I'm Baaaaack!

It was rough.
Really rough.
Somehow we survived.
It wasn't easy.

Miraculously, the Boss managed to prevent me from stowing away in Cozumel for a week or two. Ah, well. All good things must eventually get posted in blog form and for that, I needed to come home.

Alright. The kids missing us had something to do with it, too.

I suppose.

But dang, it was a good time while it lasted.

Oh, Blog! How I missed thee!(...and the kids)

But don't worry. I took about a hundred pictures a day so the kids would get to experience everything and somehow or other I'll get them posted. This is, after all a record of my existence and posterity may someday be interested in where the Boss and I celebrated our upcoming fifteenth anniversary (that would actually not be until June tenth, but what's three or four months over a decade and a half?)

The boat was heaven. No Destroying Angels messing up my house (thanks to Aunts J,M, and Beak with some grandma and Uncle T added for good measure). Meanwhile, we had a Malaysian room steward named Eko who came in and cleaned up twice a day (I tried to fit him into my suitcase to bring him home but customs got REALLY upset).

The Coca Cola company, our generous benefactors for the trip, provided us with open bar cards. So all I had to do was snap and someone was putting a delicious, fruity, non-alcoholic, umbrella drink in my fat little fingers (though we got some pretty wild eyed responses from waiters who couldn't believe we weren't taking advantage of the free booze).

Three course meals were served by a team of no less than three waiters (who like their bartender compatriots seemed stunned that we weren't trying to get smashed at every opportunity. "What's a 'Mormon'?"). What made this even funnier is that through some weird and twisted chain of fluky influences, our nightly dinner table was made up of five couples, all from Utah, and all Mormon. So nobody was having wine with dinner.

"But it's free!" they kept telling us. "We'll save it for you so you can drink a little tonight and have the rest tomorrow!". It took pretty much the whole first night of dinner service to convince them they could leave the coffee cups and wine glasses off the table. The ten of us found the whole thing highly entertaining. From the funny looks we got, you'd have thought we had told the wait staff we were from the planet Mergatron and would like to be served glasses of motor oil.

Good times.

The weather was pretty good by Utah standards, though it was windy the whole time and it rained on us when we got back to Galveston. The wind meant our day at the beach was um...abbreviated? It was warm though, hitting around the upper 80's.

The flights were fine, and Southwest did not kick me off the plane for being fat (take that Kevin Smith), though on the way to Houston, we made the mistake of sitting in the front row and I got a serious crick in my neck trying to look out the window.

I kept my notebook with me and wrote a record of all the food we ate and things we did and if I pulled it off, I should have a pictorial "Captains Log" of the journey. That will make more sense later. We lost more than our share of bingo, but made up for it by cleaning out the penny slots. We saw shows, went to parties, ate everything in sight, and bought seven for twenty dollar t-shirts from little back-alley shops run by cute and chubby Mexican Grandmothers. We drank coke by the gallon and enough Shirley Temples and tasty lemonade to flood the ship's three hot tubs.

We flew over the States at nearly thirty thousand feet cruising altitude and then sailed over water in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico that was almost twenty thousand feet deep. We started in a high mountain desert, went to a low, humid coastal plain and then sailed from the brown, muddy waters of Galveston to the eye popping, too-blue-to-be-real waters of a tiny flat island in the Mexican Caribbean.

A day later, I'm still shifting from foot to foot in order to compensate for a ship's roll that isn't there anymore (Sadly). It was grand entertainment of the highest order, and I intend to describe as much as possible here. Not for gloating purposes (though that might be a fun side effect [insert smiley face emoticon here]),but because I'd like to have something fond to look back on when the kids are slowly tearing up my house and causing their unique brand of destructive mischief.

It's good to be back. Back to the kids, back to the house, back to the mountains. Back to my beloved Blog. Back to unemployment. Back to having the only time people call me "Sir" is when they also add "you're causing a scene." Back to...Oh, who the hell am I kidding?

I wish I was still in Mexico!