I'm Back

[legion]

Chapter 1: Nolns

The flight from Bloomington to Atlanta wasn't bad, nor was the flight from Atlanta to Nolns. We checked into the Chateau Bourban and headed down the the Red Fish Grill for dinner.

I had the soft shelled crab. My wife had the red fish. Now, in 2002 I had the soft shelled crab, and it was the best meal of my life. This time it was stringy and flavorless. I was disappointed. I had a bite of my wife's red fish, and it was divine. The two glasses of Abita weren't bad either.

We headed down the street. We checked out the church. We checked out the square. We headed to the river and checked out the Natchez. Then we headed to Pat O'Brien's, but we didn't make it. My wife's sister called to say that the rest of the family had arrived in town....and they were having dinner at the Red Fish Grill. We went back to the Red Fish Grill.

The 13 of us crowded into two tables in front of the kitchen. I had dinner, so I was just drinking. I had another Abita and a Hurricane.

I'm used to Chicago bars. If you order top-shelf liquor, it may be poured from a Bombay Saphire bottle, but it's probably full of Beefeater. And they skimp on the alcohol.

Not in Nolns. The hurricane tasted like rocket fuel. It must have had at least double the alcohol of two Chicago hurricanes. So if you're counting that puts me at around 5 drinks...

Then we head to Pat O'Brien's. We order a round of hurricanes. Each of which must have had 4 drinks worth of alcohol....at least.

So we stumble down Bourbon street back to our respective hotels. I'm feeling it. I pretty much have to carry my wife. And it's only 10:00. I prayed to the porcelain god that night, as did my wife. As did everyone who made it to Pat O'Brien's...

[BRPORSCHE]

Oh those were the good ole' days. Now imagine only being 60 miles from Burbon...The amount of Hurricanes that I have throw up is equal to the amount that I have consumed.

[legion]

Chapter 2: Triumph

So I wake up Saturday morning and my head is spinning. A mild headache, but mostly a little dizziness. We have to be on the ship at noon, and it's 9:00. I saw a Krystal across from the Red Fish Grill, and figured it was as good a place as any for breakfast.

I was wrong. I was anticipating a McDonald's/Burger King quality breakfast, I was shocked to learn there is a tier below this, and on that tier is Krystal. I got my crappy breakfast combo and set it to work soaking up the remaining alcohol in my system.

I was feeling better by 11, and we packed up and caught a cab to the port. I got off the cab, a porter took my bags, and I proceeded to the stock yard. I was handed a health form. We filled it out, and waited in line for 30 minutes to hand it in. On to the next line.

We waited in line for 1.5 hours to get our room keys. I don't see what took so long. We were at the counter for a mere 2 minutes, and there were 47 counters. We got on the boat around 1:00.

3,000 guests and 1,100 crew on the boat. We were on the eighth deck starboard, and we had a king-sized bed (a real king sized bed) and a balcony. Sweet room, and much bigger than I was expecting. We settled in then headed up to the 9th deck buffet for some lunch.

Now, don't get me wrong, I enjoyed my cruise, and Carnival exceeded my expectations in all areas except for one: the food. The food sucked. It was crappy food-service quality food like I had in college. The difference being that in college, the crappy food service food was made by college students for college students, so they tried to make it the best they could. On the Triumph, I think the unseen cooks harbored some deep resentment for the guests on the boat, at least that's what I could guess by the quality of their work.

So for lunch I had a food-service cheeseburger and chips and salsa.

Well, it looked like chips and salsa. See, in my other complaint about the buffet (which I only visited when I had no other option), was that they often put the condiments before the things that they complemented. So you learned quick to take a little of all of the condiments because you might need them once you saw what was actually offered. So I selected the salsa, which turned out to be nothing more than pico de gallo (tomato, onion, and cilantro), and the "chips" were friend flour tortillas. So rather than chips and salsa, I had bland and bland.

After lunch, we went up to the fantail to get shots of the city as we pulled away. I bought a DLSR the day before we left, so I got some cool shots of rain moving in over the city as we left.

Then it was pretty much time for dinner. We were in the Paris dining room, whose decor is somehow inspired by Paris, but it's decor is also exactly the same as the London dining room. Now the Paris dining room was cool, because it is on decks 3 and 4 full aft, so we have a full view of what we are leaving behind.

And winding down the Mississippi River over dinner on a 900 ft. boat was pretty cool. The boat listed heavily as we made tight turns through the meandering river.

I wish I could say the food was as good as the view. Nope. The choices for dinner (well, the only two I considered) were "Flat Iron Choice Steak" or "St. Louis Style Ribs". I opted for the ribs. I couldn't figure out why anyone would actually put "choice" on the menu. Either it's prime or I don't want to be told. When the ribs arrived, they were boiled spare ribs smothered in KC Masterpiece. I consider "St. Louis style" to mean a dry rub and barbecued.

Ok, so the food sucked, that's that last I'll say about that. After dinner we found a bar and had a few, then went to bed.

[L8Brakr]

Next time you're in Pat O's, order a round of "Pete's Specials". Make sure no one spills anything near an open flame. Enjoy! Your Carnival dining experience echos my own unfortunately.......

[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.

[legion]

Chapter 4: Nassau or How to Sleep through a Tour

We had booked a shore excursion at 10:00 the next morning for a tour of New Providence and an admission to the pirate museum. The crap at Atlantis was just too damn expensive. $170 for five hours at their water park, for example.

Any way, we got up. We were at the appointed waiting place before 10:00. Some of the people on the cruise, particularly those from the north east, mostly from states on the Atlantic, that begin with the word "New", had no appreciation for Bahamian Time. So at around 10:15, a Bahamian gentlemen showed up, told us that he was going to give a few more minutes for everyone to show up (the last person had shown up at 9:55), and disappeared for another 20 minutes.

