Pictures of the Ecstacy, Leaving the Pier

Pictures of Galveston Harbor

This is the loading area for the boat. They had two huge tanker trucks pulled up in here pumping deisel when we were getting on the ship via the ramp you can see in the distance. I don't even want to think about the fuel bill for this beastie!


From the roof of the boat looking forward. Doesn't seem that high up until you look at the pictures of the ship from ground level. The wind was really whipping up here.

Away From the Things of Man-Day 2, Boarding

Reaggers and Bub are back this morning, and thanks to parent/teacher conferences, the girls are home as well.

Moe just came down from bed and asked me, "Are these kids this noisy every morning?"

I just laughed at her.

"Come on, guys! Let's go up to my room and play the 'quiet game'!" she said.

Bless her innocent heart! Good luck with that one, kiddo. I admire your spunk. Let me know how it turns out.

Alright, back to warm memories. I'll need them today, as we woke up to half a foot of white stuff on the lawn.




I swear I was standing on a pier this week in 90 degree weather.

Now I will say this for the hotel we stayed at. The office chair was like a perpetual motion machine. I sat down and gave it my customary spin and honestly, I haven't spun that much since me and Uncle B tried to make ourselves barf on the teacups at disneyworld ten years ago. That was one well packed set of bearings. If nothing else, they get high marks for free spinning office chairs.

We slept pretty well, and had no problem getting dressed and ready to go to breakfast before the eight thirty alarm even went off. We went down to the cafe and used our "cup'ns" for breakfast. I had an apple danish, orange juice, and because I was in the South; biscuits and gravy. Not bad, but the gravy was in serious need of Tabasco and salt.

The Boss had french toast, hash browns and OJ. We had a nice little chat with the manager who was a Rockets fan, and so I had to tease her a bit because I was wearing my Jazz hat.

We went for a little walk around the hotel but it was dang windy and the Boss forgot her jacket, so we beat a hasty retreat back to the room to make sure we were ready to go. We sat in the lobby for a bit and then the buses showed up to take us to Galveston. There were perhaps a hundred people in our group; a third from Utah and Colorado, and the rest from Texas, Arkansas, and Oklahoma. We loaded up the buses, and I fired up the camera.

Since we live in the huge bowl that is the Salt Lake Valley, our kids have no idea how flat the rest of the country is. I pulled out the camera and started snapping away to give them an idea of Houston geography. Flat, flat, flat. Real, live, horizons. And of course the obligatory shots of the stilt houses along the Galveston coast.








****Editors Note
Hey Blogger people: Do you folks realize what a pain in the rump your picture upload system is? Its taken me six months to figure out how to put a picture in the middle of a post, and I still can't get them to line up the way I want. Not to mention the five minute wait for EVERY download. What the crap is wrong with "Click and Point"?
****

We got to Galveston and saw the boat. I saw it first on the camera because it was still way too far for my bad eyes to make out. But the Boss worked out a nice system of taking pictures with the zoom lens and then I could see what she was talking about on the camera display. It was a neat little trick that we used most of the vacation.




By the way, see if you can guess which of the following pictures I took!

We got to the terminal and got our luggage to the porters while we began the long process of check-in, clearing security, and boarding. Most of that process is done in a no camera zone, so I didn't get many pictures, but I do have one funny story.






We had been very worried about our paperwork, particularly mine. I haven't been able to drive for several years and my license expired long ago. I hadn't ever needed ID for anything so I did not have one of the state issued ID cards.

We knew we were already on thin ice because we were sailing on birth certificates instead of passports. It turns out that you can ONLY do this if you are leaving and re-entering the US from the same port. But since we didn't have a passport, we had to make sure that all the other ducks were in a row. The old Fatdaddy luck kicked in and my ID card did not make it through the mail in time so all I had was the temporary paper ID and my birth certificate.

The travel agent told us we would be fine, but I know how my luck is so I had visions of waving to my wife as she sailed to Mexico, while I slept on a bench in the customs office of Galveston.

When we got to the check-in desk (after nearly an hour of wandering past various checkpoints and security stations) they looked at my papers and handed me my boarding pass. They looked at the Boss's papers and said something to the effect that since some of her ID had her maiden name and some of it her married name, she might have to provide extra ID to get back in to the country. Lucky for us the Boss had such ID, and it was not a problem. But I found it utterly hilarious that after all the worry over my ID, it was the Boss's that raised eyebrows.

