I also decided that each day from here out- at least the port days- are going to require two collages per day. One for the shore activity of the day and one for the food events and such. We did eat a lot you know…. and it’ should be documented- especially since every night we wore some “outfit” we took for the express purpose of eating dinner in it.

Anyway- we saw big Mayan ruins with our local guide, Diana. I got to use my first dose of Spanish and made my first purchase- a hand made wooden vase from a local artist named Servantes. He’d been making these vases for 3 generations. Very cool.

The Mayan ruins were nifty I suppose. Honestly, it was my least favorite day. I really want to say it was an impressive pile of rocks… but I actually was more impressed by the Jungle around them and of course– the color of the sea. I really badly wanted to get in the water this day, but our trip to the Mayan ruins took several hours and then they had signs all over on the shore near the boat that this stretch of beach was a “no swimming zone” for some ridiculous reason. Our only on shore swim option within reasonable walking distance was a HUGE wading pool in the center of this port side mall with a HUGE swim up bar… which makes the HUGE wading pool nothing more than a HUGE toilet for drunk people as far as I was concerned. So it was back to the boat to swim.

By the time we had returned to our boat, a Carnival Cruise Ship had also pulled up next to us…. here was a conversation I overheard from people heading to their boat:

“Hey John… oh man. It’s so f’ing good to see you. We’re so screwed. We ran out of money. (its the first day of their trip)”
“Oh… don’t worry man. We got managed to get free drinks all day. We got your back.”

2 lessons from this overheard conversation and others like it:

1. spend the extra money. unless you want a floating drunken party, skip Carnival. Even though Princess (which we were on) is owned by Carnival… the clientele were visibly more sober.

2. um… don’t swim in the GIANT MEXICAN TOILET.

I love to watch David Crowder lead worship. I love joining with him as I sing. It makes me happy. It makes me think- and mostly that this must make God happy. At some point, he inevitably gets the whole crowd to bounce. I once saw him lead at a willow creek student ministries conference where they had the balcony bouncing so much that they did structural damage to it and had to shut it down for the last day of the conference. I thought that was hysterical and awesome.

Anyway.. he and his crew are coming out with a new album. I ran across his blog as a link on a friend of mine’s blog once and currently he’s blogging the recording process and basically any randomness he wants to on the net- which only adds to my joy. I laugh at him daily now… since he rarely posts… this blog is kinda fun to read and anticipate the result of if you’re a David Crowder Band fan.

In his own words… “the jiggling has commenced.”

Our first full day was a day at sea. We relaxed all day. I read in the morning. We ate breakfast in the dining hall. Enjoyed watching the water fly by. Enjoyed using my coffee card. Ate a fairly light lunch by the pool. I even sat around for a few minutes and listened to people by art in an auction. Go figure… who knew people went on a cruise to buy art at an auction. The auctioneer said that more art is bought on cruise ships than all the world’s land based art galleries combined. They even were selling one painting they claim is worth 135 G. Yeah… I didn’t buy anything except a nice martini, so I could at least feel rich.

Later I went for a 3 mile run on the deck that goes around the lower level. I was hoping to see a whale or dolphin or something cool like that… but no go. Just enjoyed the sea breeze and tried to burn some calories before we got dressed up and gorged ourselves at dinner.

Dinner was one of 2 formal nights we had on the ship. We asked our group when was the last time that one of us got dressed up to take our spouse somewhere to dinner when it wasn’t associated with a wedding or work related function and pretty much… the answer was never… so this was a fun treat. After dinner we went and laughed at a comedian and then tried to get the DJ in the skywalker bar (this bar that was like 150 feet up above the water and looked like the spoiler on a race car for our boat) to play some good old school 80’s tunes. He wouldn’t do it. We eventually wore him down as the week went on and by the last night… when we came in he pretty much just turned it on so we could re-live our high school dance days and laugh at ourselves.

here’s the photo’s of formal night in front of the first of many sunsets I filmed… I made sure not to miss one on the trip.