[legion]

Chapter 3: Two Days at Sea

The hours winding down the Gulf were surreal. We'd pass by farms and small towns, right on the Mississippi River. 4,100 silently slipping by in 14 stories of steel.

We hit the Gulf around midnight, at which point I promptly went to bed.

The first stop would be Nassau, but we had two full days at sea before then.

I woke up the next morning and noticed that we had picked up speed. I spread the curtains on our stateroom and saw that it was also cloudy, and raining. And there was quite a commotion. I stepped out onto the balcony to see a dolphin leap and do a flip a few hundred yards from the boat.

Breakfast, lunch, and dinner were not memorable. We played a family game of poker sometime during those two days. We went and saw a ventriloquist that sucked. The cruise director was way funnier. I recall he was giving a talk on getting off the boat in port and some lady started heckling him. (Drunk at 10 in the morning.) His response? He looked at her and said: "Hey, I don't come to YOUR JOB and knock the french fries out of your hands." Yeah, that shut her up.

The second day at sea was sunny. I went up to the pool and got some sun and went down the waterslide a few times. Around three in the afternoon, a general announcement went up on the PA: we were going to pull in close to Miami so that the Coast Guard could come and pick up a sick passenger. (I later heard that she was in desperate need of a blood transfusion, no idea why.)

It was pretty dramatic. A fast coast guard boat came right up to the starboard side and it took about 20 minutes for speeds to get matched the the CG boat to get tied onto ours. The actual transfer only to seconds as the woman on a stretcher was carried off and another passenger got off with her.

Dinner was forgettable again, but some time after dinner, we found out the room we had played poker in the day before was a piano bar, and the ship had a piano player to man the piano bar from 9:00 p.m. - 2:00 a.m.. As he puts he, he knows 17 songs and parts of over 200 others. He could do Piano Man with the harmonica. He changed the words and the chords. Basically he was good at reading the crowd and keeping them entertained, which in the end was more important than the music. That first night we only stayed until 11:00 or so, and the ship's doctor ended up joining in on his harmonica for a little jamming.

I later found out that the piano guy, Dave, was spending his days either in the ship's internet cafe (being charged $17 an hour for access) or on shore in the obligatory Starbuck's researching new music to play each night.