Okay, I'm leaving tomorrow for a long weekend with my favorite person in the world, my cousin Lanora. I'm visiting her in Milwaukee, and I'm still not packed yet. I don't even know what to bring... I don't have cold-weather clothes any more! But before I go finish getting ready, I have to -- am being compelled to by certain individuals who shall remain nameless -- tell the story that has remained untold the last week or so, but heavily hinted at.

( You shall find the story and one final picture after the cut )

After a day at Paradise Beach with the open bar, and partying long into the night at the Halloween party where the drinks flowed freely (though not free), I was -- needless to say, but I'll say it anyway -- hung over.

I slept late, and when Brian and I got around to getting dressed and heading out on shore, the headache was still in full force. I didn't really do anything in the way of excursions. We just walked down the pier and then along the shops on the main street. At one point we hooked up with a group of friends from the ship for dollar beers on a roof-top patio. A brief rain squall came through (seems to be a theme in the sub-Tropics), and then I realized that I just needed to sleep more. So I left Brian with everyone else, and headed back to the ship to sleep most of the afternoon away.

I felt much better when I finally awoke, and I managed to meet up with Brian again and we watched the departure procedure as the ship pushed back sideways from the pier, and then spun around 180 degrees and headed out to sea, bound for Galveston again. It was a fascinating dance to watch.

Next time (and there will be a next time), I'll make sure I don't over-indulge the day before, so I can see more of Cozumel. The waters were these stunning shades of blue, and I heard from others that the beaches were amazing and the Beach Party excursion in particular was awesomely fun.... it would have been nice to have done more, seen more, and taken more pictures.

( Here are the few pictures I did take... )

After all the fun on the beach, it was back to the ship for an early dinner, and then we all got dressed up in our Halloween Costumes and went to the costume ball at the Stripes Disco.

Given the open bar on the beach, and the free flowing drinks as everyone had dinner and then got dressed, I wasn't exactly on the ball with the camera. It's a shame, because there were so many great costumes, including a butcher-knife wielding "Psycho Dorothy" with a chopped up Toto in her basket. It would have been nice if I had taken tons of pictures.

I danced like I haven't danced in ages, and stayed up late, and had a very late midnight snack, and then... well, maybe the rest of that story should be saved for another time.

But I do want to say, it was seriously one of the most fun nights on the cruise.

( I do have one picture to share )

Our first stop on the cruise was the tiny town of Progreso, Yucatan. It's a place of crushing poverty and is very third-world ... crumbling buildings next to posh resorts. It's pretty sobering. But enough of the liberal guilt... Brian and I went to the "Beach Resort" excursion, which was a long bus ride to a big resort in the middle of nowhere, where there would be an awesome beach and an open bar. Yes, I said open bar. Along the way, we were treated to a really horrible bus tour guide that barely knew pidgin English, got to see some wild pink Flamingos in the swamps, and a lot of abject poverty and rich mansions side-by-side in an environment that seemed to have almost no real infrastructure at all.

I was actually getting scared, until we pulled up in front of the resort, and it really was beautiful.

We mostly sat on the beach, drinking free double (and triple) margaritas, getting sloshed (hey, we didn't have to drive!), talking, sunning, listening to tunes... it was fun. During a brief tropical rain squall, we went and ate really some bad free food (seriously, not good at all, so thank god for the open bar). But it was over all too soon, and we had to take the bus back, get on the ship, and sail away.

( Click here to see the pretty pictures )

When the cruise ship left harbor, I was really impressed at how smooth it was. Seriously, I never even felt it push back from the dock, or accelerate to cruising speed as we headed out the channel and out into the open Gulf.

Even all that evening it was relatively smooth.

A small aside here in that, long after we lost sight of land, we were surrounded by oil rigs and various other structures in the open water. It was actually rather stunning. Late into the night, you could see tons of lights out across the water, representing oil and gas platforms, and I'm sure, other structures. Just looking out one side, I don't think I ever saw fewer than ten rigs, and an equal number on the other side. And as we chugged along into the night, this never changed. I had no idea there were so many, and that even so far out at sea (8 hours of travel time and more), that they were still that densely populated.

Anyway, I'm guessing it was a combination of passing off the continental shelf and into deep seas, combined with a sharp increase in wind speeds, but at some point the whole smooth-as-glass thing just disappeared, and it turned into a major amusement park ride. Gravity constantly, and randomly shifted. And it got steadily worse and worse. All day Tuesday, it was a challenge to walk around. Taking a shower that morning was nearly death-defying. Walking down that long hallway was like being really really drunk, even when perfectly sober... it was like going up hill for two or three steps, then downhill for two or three steps, all the while, the left wall would reach out and tap you on the shoulder, and then the right wall would do the same a bit later.

Thankfully, I never got sea-sick, but there were times when it was close. And since I knew some people would think I was exaggerating, I took these two photos during the day Tuesday while we were at sea. They're taken from the sun deck, looking down on one of the pools at the aft of the ship. This is a "kiddie pool", and is only a foot deep. Two kids were trying to play in it, but the motion of the ship turned the placid kiddie pool into a monster wave pool, and they both had a great time just trying to stand up. I sat and watched them for probably ten minutes, because it was just hilarious.

Yes, those waves you see were just created by the rocking of the ship. I couldn't even get the second picture framed right, because the boat was moving so randomly, it made it hard to aim :-)

( Click Here to Check it out: )

I have to quickly share one lesson I learned on this vacation:

Never put on sunscreen while drunk.

Seriously, you may think you're achieving total coverage, but that's evidently not the case. When I got on the ship, I was a pasty white color, typical of most programmers who rarely leave the house. After lying around on deck, and on beaches in Mexico, I now look somewhat like an abstract, psychedelic candy-cane, as envisioned by Jackson Pollock. Or something. The 30 SPF sunscreen got applied in amazingly random patterns, so I have this chaotic, patchy layout of sunburn on my body that pretty much defies explanation.

So, you know, remember the rule. Don't apply sunscreen under the influence.

I'm just saying.

Okay, let's start off slow here...

Sunday afternoon I drove to Galveston (a 4 hour drive) and stayed at a hotel near the gulf over night with a group of 9 other friends (well, loose definition of "friends": some people I knew already, some people I just just met that night), including the organizer of this little cruise vacation, and the guy that would soon become ... well, I don't want to get ahead of myself. I'll post some Galveston pictures, as well as go into a lot more detail and "stories" later.... this is just a quick entry about the boat itself.

We got up the next morning and made our way to the ship. This is a picture taken from the parking shuttle, that took us from the remote (and I mean REMOTE) parking lot to the embarkation point:



The embarkation process was surprisingly fast and efficient. The ship is an older one though (commissioned in 1991) and while it's huge, it's far from the biggest (it's not even three football fields in length, at only 285 yards). It's amazing how quickly they loaded 2050 people, and with over 900 crew, they had a nearly 2:1 ratio of passengers to crew.

Needless to say, we were pampered like crazy. All food was free, and there was a lot of it. And since drinks cost money, you never went more than a few minutes without some crew member offering you a drink :-) And I swear, every time you stepped out of your state room, you'd return to find it pristine and clean, with a made bed. Even if you just stepped out into the hall way, and then turned around. Okay, I exaggerate, but sometimes I swore they had to have a stateroom attendant under the bed, because I never saw them.

( More pictures after the cut, including proof that the same people who decorated the stairways were responsible for my original bathroom wallpaper )