Great Vacation Getaway – Day 7

What great and wondrous things would the final day of our vacation hold for us?  Only time would tell.

Well, time, and my eventual write-up of the day.

Like so many mornings, we rolled out of bed sevenish.  I used to think that my parents got up around 7 because they were old fogies.  Real people, ones with a wild life and hobbies and whatnot, stayed up late and got up at 8 or 9 or 10.  I used to tell myself that when I was a grown-up, I’d stay in bed until noon if I wanted to, and always on vacation.

But now that I’m older and wiser, I know the truth: they got up at 7 to pee.  In fact, if they were anything like me, they got up at 7 to pee for the second time.

We made our way to breakfast, and found the typical stuff on offer.  Cruise ship breakfast was starting to wear on me, to be honest with you.  I’d tried everything, and was starting to grow weary of the sugary stuff that permeated the breakfast buffet.  I missed my boiled eggs for breakfast.

Oh, sure, there are boiled eggs on the buffet.  I could have had them.  But I have boiled eggs all the time, and I’d promised myself I wouldn’t touch them while I was on vacation.  See my problem?

We saw Mr. Grumpy, the first time in a while that we’d spotted him.  He seemed, well, kind of grumpy.  I heard his wife bawling at him, too, the first time I’ve seen her do anything other than just kind of follow him around.

That made me wonder: what nickname do other people have for Angela and me?  After a week at sea, I’ve come up with shorthand nicknames for almost everybody I meet on a routine basis.  There’s the ponytail drunk, the philosopher jackass, the Eskimo Japanese guy, Mr. Grumpy, and so on and so forth.

There’s even Mr. Fantastic, the mohawked sunglasses robe-wearing guy we saw strutting around like a professional wrestler.

I wonder what they call us?  The two doffuses?  Mr. Stupid Shirt?  The Newlyweds?

Whatever they call us, I’m sure it’s out of respect.

After breakfast it was off to the final round of Crazy Trivia.  I was chomping at the bit for this one, and fortunately enough for us, our typical team showed up for one last round of trivia.  I was really happy.  And we did pretty good, too, although I was pretty ticked off about missing the question about what the common name for calcium carbonate (CaCO3) is.

It’s chalk, by the way.  If you said limestone, you missed the part in the question about “common.”

We ended up with a score of 22, which is a totally respectable score and our highest total of the week.  And everybody in the team provided answers and support, so it was all good.  All in all, we finished up happy with our performance.

Once Crazy Trivia was over, we decided to take in one last game of bingo.  We hadn’t played since the first day, as I got ticked off by Angela winning the scratch-off lottery tickets and me not winning anything.  We joined our Aussie friends at Bingo, and just before the game started I excused myself to go to the bathroom.

Only, just as I arrived at the 13^th deck bathrooms I was preceded by the lady cleaning them.  Sigh.  So I went down to deck 12.  You know what deck 12 doesn’t have?  Bathrooms.

So I ran down to Deck 11.  Now, Deck 11 is a residential deck, so there are no public bathrooms there, either, but our room is on Deck 11, and quite close to where the stairwell is.  So I just dashed over there to use the bathroom and…

Found that our steward was cleaning the room.  Sigh.

So I went to Deck 10.  And 9.  And 8, and then 7.  It was like every bathroom was being cleaned at the same time!

I dashed through the ship to finally reach the public bathrooms on Deck 7, which is the main deck of the ship.  After using the facilities, I dashed back up the stairs to the bingo room, panting and out of breath, hurrying because-

Well, because of no reason, actually.  I discovered that everyone was still buying their bingo cards.

“Look!” Angela said. “I won $2 on scratch-off cards!”

“Gasp-pant-good-for-gasp-pant-you.”  I gasped and panted.

When Bingo started, we quickly didn’t win anything on the first bingo card, a typical straight-line pattern.

Then the second game started, which was railroad tracks, where you have to fill up the I and the G columns.  I’d never played this before, and I’d already marked my free space, because I am all about getting free stuff.  It’s why my house is full of Subway napkins and McDonald’s straws.

As the game wore on, I got more and more excited.  Soon, I was only one number away from Bingo.  One number!

“I hate you,” Angela said.  “I need like six numbers on every card, except for this one, where I need eleven.”

