mexico's "free" education system worked. I don't think Dario is familiar with the term "socialism," but I let it slide. He really was a nice guy. That's why we felt kinda bad when we didn't have enough cash on hand to pay him. Oh, well. That's just five bucks that'll have to wait until the next time I eat at Chipotle to make it all the way back to Mexico.
One thing I thought was hilarious was the variety of sob stories we got the street vendors while they were negotiating price. My brother bought a $20 hoody from a teenage Mexican boy who said to him, "OK, 10 dollars. I just need the money." Oh, boo hoo. In Cozumel, my cousin's girlfriend bought a necklace or something from a guy for $12 and her Princess Cruise Lines standard issue beach towel. "It's for my two-month-old baby," he said. Right. I figured that Dario could come close to making $90,000 a year before union dues, repairs to his van, insurance, and other fees plus taxes. Not too bad in a country where one can buy a brand new VW Jetta for US $12,000. The street vendeors were creepy. They kpet telling us, "Here! Here is the right way!" to get us into their shops. That reminds me of another strang ething I noticed in Mexico. Apparently, they think American tourists are obsessed with the penis. I can't tell you haow many times I saw pipes, statues, magnets, drawings, and carvings that featured penises prominently. And speaking of pipes, they sold a lot of bongs as well. In one shop in Cozumel, the owner walked right up to me as soon as my parents were out of earshot and tried to sell me a bong. Thanks, Paco. I'm good.
Then came the drive back. We stopped in Gainsville again. There, we stayed the night with friends of friends. Though I'd never heard of it, Gainsville is a nice little community in... well, somewhere in Texas. I don't know exactly where. It's a big state; cut me some slack. As if we hadn't been eating like kings for the past week, we were treated to some awesome steaks. A lot of steaks. About a pound per person. That's the first time I've ever had as much steak as I could possibly fit in my stomach and not find myself able to eat any more. Amazing. They sure know how to have a barbeque in Texas. I'll give 'em that.
The rest of the drive home was interesting. We ran out of gas in the middle of Texas, and had to ask a gun-weilding, tobacco-chewing, banjo-playing, handlebar-mustache-sporting, Deliverance-extra-wannabe backwoods Texan for a couple gallons to get us to the next town. I was scared for my life. Texas itself is fine, but Texans scare the hell out of me. Several hours later, after we'd finally gotten gas and started back on the road, we got a flat tire in La Junta, Colorado. Just our luck, the tires on the motorhome require a special extender on the wrench in order to remove the nuts, and we were fresh out of extenders. Fortunately, we were able to borrow one from a guy who didn't even think he had the right part, which made us, according to him, "luckier'n shit." Thank you, mister scary Colorado man.
We left Monument at around 9 pm two Thursdays ago. That's when my family joined eight others for a 12 hour drive through the middle of the night in a motorhome to Gainsville, Texas. That's where we stopped over for about an hour and picked up our thirteenth member, and finished up the drive all the way to Galveston. Fitting all those people into a single motorhome without breaking any bones was a feat in and of itself. That we did it with thirteen people's worth of luggage for a seven day cruise is nothing short of miraculous.
Once we'd gotten on board, we had the opportunity to explore the ship. Un-be-freaking-lievavble. At the time it was built, the Grand Princess was the largest ship in the world. Right now, that record is held by another Princess ship, one which hasn't even been finished yet. It's ginormous. The ship is just under a thousand yards long. From my stateroom, which was very near to the front, it took several minutes to walk all the way to the back. (I refuse to use the correct nautical terms "fore" and "aft" because, well, they're stupid.)
