A Long Season

Cruise # 5- This week was another interesting one. A chair broke on stage while a dancer was on it. The entire front leg broke off it causing the dancer to fall and sprain her wrist. She is now on a two week work break. Also, this week we had a couple of crew members moving a pallet with an unsecured appliance on the top. They hit a snag and the pallet tipped over onto one of them. The appliance came off and landed on his head. We had to meet the Coast Guard outside of Virginia so they could fly him to the hospital. The last I heard he had bleeding between his ear and brain. We brought the stabilizers in and booked it to the coast when the accident happened. Things were quite rocky. I hope that we have a cruise that is accident free soon because this is getting ridiculous. Even the veterans say they haven't seen this many accidents this close together.

Our first port this week was Nassau. We changed our route this week due to Danny and Ericka. I got off with Dave Fulton(band director and trombone), Dave Blazer(trumpet) and Jason Scott(sax). We went to a place and ate delicious wings. After flirting with the extremely waitress for a while we went to Fulton's favorite sushi place. I don't normally like it but the California rolls were awesome. They taught me how to mix the soy sauce with wasabi to make it spicy. We all had different errands to run so we parted ways after our two meals. I did a little shopping for Dr. Pepper and then walked around by myself. Mostly, I just looked around for photo opportunities.

From there we went to Half Moon Cay. I didn't spend much time there this week because I had some work to get done. I spent most of the morning getting that done. I got off for a little bit to help break down the Calypso band set. I was only there for a couple of hours before we had to get back to the ship. We ate lunch in the crew area and waited for the band to finish.

Lastly, we went to Grand Turk. A bunch of us got together for Josh's party. Our Cruise Director was on his last cruise and we hung out in one of the Tiki bars. We had some food and played some volleyball. It was fun but not all that interesting to talk about.

This cruise we had Anthony Acosta(comedian), Marcus Monroe(juggler), Bob Brizendine(magician) and Jerry Goodspeed(ventriloquist). Anthony is fun to hang out with. His show is easy to do as it only requires a mic and stand. This week the stand got set too high. He is a fairly short guy, maybe 5'6" tall. While he was on stage he couldn't get the stand to lower and he made a comment about me not doing my job correctly. He got a laugh out of it and brought it to me off stage saying into the microphone "adjust this to my height". I grabbed it from him and adjusted the stand to its lowest height(about 3'6") and brought it back on stage. It got a laugh from the audience and they thought it was part of the show. This is the kind of stuff that makes me love live theatre. Anyway, Marcus had me dress up for his show this week. I came on stage as the official Guinness Book of World Records guy. He is "attempting" to set the world record for fitting his entire body through a tennis racket. Of course, he fails miserably and people laugh at him. Bob's show was funny but it got mixed reviews. I guess, either you get him or you don't. He was fun hang out with though. After the show he commented that we were the most sober people he has worked with. He then got up and bought all the techs shots of Beam. The funny thing is all he drank all night was Diet Coke. Jerry Goodspeed is a ventriloquist.

In New York this week I only had one thing on my mind and that was FOOTBALL. Greg(sax) and I got off early and ran a couple of errands. He is from New York and was craving his favorite Mexican restaurant. We walked all the way to 103rd and Broadway. It was cool though because we did most of the walking through Central Park. I never knew the park was as big as it is. In movies it always seems like a small park in a big city but it is quite large. It has baseball fields walking trails and other park activities in it. I want to go back again and take some pictures. I was on the phone most of the time I was walking through it. We finally made it to the restaurant and sat down after meeting up with Ben(roommate). I ordered a burrito. It was easily the biggest one I have ever had. It had everything you could want on it, including strips of steak. Out of this World. That's all have to say about that. Unfortunately, that's when the day began to take a turn. While we were sitting there we witnessed a dead man being loaded into an ambulance. After shrugging that off, we went back towards the ship to find a sports bar. Along the way, we saw a fire. Flames were shooting out of the apartment building and people were coming out of windows and onto the fire escapes. One man was carrying his retriever on his shoulders as he climbed down. Pretty scary. The sports bar that we went to was called Mercury bar. It had several large screen T.V.'s with different games on. We split a couple pitchers and went back to the ship.

We were in boat drill during the first quarter of the Georgia game. I got to see the first drive and could barely restrain my smile during the drill. I got to see from middle of the second quarter on after that. It is going to be a long season if we don't get better play from our quarterback. I don't know how it looked from your end but it looks like we have the same team from last year. Bobo is on crack with his play calling, our special teams are terrible and we shoot ourselves in the foot every time we have a chance to do something. It's like deja vu. Anyway, I was wondering if some of you could do me a favor. Can y'all send me game reports on Georgia and App St. after the games. Just tell me what happened and your thought on each game. It is hard to follow here because all we get is the international ESPN. Which means there is lots of soccer. Not mandatory but would be appreciated.

Talk to you next week.

Chris



Picture #1-Our ship docked with the Disney Wonder. Atlantis in the background.

Picture #2-A church in Nassau. I've been playing around with settings on my camera and I edited this one to black and white on the camera.

Picture #3-A lighthouse near our pier in Nassau.

Picture #4-The Carnival Miracle at Half Moon Cay. The picture was taken from the tiki bar while waiting for the Calypso band to finish.

Picture #5-A church in New York.

Picture #6-Another church in New York. I don't know what it was this week but I happened upon several interesting churches this cruise.

Picture #7-The burrito that I ate. Dollar for size comparison. This picture was taken in cuisine mode on my camera.