I'm not negative, I just like to plan for contingencies.

Kellie is always complaining that I’m too negative; I don’t agree.  It’s just that after almost 30 years in the navy, I’ve been conditioned to consider everything that can possibly go wrong in any situation and then prepare a plan for every contingency.  So, when Kellie wanted to hike to the bottom of the gorge in Ronda, Spain, today, I suggested that conditions might not be favorable for that sort trek, considering the increased probability for mudslides and flash floods due to the rain, not to mention the general discomfort that comes with being cold, wet, and irritated. Kellie wouldn’t listen to any of it, we were going hiking.

Baby You Can Drive My Car

Kellie is not timid behind the wheel, as evidenced by the number of times she receives the middle finger salute while driving. She will go the wrong way down a one-way street if it is quicker; for her, stop signs are merely suggestions, and to get ready for driving in places where they drive on the left, Kellie will practice by driving on the wrong side of the street at home, which explains a good number of the special hand gestures just mentioned. She can also whip around blind corners on the precarious cliff roads of Italy’s Amalfi Coast without careening to her death, but if you ask her to drive through the narrow, building lined streets of an old European City, she turns into a quivering bowl of jello. 

Love and Marriage

It seems that every ship hosts their own version of the famous Newlywed Game.  On Royal Caribbean’s Adventure of the Seas it’s called Love and Marriage. They select three couples: one married less than a year; another married between 10 and 25 years; and for the third pair, they choose the oldest couple who are still able to climb the stairs to the stage.  Kellie wanted to play; I was not so eager. I tried to get her cruise husband to take my place, but Kellie insisted this was a job for the real husband, so I defaulted to my rote vacation response: “Whatever you desire, dear.

Topless Night

(Today’s post is a continuation of Monday’s story. Please read that post first if you haven’t seen it already.)

What happens at sea . . .

Kellie’s Cruise husband, Ron, wasn’t the only person to make significant sacrifices in our unsuccessful attempt to win the The Quest.  Susan took one for the team too. Just before the game started, we met a couple, Carl and Susan, who joined our losing effort. They had sailed on Royal Caribbean before and they came to game prepared.  Susan had a bag filled with some of the items she thought we might need: women’s underwear, a bra, the ship’s daily paper, kitting needles, and other assorted items.  Still, there were a few other necessary items that she didn’t have: dentures, a body piercing at a location other than her ear, and fruit. Luckily, the cruise director was sometimes rather liberal about what he accepted in satisfaction of a given task, and when he requested that we bring him two pieces of fruit, my team was given full credit when I appeared in front of him clutching my crotch.

Kellie's Cruise Husband

One of the things we like best about cruising is the opportunity to meet new people. During dinner, Kellie and I always request to share a table and we’ve made several new friends: John and Judy, from Canada; Mike and Barbara from Texas; Ron and Richard from Oregon; and the three traveling sisters, Joy, Toy, and Thelma from Missouri. 

Not What I Imagined

Whenever we travel, there always seems to be at least one nude beach somewhere along our journey. Like most people, and by most people I mean most men, I’m often a little intrigued about a visit to the naked shoreline.  However, the reality of a nude beach never lives up to the fantasy.  In my imagination, a nude beach is packed with hard bodied, athletic young women, skin glistening with suntan oil, playing volleyball in a wild Playboy mansion party atmosphere. In reality, the sand is strewn with bloated, lethargic, refugees from a cruise ship buffet who look like they fell overboard and washed ashore, sunburned in areas that were never meant to see the light of day, their body parts having long ago surrendered to gravity.  Nearly all who are naked should be clothed and, in some cases, tented.

So You Think I Can Dance?

Kellie dragged my butt to its first dancing lesson four months ago while we were cruising aboard the Caribbean Princess. There, a pair of energetic, twenty-something dance instructors, Fernando and Isabella, ceaselessly toiled in a hopeless effort to get my hips moving to the rhythm of a salsa beat. They failed. Undeterred by my lack of progress, Kellie made me attend each day’s lesson.  After a week of instruction, I successful demonstrated incompetence in the salsa, the rumba, and the cha-cha.  So when we embarked on Royal Caribbean’s Adventure of the Seas, I was fully prepared for a week of ballroom torture.

Booze Battles

From all the traveling that we do you might conclude that Kellie is an extravagant woman, but that would be incorrect, she’s actually quite frugal.  Kellie perpetually scours the Internet for looking discounts and special rates, she selects and uses credit cards based upon how many frequent flyer miles she can accumulate, and when it comes to cruising, she employs whatever measures are necessary to avoid paying the exorbitant shipboard prices for alcohol.

Kellie and Joe are in Da House

No, seriously, we’re in Da House; it’s the name of our hotel in Old San Juan.  I was a little worried when Kellie told me about the place because she described it as a youth hostel. I don’t how she came up with that description. When I think of a youth hostel, I picture the place we stayed at in Cassis, France, where we had small 8-foot by 8-foot room with a sink, bunk beds, and a shared bathroom down the hall. This place was nothing of the sort. (I'll explain the picture a little later.)

I Stand Corrected

We were in a bit of a frenzy as we tried to clean the house last Friday before leaving for the airport.  Kellie’s mom, Bev, was going to stay at our home to look after our 15 year-old daughter while we’re away, and we wanted to get the house cleaned for her.