Sunday, February 12, 2012.
Cold And Windy At Sea. The Best Dinner.
After an extraordinarily mild January, New Orleans got a blast of cold weather last night, knocking the temps below freezing at the Cool Water Ranch. We worried about the animals, even though we have warm places for getting through a night like that.
The weather was frigid during our departure on the Voyager of the Seas. We were only able to stand about ten minutes on the upper decks as we rolled down the river. The temperature and wind speed were both in the forties. My baseball cap blew off and down to an inaccessible part of the deck. Despite my protestations, Mary Ann got a staff member to bring a pole with a hook on the end. He arrived in time for us all to watch the cap blow off the railing on which it was caught, and away into a recurring joke I will keep alive for a long time. (Look! Did you see it fly past just now?)
The weather forecast said we'd be out of this icebox and into the seventies sometime today. But it remained too cold to lie around the pool as Mary Ann wanted. On top of that, the waves rocked the ship, although far less than the worst we've ever experienced. We had a good sleep.
The new day began for me in the buffet with fruit, a muffin, juice and coffee. It wasn't a good place to work, so I moved to the coffee bar on the promenade. This is a very cool space, a street scene with both retro and futuristic qualities. And they make good coffee, worth the extra cost.
I took a break to check on Mary Ann, who was well occupied and not in need of my company. What I needed--very badly--was a haircut. I look like a crazy beachcomber. A young British woman who has been on this gig for three months dispatched my thatch, and for no more than Harold Klein would charge me at his shop in the Royal Orleans. (He will demand to know, a few weeks from now, who it was who butchered my hair. He will somehow know that this cut was not executed by him.
Mary Ann, who swears that she doesn't want to eat at all, didn't like the lunch buffet. We checked out a little spread in the Promenade, but that was just hot dogs, ham, burgers, and tacos. She resigned herself to lunch in the main dining room--something she has had maybe three times in some fifty previous days at sea.
Tablemates Carla and John were kindred spirits. Carla almost had to cancel this cruise: she had an appendectomy a week ago today. The doctor cleared her for the trip as long as she doesn't go swimming. The wonders of modern medicine! When I had mine out eighteen years ago, I was in the hospital for a week and laid up at home another ten days. Carla walked six miles around New Orleans in the past couple of days and felt only a little tired.
We ate well. My lunch started with a soup of asparagus and fake crabmeat (not as good as in New Orleans, but not bad). The entree was a bowl of spinach gnocchi in a cream sauce made seriously delicious by some meaty exotic mushrooms. This was as fine as last night's linguine was execrable. Mary Ann was ecstatic about a sort of salad bar where chefs compose salads with anything you want on them. She also liked the looks of John's chocolate-raspberry dessert, and broke another one of her rules to order one for herself. I had a gianduja (chocolate and hazelnut) torte, rich and intense but small enough to enjoy.
Mary Ann says that people on this ship dress more casually than what we remember from our last cruise together. Can that really be three years ago? The only definitive statement about a dress code is "Bare feet, short pants, and tank tops are not permitted in the dining room." Let's hope not.
At tonight's captain's party the dress is formal. Of course, I am ready with my tuxedo. I take every opportunity to dress up. Captain Charles Teige was in his dress uniform, but not shaking hands--that is verboten, a vector for norovirus. One bumps fists, which somehow doesn't seem especially friendly, although the Captain himself is light and cordial. No food was being served (we certainly didn't need it), and glasses of very drinkable sparkling wine were passed around. A three-piece jazz band played music for dancing.
Three couples in the Cleopatra's Needle ballroom recognized me and wanted to talk. One is the son of Paul Frederick, a teacher who was at Jesuit when I was. I remember that he was a tough disciplinarian. Forty-seven years after I first saw him, Mr. Frederick is still teaching at Jesuit.
Dinner time. The menu and the crowd were much more auspicious tonight than last. Escargots in pans loaded with garlic butter was the favorite appetizer. Slices of whole roasted beef tenderloin with a pepper-flavored brown sauce, asparagus and mashed spuds was my entree. With this I called for a secondary wine from Chateau Lafite. At $77 it was a risk, but I don't drink Bordeaux often enough. I liked it pretty well. Mary Ann did not; she thought it had a peculiar aroma. The other folks at our table (two of them were met for the first time) were uninterested in my offer of a glass of the stuff, on me. This is a beer-and-iced-tea table, it appears.
All the desserts sounded good, but it was hard to pass up a hot chocolate soufflee with chocolate-espresso sauce, hot and fluffy. The guy who talked me into a cordial last night had another one tonight. I now have two of those souvenir shot glasses. I have a feeling I'll come home with a half-dozen.
Somehow, I persuaded our tablemates that watching me sing karaoke would be entertaining. To make up for this loss of their time, I bought a round of drinks. As always, the bartender made a fine Negroni with no need for instructions. Every bartender on every ship we've sailed could do this.
While waiting my turn to sing, a short, boxy man with the worst toupee I've ever seen got up and let fly with "Just A Gigolo." The full auditorium went wild. For the remainder of the evening, drop-dead gorgeous young women kept grabbing him to dance. No matter how long I live, I will never discover what gets a gal going.
My number was "I've Got The World On A String," Sinatra style. The host of the evening even had a fedora for me to wear. I got a good hand, but no curvy broads asked me to dance.
When it all broke up at half-past midnight, I wasn't quite ready to retire. Mary Ann, as usual, skipped the (to her) appalling spectacle of karaoke and was already asleep. I went down to the casino and shoved a twenty into a slot machine. I do this once every trip. I have never gotten a cent back. This time, however, my winnings ran up to $170. Then down to zero. Well, I can check that off my list.
I was awakened in the middle of the night by a rhythmic, dull clang. I happened to be facing the window, and saw a single blinking white light in the distance. The clangs and the blinks were coordinated. As far as I knew we were far from land. Were we being fired at by a pirate ship? The things an addled, sleepy mind can come up with! I saw the next morning that we'd gone around the western tip of Cuba. And heard a coat hanger bang against the inside of the closet door every time the ship made one of its regular shifts with the waves.
Pirates! What a great book that would have made if that had been for real!