One of the first things we did after the ludicrously unneccessary muster drill was go to dinner. This was my reason for comingon this trip in the first place. You hear stories about cruise food, but nothing quite prepares you for it. "I can eat steak every night if I want? What? I can order all entrees if I feel like it? I can get three desserts just like that? And it's all free? Strange. I didn't imagine heaven to be this crowded..." It was the greatest thing since the invention of kicking people in the face. Over the course of seven days' worth of dinner, I ate 13 entrees (including one day when I had three plates of crab), 11 desserts, 10 kinds of soup, and 8 appetizers. Life was good. Unfortunately, I didn't gain a single pound. I don't know what to do. I barely moved the entire week, so it's not like I was burning calories. Life is so unfair.
We met some interesting people on the ship. There was one group of middle-aged ladies and gentlemen who sat beside the "kids' table" at dinner one night, and while by all rights they should have been annoyed by us, apparently they loved us. They actually looked for us the next day at dinner time, and complained that we'd "ditched" them to sit at the other end of the dining room. One of them had decided that she couldn't wait to get back to civilization in three days to get her eyebrows "done." Of course, by "done," I mean tattooed on. Amercia is, I suppose, just too boring a place to get something like that done, so she chose to mix it up and got it done in Belize. Unfortunately for her, Belizian tattoo artists don't really have a concept of symmetry. One of her eyebrows was half an inch higher than the other. My brother took to calling her "Crazybrows McGavin" behind her back, as if she were a 1920's bareknuckle boxer. She looked like she was constantly trying to give someone a scornful look, even when she was smiling. Ah, the combination of stupidity, alcohol, and foreign countries... priceless.
The shows on the ship were awesome. The Grand Princess has a huge theater that seats probably 700 people, and there isn't a single column anywhere that could obstruct an audience member's view. Quite an impressive feat of engineering, I'm told. Whatever. Anyway, the first show we went to was the only bad one. It was a "comedy magician" named Doug Anderson. And when I say "comedy magician," I mean "a guy who learned a few sleights and combined them with some God-awful jokes that didn't even manage to make a roomfull of drunken idiots laugh." He was so bad, he gave me diarrhea. And not in a good way. The best show I saw was a guy who called himself The Amazing Fernandez. I'm not quite sure how he got that name. Maybe his full name if Fernando Hernandez and he decided to combine them to make it easier to remember. Anyway, as you could imagine, I was too distracted by his stupid name to be excited about seeing his show. I was even less impressed when I got to the theater and saw the sign on screen that announced we were about to see "Canada's premier comedy hypnotist." Canada sucks. Why would I want to see some Canuck telling a bunch of people I don't know and don't care about to run around clucking like a chicken? Well, I got my answer. Fernandez was absolutely incredible. If I try to describe what he made people do, I most assuredly would not do him justice. Suffice it to say that I decided I will never ever EVER volunteer to be hypnotized by a stage hypnotist. At the beginning of the evening, he said that we, the audience, would determine who got the award for best performance for that show (he did two that night). It was an 18-inch-high trophy. When the woman who won the award realized why she suddenly woke up back in her seat holding the trophy, she was so embarrassed, she ran out of the theater before the show was over; I can tell you right now, if she couldn't even stay in the same room with all the people in front of whom she'd just danced like Beyonce, then she definitely would have at least cracked a smile when she became convinced that she was the laughter police and started chastising anyone who laughed by screaming in Chinese gibberish. That night, I became a believer in hypnotism.
