"I may as well watch while you lose my money."

Normally, I would have a problem getting up at 4 a.m. on a Saturday. Even on this day, I kinda had a problem with it. Two things softened the blow. A) Racer was sleeping next to me. B) The reason I was getting up at 4 a.m. was to go to the airport to fly to Miami for a cruise. By 6 a.m., we were on the plane, flying directly to Florida and straight to our ship. We landed at 9 and were shuttled to our ship before noon even though we weren't set to depart until 5 p.m.

The last time I tried this, my flights were delayed to the point of entertaining the idea of Cara going by herself. To not have to rush this time, to actually have hours and hours to spare, was kinda nice albeit a little boring. We went up to the Lido Deck, the 9th floor, and hit the buffet for lunch, one of many frustrating waits in a line of people who don't know how to follow the leader. Before the ship left, we had to do what they called a "safety briefing", which meant they lined every, single passenger up in rows on the 4th deck to tell us what to do in case of any number of emergent situations. What it felt like to me and every other person standing in those lines was standing in a pressure cooker. I've never sweated so much from simply standing upright and still. I had sweat in places I didn't know could sweat. Yes, it was hot. It was disgusting, in fact. What I don't understand is what the people behind me thought they would accomplish by complaining a little too loudly about the heat, the moisture and the length of the "safety briefing." Do they think that if they say "It's HOT AS BALLS OUT HERE, THIS IS RIDICULOUS." a little bit louder that the life jacket demonstrator in front of us, who is most likely a waiter or a room steward or some of run of the mill staff member, is going to say "You know what, you're right. This IS ridiculous. I am calling off this whole drill. Y'all don't need to know what to do if the ship SINKS. Let's go do some drinkin!!"

At night, we went to dinner, where the food was not only delicious but beautiful. I almost didn't want to eat because I'd have messed up the presentation. After that, we went to the Palladium, this beautiful lounge/theater where we spent a lot of our time to see different shows, play game shows and Bingo, and watch other ship guests play game and humiliate themselves. That night, I was one number, B-11, away from winning $500.

On our third day, we docked in Ocho Rios, Jamaica at about 9 in the morning. We went to Dolphin Cove for an encounter with a dolphin named Mitch. I miss him already. I need to have a pet dolphin at some point in my life. We got to kiss him, pet him and throw a ring for him to retrieve. The only thing I would have changed about it was that I would have made it longer. I could have played with Mitch all day long. As we sat on the dock, in the distance we saw lightning and heard thunder booming out across the ocean. As we all know, I LOVE thunderstorms so the idea of getting caught in one in Jamaica was very exciting to me and let me say this, watching a storm develop over the open ocean is an entirely different experience than watching one on land. You can see hear everything, see everything and it seems more powerful somehow. Totally ate it up.

After the dolphin encounter, we were taken to Dunn's River Falls, a 600-foot river waterfall carved out of the side of a mountain that comes all the way down to the beach. Let me point out that this excursion was my mom's idea. "It looks fun," she said when we looked at the pictures on the computer. Standing at the bottom of a 600-foot waterfall, in the middle of a monsoon that is pelting us with rain, thunder and lightning crashing around us, slippery rocks forming hills and valleys and narrows paths all leading straight up, it did not look so fun to her. As we started our climb, holding hands with each other and others we didn't know, she looked back at me, already on her first step up, and said "I don't wanna do this." Sorry, lady. As hard as it looked from the bottom and as difficult as it was to maintain balance with only your feet because we were instructed to hold hands, Mom made it about 80% of the way. There was never any question that I was going all the way to the top and it was AWESOME. I've never done anything like that before, I wish I could do it again. The problem arose when we tried to get out of the park and back to the bus. We somehow got separated from our group and several very nice (because they wanted us to buy their stuff) Jamaican guys who said we were pretty, are you married, la la la, converged on us. When I asked how to get to the bus, one of them said "Oh it's right here, and let us into a tent. No, I don't think this is where the EXIT is. When we finally (for the 10th time) said we did not want to buy anything and just needed help getting back to the bus, SUDDENLY, there was no help to be found but at least it was nice to be left alone. At night, we caught some gameshows in the Palladium, including Sail & Sign Wipeout Bingo, which cleared out the winner's onboard account balance. The best part of the night was The Game of Love - a variation of the Newlywed Game where they pulled 3 couples up to the stage and asked them all questions ranging from "What holiday describes your night last night?" to "Who your husband's last girlfriend and how would you describe her?" The three couples had been married 2 days, 20 years and 51 years respectively. At the end, the husbands, who had been backstage the whole time, came out wearing ridiculous underwear, even the oldest guy, who couldn't have been younger than 70.

Day 4 was Grand Cayman. We walked around shopping for awhile and then we went parasailing. The boat was manned by two guys and one of them turned out to be from Granby. Only I would have to go all the way to Grand Cayman to meet a dude from a town over. He was my age too, so we knew a ton of the same people. Parasailing was amazing, but like the dolphin encounter, too short. It was surprisingly peaceful and very quiet that high up. I could have stayed up there for hours. That night, after an amazing dinner and a show in the palladium about Paris that was really lame, I could tell Mom wanted to go to bed but I wanted to gamble. I had an itchy slot finger. I only had $28.50 on my card but I felt like something was going to happen. I said, "Mom, if you want to, you can go to bed. I know you're tired." - Her response, and I love looking back on it, the "if she only knew" of that moment. She says to me, "I may as well WATCH while you lose my money." - Fair enough. Maybe 4 spins in - TRIPLE FLAMING 7s. That is 1,000 credits. WHAT'S UP, $250??? It just kept dinging and dinging. How great is this? How can this get any better?? --- THIS is how - 4 minutes later - Triple 7's again - $100. OH MY GOD. That has to be it, right? WRONG. Two more $50 dollar jackpots after that - at the end of the night, I had won $373,.58 - I played down 23, stopped at $350 and left $50 on my card to play with the next day. Not bad for 45 minutes at the slot machine, huh?

Our last day was a day at sea. By that time, we were both exhausted and seen everything we thought we wanted to see. The day was fairly uneventful until dinner. We did the same dinner and a show (which was lame again.) as the night before. This time, I was the one ready to pack it in early since we were planning on getting up at 6:30 to leave the ship in Miami. Mom pulls out a 20 and says one more time. Just twenty bucks. So we went to the same machine, as if we'd go to any other one in the place, she sat down and within a few minutes, we heard that same, familiar ding ding ding ding ding ding over and over - 1,000 credits. And then another! and then ANOTHER! Mom cashed out with just under $300 of her own and we walked away.

Since our flight home wasn't until 8:40 on Thursday night and we docked at 8 a.m., we had all day to spend in Miami. We decided to do a Seaquarium excursion which was fun, because really, who doesn't love the aquarium. After lunch and hours and hours of waiting at the airport, we finally landed. Long week but filled with stuff I'm not ever going to forget. What an awesome vacation!!!