Day 4 and 5

Day 4 - Monday

Diane and I got an early start, about 7:30. Went to breakfast and laid in the sun for a short time, then back to the room.

Went to the big show, titled “Music Man” and featured music by Billy Joel, Elton John, Stevie Wonder, Ray Charles and Barry Manilow. They picked some great tunes and did a respectable job on most, did very well on some, but the Elton John and Barry Manilow sets weren’t remarkable at all. My guys in the band were solid, but you could tell they weren’t really into the gig.

Day 5 – Tuesday

A typical night for me—a couple of hours of sleep, then I’m awake for a while, then back to sleep for a couple of hours. This morning I awoke right after 6:30 and saw the brightness coming through around the curtains on the balcony. We have never had a room with a balcony before this cruise; it is a nice amenity. After a little bit I realized that I wasn’t going back to sleep, so I came over to the desk beside the balcony door and started writing in the journal. We are somewhere near Cuba on our way to Jamaica. After perhaps 15 minutes I noticed some odd motion of the ship. These ships are pretty big, about a thousand feet long, and they provide a very smooth ride. So when I felt this unusual side-to-side motion it caught my attention.

I noticed that their wasn’t as much light outside the curtains as there had been shortly before, so I pulled to curtain open a little to see what was up. We were in a fairly strong storm … driving rain and high winds. By this time Diane was up, too. To call it a “tropical storm” in the meteorological sense would be incorrect, but it was pretty intense squall. We had left a towel on one of the chairs on the balcony to dry, and it was pretty obvious that if it stayed out there it would get soaked, so I opened the balcony door to retrieve it. You’d have thought I’d opened the door to Flight 5003 at 30,000 feet; a giant sucking sound erupted as the negative pressure opened the cabin door into the hallway, which wasn’t completely latched, the curtains were sucked out the opening, and the papers on the desk started to fly. I shut the balcony door as quickly as I could to keep the contents of the cabin from being sucked out into the Caribbean, but didn’t get the curtains out of the way first. I shut the door into the hallway and made sure it was latched, and then Diane and I retrieved the curtains.

The rest of the day was less exciting. We went to a cocktail seminar and that was pretty entertaining, and we got to taste a variety of watered-down drinks and had some laughs.

The show tonight was a gas. We’d seen Glen Smith two years ago on the Grandeur of the Seas. He sings, plays the hell out of the piano, does comedy, plays harmonica, and gets down with the fiddle. The band really kicked tonight, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. This was the best show so far, but Thursday is a Broadway thing that might be good, too.