We finally got on the boat around noon, but the rooms were not ready until one thirty. We went to the Lido deck where a reggae band was playing, and lunch was being served. I saved us a table while the Boss went to get us something to eat. I snapped a pic with my camera phone and sent it to Uncle T, who texted back that I was a jerk, but he wanted me to have fun anyway.

The Boss came back with Mongolian BBQ (which wasn't bad), goat cheese and mushroom pizza (which was probably the tastiest thing we ate all week), and big tall glasses of the previously saluted lemonade.




After lunch, we wandered around the boat taking pictures of the harbor, our boat, other boats, and a dry dock (Peff liked that one). I think that I'll post those on a seperate post below this one since they are sight seeing pics and don't require much explanaton.

Soon it was time to muster for the safety drills though thankfully we didn't have to actually put on life jackets or do life boat drills. Beak said that when she and Uncle C went to Alaska on their cruise they had to do all that stuff, and it took forever. We didn't have to do all that, but going to the muster station meant that I didn't get to watch us pull away from the dock. But as my sea-faring grandfather would say, it was "Anchors Aweigh!"

Away From the Things of Man-Day 1

Alrighty then...I got my notebook out, my photo album up in another window, and I don't have Reaggers or Bub today. Squizzle is still sleeping (hallelujah!) and Peff is glued to the Lego Batman controls. So settle in for a nice long post.

Last Tuesday, I got done with class at 8:30, took the train to West Jordan and had Aunt M and Uncle J bring me home. The house was mostly picked up, but we still had to get everybody packed and all the last minute details worked out. By the time the kids were in bed and the Boss and I could get to work it was nearly 10. We finished packing at about 1 A.M, then had to print off the "permission to treat" forms, schedules, maps and phone numbers for who would have the kids and when.

It is at this point that I will once again give credit and thanks to those brave souls who were willing to increase their usual workload by five so that the Boss and I could do this. The Boss's sister, Aunt J and her husband Uncle D get thanks and love for accepting the difficult task of getting the kids to school and back each day, and housing them from Wednesday to Friday and then again Sunday night until we got home.

Aunt M and Aunt Beak took the kids for the weekend, in spite of the fact that it was Beak's anniversary on Sunday. If I had known that, I would have found alternative lodgings for my brood. Coming from a man who once bought a toilet snake for his anniversary and spent the day trying to remove the comb and two hot wheels cars that Peff had flushed down the toilet, I can say that Beak deserved better for her anniversary than keeping Destroying Angels from burning her house to the snowline.

While I'm on the subject, thanks to Uncles C and J for fixing a home repair problem while we were gone that had been bugging me for a while. You guys rock.

Also, My mother and Uncle T spent time with Squizzle and Peff on Friday and for that I thank them also. The Boss's Mother went with Haggis (AKA the Eldest) to her young women's "new beginnings night", while my Mom took Moe to her mother-daughter activity on Friday, and to numerous family members were in attendance at Haggis's last basketball game on Wednesday. Thank you all.

For a reward, each of the previously mentioned Aunts will receive from the Cozumel Fairy a bottle of real Vanilla extract and a bracelet. All the Uncles will receive a copy of my two favorite photos from the trip(get your minds out of the gutter! It ain't what you're thinking!...Sort of).

Back to the trip. We finally got to bed at about two or two thirty and since we had an eight A.M. flight, we had to be at the airport no later than six. So it was back up at five, marched the kids to the van and filled it with enough bags to make Paris Hilton blush (or whatever it is she does if she ever feels shame). We said family prayer and then dumped the kids on Aunt J while Uncle D took us to the airport.

We cleared security much faster than anticipated although part of that was due to the fact that I had to take my belt off. This meant they really didn't need a metal detector or even one of those fancy "strip search" machines, 'cause my drawers about fell off and they could have done a visual.

****Editor;s Note
I can think of so many airport security jokes right here that they have all just lodged together into one giant traffic jam of thoughts best left unspoken. So feel free to invent your own and insert it here.
****

In spite of the fairly dense (for Salt Lake anyway) fog, our plane to Denver left pretty close to on time. Thanks to on-line early check in, we had a boarding number in the twenties so we could pretty much pick where we wanted to sit. I thought it would be nice to have more leg room by sitting up front, but all it really meant was no table tray and a nasty sense of claustrophobia from staring at a wall for the whole trip. The flight was smooth and the landing smoother. We had an hour to kill in Enver (still can't find a "d" in that city)so we grabbed a bite to eat (Mmmm...Airport Nachos for breakfast!) and made fun of the weirdos who inevitably inhabit Airport Terminal lobbies.