The cruise had four stops: Costa Maya, Playa del Carmen, and Cozumel (all in Mexico), and Belize City. The first was Costa Maya. Man, it was cool just to sit on a white sandy beach drinking Corona and... well, that's pretty much it. It was a bit cloudy that day, so we didn't get a whole lot of sun. Next stop was Belize. Belize is scary. The whole tourist area is just a few blocks long, beyond which are basically the ghettos of the city. I don't know how many times one of the natives yeleld at me through the giant iron gate that was erected to separate the riff-raff from the rich American tourists, "Hey boy! You want a taxi?" Apparently, I just give off this "I'm here to ride around in a taxi while I'm on vacation on a Caribbean island" vibe. Next up was Playa del Carmen, or as we came to call it, the place with all the naked people. Nude sunbathing is the thing to do in Playa del Carmen. It was the only one of our stops where we saw it, anyway. The water was beautiful there, and best of all, there was a bar not 100 yards from our spot on the beach. I don't know what kind of tequila they put in their margaritas, but I do know that that's pretty much all I could taste. Drunken body surfing is fun. Our final stop was Cozumel, which was devastated by Hurricane... uh... Something in late... uh... some month of last year. It's amazing how quickly some of the greenery had grown back. The beaches were still mostly covered in debris. While we were there, all we got to see was basically a shadow of Cozumel's former beauty. I'd love to visit the island again in a year or two and see it fully recovered. It mst have been gorgeous before the hurricane. We hired a guide for that day. His name was Dario. He kept trying to explain to us how Mexico's "free" education system worked. I don't think Dario is familiar with the term "socialism," but I let it slide. He really was a nice guy. That's why we felt kinda bad when we didn't have enough cash on hand to pay him. Oh, well. That's just five bucks that'll have to wait until the next time I eat at Chipotle to make it all the way back to Mexico.
One thing I thought was hilarious was the variety of sob stories we got the street vendors while they were negotiating price. My brother bought a $20 hoody from a teenage Mexican boy who said to him, "OK, 10 dollars. I just need the money." Oh, boo hoo. In Cozumel, my cousin's girlfriend bought a necklace or something from a guy for $12 and her Princess Cruise Lines standard issue beach towel. "It's for my two-month-old baby," he said. Right. I figured that Dario could come close to making $90,000 a year before union dues, repairs to his van, insurance, and other fees plus taxes. Not too bad in a country where one can buy a brand new VW Jetta for US $12,000. The street vendeors were creepy. They kpet telling us, "Here! Here is the right way!" to get us into their shops. That reminds me of another strang ething I noticed in Mexico. Apparently, they think American tourists are obsessed with the penis. I can't tell you haow many times I saw pipes, statues, magnets, drawings, and carvings that featured penises prominently. And speaking of pipes, they sold a lot of bongs as well. In one shop in Cozumel, the owner walked right up to me as soon as my parents were out of earshot and tried to sell me a bong. Thanks, Paco. I'm good.
Then came the drive back. We stopped in Gainsville again. There, we stayed the night with friends of friends. Though I'd never heard of it, Gainsville is a nice little community in... well, somewhere in Texas. I don't know exactly where. It's a big state; cut me some slack. As if we hadn't been eating like kings for the past week, we were treated to some awesome steaks. A lot of steaks. About a pound per person. That's the first time I've ever had as much steak as I could possibly fit in my stomach and not find myself able to eat any more. Amazing. They sure know how to have a barbeque in Texas. I'll give 'em that.
The rest of the drive home was interesting. We ran out of gas in the middle of Texas, and had to ask a gun-weilding, tobacco-chewing, banjo-playing, handlebar-mustache-sporting, Deliverance-extra-wannabe backwoods Texan for a couple gallons to get us to the next town. I was scared for my life. Texas itself is fine, but Texans scare the hell out of me. Several hours later, after we'd finally gotten gas and started back on the road, we got a flat tire in La Junta, Colorado. Just our luck, the tires on the motorhome require a special extender on the wrench in order to remove the nuts, and we were fresh out of extenders. Fortunately, we were able to borrow one from a guy who didn't even think he had the right part, which made us, according to him, "luckier'n shit." Thank you, mister scary Colorado man.
posted by Vaughan at
11:42 AM
2 Comments:
I would have expected you to be the first to volunteer to be hypnotized just to prove to yourself it's real.
I can see how you'd say that, but Fernandez actually started the show with the disclaimer that he only wanted volunteers who were willing to be hypnotized. I was still very skeptical about the whole thing, so I was unwilling to volunteer. Plus, I don't like being in front of people unless I'm speaking to them.
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