Sunday, February 7. A Day That Will Live In Famy. A Frigid Sailing. Teppanyaki. Everybody in the house was packing suitcases to go somewhere different. The Marys have a suite in the club level of the Windsor Court Hotel for the night. They'll invite an assortment family and friends to come by to watch the Super Bowl, where the Saints are making their first visit in the history of the franchise. Mary Ann keeps telling me that my failure to understand the historic nature of this is the root of all my problems. "Yeah, Dad!" Mary Leigh didn't say, even though she was thinking it. She won't amplify any argument between MA and me, knowing there's nothing pleasant bout such exchanges.
In fact, Mary Ann has been very nice to me this morning. She is of two minds about sending me alone on the Yucatan cruise. She never liked the idea, and she's about had it with cruising to begin with. The fact that this cruise is the least successful of all nineteen of them makes her even less inclined to bother with it. (It's all the Saints' fault, but how can I get mad at them?) On the other hand, we will be apart. On our anniversary, yet. Bad plan.
The traffic downtown was tremendous. I've heard more people are visiting New Orleans for the Super Bowl than went to Miami, where the game will be played. There's no question we'll have the bigger and better party, especially if the Saints win. Mary Ann says she got the last room in the Windsor Court. Hotels around the area are similarly full.
The girls deposited me at the cruise terminal at around one. The line to get aboard was short; checking in for a cruise is much easier than it once was, since it became possible to do most of the paperwork online. Once aboard, I found another new development, common to all of my last several cruises. The rooms weren't ready yet. With my heavy carry-on bag in hand, the only course that made sense was a three-course lunch in the sit-down Windows dining room. It began with asparagus soup, continued with a cold rice noodle and beef salad, Thai style, and ended with ice cream.
That killed just enough time for the room stewards to finish their enormous task. I descended to the fifth deck and walked toward the bow, where the cheapest cabin I've ever had awaited me. An inside cabin. If either or both of the Marys were here, we'd have a balcony. They like nice rooms. (That's why they're at the Windsor Court.) But Dr. Oz says men are not built to be comfortable. We should rough it. Stateroom 5011 is roughing it by cruise standards. I'm almost as low down and far forward as it's possible to be. Forward and low have the most motion. This room is also right above the side propellers, which I was to find later in the cruise make such a racket and vibration that no sleep survives it. Dr. Oz would be proud of me. Frankly, I don't care. I spend very little time in the stateroom anyway.
I did take a nap to get my head adjusted. I walked around to the rooms of my fellow Eat Clubbers to drop off the newsletter that tells them what's planned for our group.
Walking around, I found very few other passengers in the halls or public spaces. Most of them had already adjourned to the places where they would watch the Super Bowl. The game was being shown all over the ship, with the biggest exhibition in the main theater.
The ship pulled away from the dock at almost the exact moment of kickoff. The sail-away party on the open deck was not well attended, but it's just as well. It was freezing up there. Nevertheless, I had my welcome-aboard cocktail (a hurricane; the other option, believe it or not, was the Peyton) in hand as the ship rotated 180 degrees just downstream of the bridge, to begin heading toward the Gulf of Mexico. I called the Marys, who went out onto their balcony to wave to me. I didn't see them and they didn't see me, but we saw each other's spiffy accommodations. Weird.
The sun was setting, the skies were clear, and the view of the French Quarter from high up on the ship was heartstopping. I think the top deck is higher than the steeple of St. Louis Cathedral.
At around seven I went to Teppanyaki, the only restaurant on board the Norwegian Spirit in which I did not dine on last year's voyage. They only have one hibachi with seats for ten, and it was always full. Not tonight. The only others were a couple from Houston. Something is lacking when these chefs with their spinning knives and flying food have to put on their absurd performance for such a small crowd.
On my way there, I passed through a sports bar, where I saw that the Saints were losing by a touchdown. It was easy to keep track of the game from Teppanyaki, which is about a hundred feet from the entrance to the big theater. The noise emanating from there as the chef flipped eggs around and made a heart of fried rice thump said that the tide of the game was turning. At one point, I walked out to see what was going on. The Saints got a first down right at that moment, and the sound in the theater hit such a crescendo I don't think you could have heard the sideways propellers if they were running.
My dinner was scallops and lobster tail from the hibachi, after miso soup, edamame, a little salad, and a lot of fried rice. My two dining companions had much to relate about their travels to Asia and their taste for Japanese food. What are they doing eating in this place, then? I thought. But then again, what am I doing here?
I was up in Champagne Charlie's, listening to a duet of piano and bass (the pianist was also a singer), when it was clear that the Saints had won the game. Streams of people issued forth from wherever they were, and "Who dat?" was the most often-spoken sentence fragment. I'm happy for them, and if I'd been able to get a phone connection, I would have checked into the Mary's no doubt jubilant party.
I went to my bivouac and watched the highlights of the game. The main thing I took from it was a shockingly bad attitude on the part of Peyton Manning. Hey, wasn't this the team from his home town that won? Surely he must have some feeling for that. Also bizarre was the insistence on the part of the sportscasters to talk not about the upset-winning Saints and how they won, but about Manning and the Colts and why they failed. What's that about?
