Days 16, 17 & 18 - Clear Sailing

Ahhhhh, we do love our sea days.  What day is this?  It’s so hard to keep track.  It was a slap in the face to find a Day 13 Cruise Compass on our bed last night!  Nooooo!  We don’t wanna go home!  Tomorrow is our last full day on board.  Saturday they will kick us off.  How rude!

We're 447 miles from Grand Turk - the nearest land - cruising along in the North Atlantic at 18.1 knots.  We have 16,000+ feet of water under the keel.  We’ve had great weather - warm, but windy.  Today it’s REALLY windy – 50 MPH gusts up on deck - caused by Hurricane Sean.  He's heading away from us toward Bermuda so we should escape this wind soon.  It’s causing sudden lists of the ship – which makes it hard to walk around.  You never know when you’ll suddenly be knocked off balance.  But it’s great for being gently rocked to a deep sleep.  And the beds on Liberty are so awesome. 

Bruce has had to work a lot the past few days.  The progress on our screenplay outline hasn’t been what I had hoped for.  We keep hacking away at it and I’m really excited to start writing it.  It’s so creative and full of twists.  You’ll NEVER see the ending coming!  It’s the kind of screenplay that we admire when we see movies like this, so I hope we can live up to our high standards.

Bruce has mastered his new skill of pouring beer from the can stuck to his palm.  I finally got a picture of it.  Look how hard he's concentrating, and then the smile of success.

His teacher, master bartender Kyle, hammed it up with him.  The people behind them are shocked!

Good to the last drop!

Electricity has been interesting on this trip.  Europe has a different system than we do.  Before we left home, we bought a converter.  We thought we could plug our power strip into the converter and we’d be able to keep both laptops charged, along with the camera batteries, phones, etc. and also run my little fan (hot flash control).  We have one whole carry-on bag full of our electronic cords and stuff.  TSA loves to look inside.  They’re always amazed that we aren’t mad bombers.  Well, can you guess what happened with the converter?  Um… let’s just say that our plan didn’t work.  And… let’s also say that we have to buy a new power strip when we get home.  We were only able to have one item at a time plugged directly into the converter which about drove us nuts.  Next time we visit Europe, we’ll buy another converter so we can at least keep the computers charged up.  The upside of this is that we can use the converter to plug into the ship’s outlets in the common areas, so when we’re on the ships that don’t have all-over Wi-Fi we won’t be limited by battery time on the laptops.  Why didn’t we think of getting a converter before?

Bruce is reasonably fluent in Spanish.  I know just enough to get myself in trouble.  We’re both used to hearing the Mexican version of Spanish.  In Spain, we noticed that the people speak slower, enunciate clearly, and use better grammar than Mexicans.  It was much easier to understand them.  Their local slang threw us a few times, though.

Other forms of communication were also different.  Every time I saw the “Pedestrian Crossing” street sign, I couldn’t help thinking of Tom Hanks dancing on the piano keys at FAO Schwartz in “Big”. 

Tonight we’ll be re-living another classic movie – at the Broadway version of “Saturday Night Fever” in the main theater.  We’ve heard buzz around the ship that it’s very well done.  I’m excited!

I’m not so excited that this is Day 13 of a 14-Day cruise.  We’re never ready to disembark, no matter how long we’ve been on board.  Stay tuned…