Big Calves

In my next life I'd like to be a woman with calves like duckpins.I’m seeing a lot of such calves on this cruise that I'm on. The women who own them seem to have more stability and be more stable than the rest of us ladies here on board.  More 'planted', sort of, like the legs of the big grand piano at the Schooner Bar where the red-haired Irish lady sings each night.They kind of roll with the ship whereas the rest of us scrawny-calved gals skitter around like sandpapers on our drinking-straw legs. We seem plain doomed to topple, kind of like these guys below. (Go 18 seconds in to hear the soundtrack. Love it!)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NawmpwHUVJ4  

It's the People Watching

  What I like best on any cruise is the people-watching.Seeing the way folks lick their ice cream down for example.I could watch that all day, and did in fact, since they serve ice cream all day long out by the pool on Deck 9.Some eat it the way a cat would.Others more puppy-style as in Down the hatch! in one quick gulp.To me the people-watching is the best fun thing about all travel.I remember being at Disney World one day when the weather was so hot Snow White was running sweat all down her back under that satiny costume.We were tolling along the main drag trying to fight our way toward Space Mountain, that famous indoor ride with the twists and turns where we figured we could cool off anyway if we could ever get there and here came this red-faced father walking fast behind his ten-year-old son.“Slow down!" he hollered at the boy. “I told you 50 times stop running ahead!”The boy stopped, turned.“Dad I’m not even walking fast,” he said."You shut your mouth or I’ll take off my belt!”“Dad, you’re not wearing a belt.”“THEN BY GOD I’LL BUY one!”That’s some pretty good people watching, when you get to see someone make a jackass of himself in front of a hundred witnesses.Of course it’s all much milder on a cruise ship. It’s more like being in a room with a lot of sleeping zoo animals. People sure look funny when they fall asleep with their mouths open!We had the chance to watch a lot of people because we hung out on deck three where sooner or later everyone passes by on their way to the Casino or the Chapel, the Library or the Fun Shops.The cabins are lovely, paneled in warm wood with balconies and ingeniously-designed little bathrooms where every surface sparkles and the towels are infinite in number and the water from your shower never ever slops onto the floor but still....You want to have maximum fun on a cruise curl up in one of those window seats and watch the whole parade of humanity pass by.It’s the Canterbury Tales all over again.Here’s Nan doing that on our last cruise, book in hand.  

I Was a Wreck (So I Took a Cruise)

I was a wreck, so I took a cruise.This was me two weeks ago.I don't look all that much better now but I feel better.Cruising today isn't like cruising 100 years ago when wealthy wasp-waisted women dressed for dinner in their rustling silks, and their gents came in white-tie-and-tails. Today, for as little as $500,  anyone can revel in a week of total spoiling, and far from the chill Atlantic to boot, moseying instead among the sapphire-tinted harbors of the Caribbean.During this whole cruise I took I kept thinking, Well here we all are, waddling about in our scanty beachwear consuming literal tons of food at the almost-continuous all-you-can-eat buffets; shopping obsessively, both on ship and shore; and gambling day and night in the jingling casino spaces you can’t cross the 5th deck without having to walk through. No wonder much of the world finds us laughable. We’re a boatload of Baby Hueys, I kept thinking, getting fed and fussed over, having our pants changed, practically, by a vast staff of people 95% from developing countries.But hey: why be negative? Basically it's AWESOME to be on a cruise. Awesome to see how many ladies for example, succumb to getting their hair lashed down in the tiny island-style braids that unless you have the face of an angel and a noggin to match, make you look like ET.Awesome to notice how middle-schoolers find each other so unerringly on a cruise, making friends fast and moving in packs around the ship, the girls shrieking “Omigod!” every five minutes and the boys bellowing “Dude!”It’s even fun waiting in line for the iron in the laundry room, with the dozen others trying to gussy up for the big Captain’s Reception. It feels like a college dorm then, or a real friendly apartment building. The whole experience feels like a big sleepover we were all having.But the best fun on a cruise is what you notice the first night out and that is this: when you lie in your bed, the bed moves.All night long it moves, and you sleep rocked like an infant, dreaming lovely long dreams with complicated plots and sub-plots.  And even later, the boat docked and the cruise long over, when you sleep once again in your own bed, you can still feel it: that something much larger is holding you and you, great baby, are just along for the ride. AH!Also, show me a nicer sight than this eh?Now picture yourself with your eyes closed , on bed in your cabin, face down and clinging lightly to the bedding, as a baby chimp clings to its momma's fur as she swings slow and easy through the treetops.That to me is the best part of the whole deal.

All This For a Mere Thousand Dollars

This day was our one chance to see Mexico. We were just yards away, pulled up at Cozumel and I was definitely going ashore - just as soon as I could drag myself away from Nan and Sheil and this big floating bathtub of an onboard pool anyway.

Back in the morning we had breakfast with six strangers and I was feeling pretty good so I said “Hey, Mexico you guys! Let’s go buy all the prescription drugs we can think of! Can you do that really?”

“Sure can,” my sister Nan said. “Just about anything you want.” “A few years ago we took this cruise just for the birth control pills!” said a cute young thing in a plaid headscarf and two little pigtails. “We had to keep walking and walking and ended up trying three different shops because they’d each only sell us fourth months’ worth.”

“Yup,” smiled her husband, a beefy guy with a shaved head. “And how’d that work out for ya?" “She has six kids now,” he joked.

“No it worked out great!” she said, slapping his arm. ‘Course then he goes and gets a vasectomy anyway.” “OK! Too much sharing!” said Mr. Beef and when the meal ended and a few hours had swooned by I did go ashore, and saw many people from our cruise ship and other cruise ship too at an open-air saloon. They were writhing in and out of doors in conga-line fashion and at a certain point in the line attempting a drunken limbo move, drinking a swig of booze poured straight in their mouths by a giant employee and immediately afterward receiving a hard slap on the fanny with a wooden paddle.

I’m so glad I didn’t try going on that rules-filled lecture-based Galapagos Island cruise instead, you know? Not only is this one like a tenth of the price but in terms of sheer zoology Carnival Cruise lines makes those guys look sick.