“You only need ten for a bingo,” I said.

“So you can see my problem.”

Then he called it:  I18!

“BINGO!” I yelled.  “WHOOO!”

I ran down, they played music, and I danced the boogie-woogie.  I am told that my underwear showed, but I don’t care: I won $140 playing Bingo!  It would have been more, but this other woman won bingo, too, so I had to split the pot.

Riding high on my wave of luck, I didn’t even care that I didn’t win the raffle or the third round of bingo.  After all, I’d won!

Although technically, if you sum up what I spent on bingo, and then subtract my winnings, I’m still in the hole to the ship.  So there’s your message: don’t gamble, kids.  It never pays.

We spent time after that eating and messing around, waiting for the trivia game that I was a veritable lock for: Historical Figure trivia.  I didn’t really care what the format was: pictures, descriptions, questions, whatever; I am a history nerd, so I was all over this like white on rice.

Come on, Historical Figure trivia!

It started, and the format was that they showed us pictures of historical figures and we had to say who they were.  And, sure enough, I knew most of them.  Not all – I didn’t get Sir Francis Drake, for example.  But I knew 16 out of 21, which I felt pretty confident about. 

What you do is, you switch sheets with somebody else to get it scored.  And then the lady says “did anybody get more than ten?  More than fifteen?” and so on and so forth.

Well, this one team got EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM RIGHT!

I’m not gonna say that they cheated and scored their own paper, but I’m pretty sure that’s what happened.  Cheating weasels.

Now, you might be asking yourself: why have you been playing all these games, and subjecting your wife to trivia stuff, when you know it’s not her favorite activity?

Because of the Activity Cards, that’s why.  Every time we participated, we got signatures.  And if you get all 20 boxes signed off, on the last day, you can trade them in for…something.  And this was the last day.  And I had 20 signatures.  And so did Angela.  So whatever the something was, we would get two of them!

I was hoping for a life boat.  They’ve got tons of them, after all, and they hardly ever get used.

So we marched over to the bowling alley to trade in our cards.

“Think we can get a ball?” I asked.  “Or maybe some pins?  Or a rivet from the hull?  Oh!  Perhaps we’ll get a free cruise!”

“Calm down,” Angela said.  “It’ll probably be like a coffee cup or something.”

“I’ll bet it’s an official jacket!  Or a lapel pin!  Or maybe a steering wheel!”

“I’ll bet it’s a T-Shirt,” she said.

We got up to the desk, me eager and her somewhat more jaded, and spied the prize list.  It looked like this:

CHINTZY PIECE OF JUNK – 5

SOME OTHER CHINTZY PIECE OF JUNK – 8

SOMETHING YOU DON’T WANT – 10

SOMETHING YOU PROBABLY DON’T WANT – 15

SOMETHING YOU ALREADY HAVE – 20

Okay, so the only reason we had the T-Shirt was because we were famous and awesome.  But still, we certainly didn’t need to trade in the card for something we already owned.  So we ended up getting a coffee cup and two decks of cards.

“I told you,” Angela said as I sobbed in disappointment.

Next up we visited Victoria, British Columbia. 

Never have I been so glad that the shore excursion was so short.

It’s not that it’s not a nice town – it is, except for the foul-mouthed teenagers.  And it’s not that it’s not full of kind Canadian people – it is, particularly our bus driver, who seemed to be a clone of Barney Fife, only Canadian.  It’s just that after a week of visiting places a lot like this, only where they used the proper currency and nobody spoke French, this is getting to be old hat.  And I’ve already seen all of these souvenir stores.

Oh, and I have pictures of stuff already, too.  But I still took more.

And Angela and I ate in a McDonald’s, just to be able to eat something that wasn’t ship food.  Not that the ship food is bad, it’s just that, well, the same problem has manifested itself at dinner as at breakfast, and I’ve already discovered I don’t like Tabouli.

Conveniently enough, we finished visiting Victoria BC once it started raining, so we returned to the boat.  We finished packing up our stuff, and then Angela changed into her jammies to go to bed.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“I’m going to bed,” she said.  “I’m tired.”

“No you’re not,” I said. “There’s one last piece of cruise fun to be had.”