We were loaded onto cabs, which were Toyota vans with the driver in front of the front wheels. We were dropped off at the Queen's Staircase and one of the forts. The next 1.5 hours we were driven around. Once every 5-10 minutes, the cab driver would point and say: "there be Parliament" or "there be da football pitch". No other detail. I fell asleep.

The pirate museum was air conditioned, which at first was it's best attribute. The first 2-3 exhibits seemed to be written by a ten year old boy who learned everything he knew about pirates by watching the Disney movies. It actually got much better and much more informative as it went on, including extensive information on Edward Teach and Woodes Rogers.

The Piano Bar was closed that night, so we headed up to the pool deck to drink at one of those bars. As it turns out, so did everyone else from the piano bar, including Dave, the piano guy. I decided to drink Long Islands that night...

[legion]

Chapter 5: The Doooche

My bro-in-law came back from a bathroom trip and had a weird story to tell. He was walking back from the bathroom, noticed some muscle-head standing out on the deck with a large entourage, and one of the guys in the entourage said to my bro-in-law: "He could kick your ass." My bro-in-law kept walking.

I looked and I saw The Doooche. He'd positioned himself right at the center of the crossroads where the path between the hot tubs and the pool me the path that ran between the two banks of deck chairs. He was topless. He was tanned. It was 11:00ish and he just screamed attention whore. He was everything that personified why "The Jersey Shore" is such a train wreck.

He was standing there with an older lady with fake tits. (His mom? His girlfriend? His agent? All of the above?) There was also another girl and a guy who looked like a miniature version of him in his entourage. They were alone in the middle of the deck.

The more I drank, the more this guy pissed me off. I watched as members of his entourage would wrangle young women into talking to him. These women would listen to him talk, and look for their exit. The various member of the entourage would move to physically surround the young lady. I saw a lot of disgusted looks as women gave up being polite and walked away, often having to push their way through two of the toadies. After awhile, people started walking around the deck the long way to avoid his group. The older lady with the fake rack and disco stick then started making sweeps across the deck to try to entice women into the Doooshe's grasp.

It was just bizarre and surreal. I got very close to getting up and doing something when I saw they had some poor 12 year old girl surrounded. I signaled to my bro-in-law to keep an eye on the situation too. After 5 minutes of watching the girl try to find a way out of the maze of douches (there is only one Doooche), she finally made her escape.

The whole entourage ended up leaving without any more people than it started with. Sometimes all is right in the world.

[legion]

Chapter 6: How to Nurse a Jeep

Next day was Freeport, and our Jeep excursion started at 8:00 a.m.. And I was a little hungover. We got off the boat around 7:45 and found the waiting area for the Jeep tour on the dock. Mark, the Bahamian that would take us to the Jeep hub was there at 7:55 and we were on our way by 8:05.

While we were waiting, an older guy with flourescent orange hair noticed my NRA t-shirt and asked if I was an instructor. His wife was sporting flamingo-pink hair.

My biggest fear was driving a manual with a shifter on the left. I was afraid of doing a mirror-image of right-hand shifting. I was relieved to see the Jeeps were left-hand drive. Driving on the wrong side of the road was easy.

I picked one out and jumped into the driver's seat, as did my wife, brother-in-law, and sister-in-law. There were six Jeeps in the caravan, including the tour guide's.

What wasn't easy was driving a Jeep on and off road with a suspension that was shot, the oil pressure was iffy, the front left brake didn't work (pulled hard to the right under braking), the tires were bald, the steering was hosed (it would hop and jerk when turning right), and it was running on three out of four cylinders. I had to heel-toe to keep the revs up at 2000, or the oil pressure would drop off and it would stall.

Still, I had a blast. The guy in the orange hair turned out to be a real @$$hole who followed way to close, and would pass anyone who wasn't going fast enough. The guy behind me had the only 4.0 six-cylinder in the group, and he couldn't keep up with me, and I'd often lose him on the trails.

Our tour guide, Sam, had worked for American Airlines in Houston for 14 years. He was VERY informative and could answer any question thrown at him. He gave us the history of the Bahamas, the politics, the laws, the good, and the bad. The mix of driving/history made it a very enjoyable experience. One I would highly recommend.

[legion]

Chapter 7: The Conch Republic

We slept in, hit the breakfast buffet, and got off the boat around 10:00. This was the only stop we hadn't booked an excursion for. My wife wanted to take the tour of the "Little White House". I wanted to walk off the gin & tonics from the piano bar the night before. My wife thought I was giving her the slient treatment for some unknown reason because I was not my normal, loud self. I had to explain that it wasn't that I didn't want to talk with her, it was that I didn't want to talk.

We walked around for an hour or so. Finally feeling better, we decided to go to Ernest Hemmingway's house. I thought it was a cool house, but a way overblown production for a guy who only lived there for three years. He lived in Cuba for something like 15 years.

Next we decided to do the tour of the little White House. Well, until we saw the place and decided it was another big production for not a lot of historical significance. So we headed to the pirate museum. When we finally found it, there was a note on the door that stated that they had moved to St. Augustine. St. Augustine? Really? That's quite a move.

So we got lunch at a place called Bagatelle. Excellent food. I got a Cuban sandwhich. The pulled pork had a wonderful, rich, smoky flavor to it. My wife had the crab cakes. We split an order of deep-fried tiger shrimp wrapped in bacon and drizzled with a spicy barbecue sauce. It was the best meal of the trip.

Finally, we headed to the shipwreck museum. I didn't know that in the early days, the people of Key West subsisted mostly by salvaging ship wrecks, so the museum had a lot of historical significance to the island, and a lot of locally recovered artifacts. Very cool. Even cooler, the museum has a huge tower that gives a full view of the island.