We saw the New Mexico Lobos basketball team on their way to play at Air Force and if I had known then all the nice things their coach was going to say about my BYU team, I'd have returned the favor for old JT. Jerks.

One other thing I noticed about the Denver Airport...it is in the middle of NOWHERE! I've seen more crowded neighborhoods in the heart of the Bonneville Salt Flats. It has to be a two hour drive from the airport to anywhere in Colorado worth visiting. Not that we had to go anywhere there, I'm just sayin'...

For some reason that I'm still trying to figure out, I picked the same seat for the flight from Denver to Houston. Never again.

By the time we landed at Hobby Airport, I had a cramp in my ribcage (ever had one of those? Avoid it if at all possible) from squeezing and twisting my frame away from the wall. I was already not looking forward to flying home.

The good news was that it was pretty clear most of the way, and even with my lousy eyes, I got to see some pretty cool geography. Thanks to the cramped conditions and the newness of flying again (it has been about ten years since I flew anywhere), I left my camera in my bag and didn't get any pictures.

Houston was flat and cool and much less humid than I expected. I could learn to dig Houston in February. May through September would probably kill me, but February is very nice. The Boss was thankful she had worn a jacket.

We got our luggage and then due to the size of our group we had to wait for about forty minutes to get on the hotel shuttle. It was worth it though when the driver got out and looked like he could have been Ossie Davis's twin (Another Joe Vs Volcano reference). I wanted to tell him I was shopping for clothes or better yet, that we were "off to the Pierre" but I am one hundred percent certain he would have had no idea what I was talking about. Oh well. I thought it was a good omen anyway.

We got to our hotel and found that they had lost our reservations. Something to do with them not completing a name change the way our travel agent had requested. All they had left was a room with twin beds and a "spectacular" view of the airport runway. I suppose it was better than sleeping in a broom closet but for a hotel chain with such a hoity-toity reputation, I was expecting a LOT more.

I won't name names, but we'll say that if and when a certain famous (notorious?) daughter of the founder takes over, I imagine things will get a lot worse. The shower wasn't working quite right, the shower curtains were too short to keep water from flooding the bathroom floor, and from the tile damage it had been that way for a while. The TV was a high def flat screen, but it looked like someone had let their cat use it as a scratching post. Had we been spending our vacation there...we wouldn't have. Motel 6 can and does do better. But it was free so I mostly kept my mouth shut. Thank heaven that this is the only complaining I have to do about the whole week. One night in a mediocre hotel room is far from the worst thing that's happened to us in the last few years.

That night, we had a buffet style kick off dinner with the obligatory open bar. In retrospect I have to ask, is drinking the only form of fun "adults" are looking for while on vacation? No wonder people think you can't get a drink in Utah.

There was plenty of Coke and Sprite for us teetotalers and more than plenty of food. There was a Tex-Mex version of a Cesar salad that had the spiciest dressing I've ever tasted. The Boss and I had a fun time watching as unsuspecting people would sit down, try a bite of salad, chew for a moment and then have flames shoot out their ears. It happened over and over again. Very funny.

There were chicken enchiladas, rice, beans, and both steak and chicken fajita fixin's. None of it was even close to as spicey as the salad dressing. Cake and cookies rounded out the menu.

After dinner, they had a quick run through of what would be happening in the morning, when to be ready to board the bus, and what we'd need to do to get on the boat. Then they went around the room and had each winner introduce themselves, where they were from and tell their most funny/ memorable McDonald's moment.

The Boss scored some of the best laughs of the night when she told the group about how we met at McD's sixteen years ago when she was a swing manager and I joined as crew fresh off my mission. Now we were married, had five kids, and she was still the Boss (everyone laughed, but no one found this funnier than me). We also got big cheers when it was discovered that this was our first trip without kids since Haggis was born almost thirteen years ago. More than one person thought that this made us more deserving to go than the Boss's sales success.

We had to be in the hotel lobby and ready to leave by 10:30 and knowing we'd want breakfast (for which we had free coupons or as Texans call 'em... "cup'ns") we decided to turn in early and in spite of the lullaby of landing aircraft, we were asleep by 10 P.M.

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!