“What is it?” she asked me.  “It’s not more bear puns, is it?”

“No,” I said.  “It’s a game show called The Perfect Couple.  I figured we could go reprise our role as the perfect couple.  It’s practically made for us!”

She sighed.  “Are you gonna screw up the answers again?”

“No, no, this time I’ve got it,” I said.  “I’m good.”

“Okay,” she said as she began to change.  “But you owe me.”

I was pretty excited when we settled in for the game show.  Not a lot of couples were here, probably because they were out getting rained on and trying to buy maple syrup.  And when the guy asked for volunteers to stand up, only six couples stood.  Hoo-ah!

“We’re going to ask for people to audition,” he said.  “What I want you all to do is to give each other a passionate kiss.  Go!”

I did the only thing that logic dictated: I swept Angela back off her feet, planted a big kiss on her mouth, and groped her just for good measure.

When I dropped her back off the couch, the dude immediately picked us for the show.  He knows a good thing when he sees it, after all.  I immediately ran up and sat down, leaving Angela to pick herself up and come join me.

“You owe me!” she said as she sat down.

“I can bear-ly see why!”

“The will never ever find your body,” she said.  “I’m not kidding.”

This game show was a little bit different than the other game shows we’d seen, though.  Instead of questions, or trivia, or something like that, this game show was full of physical challenges.  Specifically, it was full of physical challenges for the wives to do.  The husband’s part was pretty much just standing there.

The first one was to put a lemon up one pants leg and down the other one.  Simple enough, except that the lemon was frozen.  Okay, cold and uncomfortable, but no big deal.

The second challenge was this apple thing that I screwed up in about ten seconds, causing us to get DQ’d.  Okay, no big deal.

The third challenge was fairly lewd and difficult to describe, but Angela did a great job and only jabbed me once.  No big deal.

It was the fourth challenge that was a problem.  In this one, the woman had to put a balloon between her knees, waddle across stage, and then pop it against the man.

On the up side, Angela does this all the time in the pool and could hustle with the balloon.

On the down side, she hates balloons.  She hates popping them.  And she was beginning to not be such a big fan of me, either.

So the first one gets popped belly-to-belly, the second one sitting, the third one belly-to-back, and the fourth one the guy lays down and then the woman lays on him and pops the balloon between them.

Angela proceeds through the first two with no problem, but she can’t pop the third one no matter what she does.  She tries and tries and tries, but it won’t pop!  Finally, it bursts, and she’s ready to pop the fourth one.  I’m laying down, and she comes up, and puts it on me, and then, suddenly, she’s channeling Leaping Lenny Poppov.

Up and up she goes, to the top of the turnbuckle!  She’s in the air!  Oh no, it’s the flying leap of death!  Down she comes, crashing to the ground!   Oh dear god!  I realize I’m laying on a hard wood dance floor, and Angela, having seen that the third balloon was reluctant to pop, has decided to make sure that there is no misunderstanding with this fourth balloon.

BOOOM!

The balloon is utterly destroyed on the first attempt.  Thankfully, I am uninjured, but I did have the wind knocked out of them.

I was a little miffed – was that really necessary? – until I see the last couple go, and spend about two minutes writhing on the floor trying to pop their balloon. 

“Good job,” I finally say to Angela.

“You told me to win,” she says.  “So I went for it.  I figured you wouldn’t mind a few broken ribs.”

“I’m okay,” I said. 

“Why don’t you lay down and let me jump again, then?”

“Not a fan of the game show, eh?”

“You owe me so big,” she said.

“Don’t worry,” I said.  “Give me some time to bear down and work on some totem of my appreciation to seal the deal.”

“I am not kidding,” she said.  “I will push you off the boat.  Right now.  I’ll make it look like an accident, too.”

After that, we decided to turn in and go to bed.  Well, after eating some dessert.  Three, to be exact.  I mean, I had three.  I’m not sure how many Angela had, or if she had any at all.  All I know is, I never get tired of the dessert buffet.

We put our luggage outside the door to be taken away, or stolen, or whatever it is they do with it.  Theoretically, we pick it up tomorrow on the pier, but we’ll see.  We put up the “Do Not Disturb” sign, lay down, and went to sleep on our last night on ship.

Tomorrow, we begin…the Bee!