There was, of course, the matter of that first day. It started at 11 p.m. for me and not much later for Eva. Travel is always stressful...well, for me, leaving home always gives me a low-grade case of stress. The three-hour delay in boarding certainly didn't help. By four o'clock, as we gathered at muster station H for a mandatory safety briefing that nobody took seriously (and to be fair, they could just as easily have announced it all without passengers needing to leave their staterooms), I was ready to start pitching people overboard and so was Eva. Our irritations fed off each other...we were both exhausted, and all my worst personality traits come out to play when I'm that tired. Hers, too.
Little things, tiny things that pissed me off beyond all reason. Like that every time there was a ship-wide announcement (and there were plenty of them as we were getting underway), the televisions in the cabins would mute themselves...and then, after the announcement was over and no matter how quietly they'd been set, they'd come back at EARSPLITTING VOLUME. It got so that every time there was a bong indicating an impending announcement, Eva or I or both of us would make a mad scramble for the remote.
Speaking of the TVs, ours had a sleep timer that didn't work and a volume control that wasn't much better. You had two options when it came to the loudness of that TV: too loud or too quiet.
The bathroom light flickered every time you turned it on, like something out of a horror movie, before it would catch. The light switches all over cabin seemed designed to confuse fumbling fingers--both of us were still turning on the wrong lights on day four. The little hallway that led from our cabin door to the room proper was impossibly narrow (nothing to be done about that, and yes, I get that I'm nitpicking). And those announcements! I really don't mean for this to sound as racist as it's going to come out, but if your job involves public speaking to a large number of people whose first language is mostly English, it would be nice if you could speak coherent English without too thick an accent.
All these things and a bunch more combined to make me pretty much impossible to live with that first day. Anything past that was also (mostly) me and my utter distaste for the manners and methods most of humanity seems to have concocted to have "fun".
A friend asked me last night why we had sailed with Carnival. They're known as the party cruise line...and yes, we knew that. The biggest reason we went with Carnival was simple logistics: they were going where we wanted to go, when we wanted to go there. The cruise was bought and paid for three days before I lost my job; I was trying to plan around various work-related issues, none of which ending up mattering at all....but we didn't know that, then.)
Where did we want to go? Mostly Key West. As I said last time, that town has a special place in the fiction that bonded Eva and I together (quick plug: if you haven't read the Callahan's series...I'm speaking as a fellow human being here...it would do you good.) We really wanted to see the real Key West.
It didn't disappoint, but it sure surprised us.
We arrived at 7 a.m on the second day of the cruise. We were only slated to be in port for six hours. Eva and I purchased our only shore excursion for the cruise: a hop-on, hop-off trolley tour that took an hour and totally immersed us in the atmosphere, history, and more trivia than you could shake a conch shell at. (Kate: I looked for shells, but the beaches of Key West are all man-made--no shells to be had.)
Some of the trivia I knew about, like that there are 360 bars in a town of thirty thousand people (and at least one of those bars is clothing-optional). Some I had no idea about, like that there ten thousand chickens wandering around the city, and every one of them is protected by law.
The real estate values are absolutely friggin' insane. Homes that would be lucky to fetch $200K here go for $2 million there. It's not the land, because there isn't any. Houses are built practically right on top of each other, worse even than Vancouver. Many of the homes are run down, the sort of things referred to in real estate guides elsewhere as "fixer-uppers"...and it doesn't seem to affect the price. The median income in Key West is only $52K, so it really makes you wonder how these people live.
Looking down on Key West from the ship
I wish more pictures had turned out--we took a bunch more, but it was absolutely raining chickens cats and dogs out for most of the tour. Key West, it turns out, gets just as much annual rainfall as Seattle, except they get all theirs within four or five months of the year.
We hit a few of the T-shirt stores on Duvall. Spider Robinson jokes (maybe not a joke?) that there are so many of them, they must be fronts for the Mob or something. He's right. Next to bars and chickens, T-shirts must be Key West's prime calling card. Sadly, I couldn't find a T-shirt that I really wanted, despite the myriad on offer. I ended up purchasing one later...back on board Victory.
Key West also turned out to be the last place I could find and use free wifi, so I went incommunicado after this. We wanted to get back on board anyway...we were told that at least once a month, somebody from a cruise ship misses the embarkation. That thought scared the almighty crap right out of me. I suppose I could deal -- somehow -- if it happened to me there, but it would be a nontrivial problem. And if it happened in Cozumel, our next port of call...disastrous. Best be present and accounted for long before the ship pulls out.
Back to the balcony...
...where I re-immersed myself in The Magic of Recluce, lent to me by my friend Nicole and very much enjoyed. You could say I was feeling a little Reclucive on this trip. I'd read three or four pages, put the book down, take a swig of water and watch docean play against the clouds, then repeat the process.
Docean. You probably should know that "docean" is the way Eva and I have contracted "the ocean" since time out of mind. The word that spawned that was actually "doreo", as in the cookie. I yoinked one of her Oreo cookies away from her--had to have been the first year we were married, if not earlier--and she whined, pitifully, "give me back doreo". That stuck. "Docean" came later--it means as much to Eva as 'doreos' used to, and that's saying something.
Starting to get an idea why we coveted that aft balcony?
We are precisely the opposite of many people. Lots of people go on cruises to have fun, and we did too, but our species of fun involves lots of alone time together and, well, docean. The awning kept the worst of the sun off--I'm no more tanned than I was when I left, which is to say "not at all", and--sorry again, folks, but that's a good thing. The words "healthy" and "suntan" don't belong in the same sentence unless the words "really" and "not" are in there somewhere too.
I re-learned about something else in Key West...something Spider had briefly alluded to in Callahan's Key called Fantasy Fest. It happens at the end of October, and it's basically a hundred thousand nekkid people (nekkid except for body paint, anyway) taking over the city. Cool. I am not a naturist, but I could certainly be one under the right conditions, and musing on that led to a epiphany of self-realization that, as far as I'm concerned, was worth the price of the cruise several times over. I'll get to that after this travelogue is done, so as to not interrupt its flow any more than I already have. (Yes, I'm a tease: but this striptease is much more soul than body.)
TOMORROW: the concluding volume of the Victory trilogy, comprising Cozumel, Mexico, our sea day (more pics) and final thoughts.
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