The Grandeur of the Finale

Having made it to the last day of our trip, we woke up slowly and roamed up to the pool area. We stopped to grab breakfast, then went out to our usual chairs on the deck. The Weege and Scarlett decided to get in the hot tub for a while, while I stayed at the chairs to read (By the way, I read five books on this trip.). By the time they moseyed back, these extremely odd people had taken their chairs, despite the fact that I said to them "my friends are sitting there, they just left for 15 minutes to go in the hot tub," so we moved up to the top deck, which was really nice. At this point, UnShy lost his damn mind and came over to us repeatedly saying "Talk to me, don't be shy," except not with any punctuation to speak of, so we agreed that he was in fact a nutbar, and decided to avoid eye contact, although we did watch him walk back and forth ferrying beers to the ubitquious rednecks (who still had their beer cozies! Never fear!) by carrying them on his head. While we were up there, The Weege was keeping a teeshirt on her face to protect her sunburn, but since it was windy, she felt it necessary to put her sunglasses on OVER said teeshirt, which was actually pretty smart but also made her look like some kind of insane terrorist, which prompted Scarlett to call her "a sandanista" and me to refer to her as "FARC." We noticed this interesting headgear when she randomly sat bolt upright, and it promptly reduced us to giggling-to-the-point-of-tears. The DR stopped by at one point to be confused by the outfit, all "why do you need the sunglasses? I do not understand," which actually was the exact response that my mom had when I showed her a picture. He then proceeded to tell us that New Orleans was cold, and did this odd noise that was supposed to indicate chattering teeth but actually sounded more like a car with a loose muffler. Soon after, we moved to the lower pool deck and ultimately inside as it got overcast. The Weege and I headed for the Windjammer, while Scarlett got waylaid by The DR who said he would call the room, so she grabbed some chow and went to the room to wait for the call, only to have him tell her he randomly walked past her room two minutes ago. He had this whole plan about coming up to see her at the room that night if there was no security, which was STUPID because of COURSE there would be security at night, so Scarlett just told him to come by then.

The Weege and I came down in the middle of The DR's attempt to get to the room unnoticed, which was ALSO stupid because there were people milling around, but we arrived at our door only to be told "go away, go away" by a demented-acting Scarlett, so we wandered off to amuse ourselves elsewhere while Scarlett made out with The DR. This session apparently only lasted for like 10 minutes, but of course we had no idea, so we sat up in one of the lounge areas around the atrium and hated Scarlett for a while. We eventually called the room from the courtesy phone to check on the situation and received the all clear, so we headed back and began to attempt shoehorning our massive piles of crap into our suitcases in order to put them out in the hallway to be lugged away for customs checking, et cetera. That pretty much took us until dinner, at which time we headed up to the dining room for the last time of the week!

Dinner proved to be hilarious for several reasons. At one point, The DR came over to tell us how sad he was that it was the end of the week, and informed us that it made him cry like a chicken, which promptly brought the kind of screeching halt to the conversation that probably could have caused a rip in the space-time continuum. We then debated for a while whether that was a Domincan-ism or just The DR talking crazy. (A Google search post-cruise proved that it was the latter.) Then at the end of the meal, there was this huge singing routine, where all the waiters and chefs and whatever the hell come out and sing this thank you song. So they all came out and lined up, at which point our waiter, who was behind us, informed The Weege that she looked like a lobster, because apparently he missed this on, I don't know, every other day of the cruise?? Then the song and dance began, which was hilarious because the recording playing over the whole event was clearly sung by white British people, and all the waiters, who are from all over the world and thus often have heavy accents, were just mouthing along with varying degrees of energy. It was great, and Scarlett and I were reduced to tears from laughing so hard at this spectacle...I assume The Weege was cracking up too but I was laughing too hard to notice.

Promptly after this trek into hilarity, the Oddest Man In The World, also known as the head waiter came over and had the following conversation with Scarlett:

HW: Everybody looking over heeeeere!
S: Why?
HW: You tell me whyyyyyyy!

At which point we cracked up AGAIN because a.) why was this weirdo having this conversation with us, b.) which of the billion reasons people could have for looking at us laugh until snot came out of our noses would you like first, and c.) sometimes you laugh when you're nervous. I think he finally figured out that we were laughing too hard to be expected to produce coherent conversation, so he left, just in time for us to do a round of the after-dinner shots that our friend who had brought us the Bob Drinks was always bringing around. This time, they were in little glass shot glasses instead of the aluminum "Loving Cup" ones, and were helpfully labelled "Shooter," I guess in case you availed yourself of one too many shots and forgot what this teeny little glass was. We then wandered off to the Schooner, where a woman who was INTENSELY annoying and far inferior to our beloved Beatlemania was doing a trivia game. She proceeded to just completely lose the plot - forgetting which answer she was on, forgetting WHICH QUESTION SHE HAD ASKED, and proving completely unable to moderate her volume on the microphone because she insisted in talking in that stupid whisper-giggle that stupid girls in high school us.

After she had finished mangling the trivia, we decided we needed a change of obnoxious woman, so we went to see a lounge singer in the theatre who proceeded to massacre a variety of my favorite jazz tunes and then moved on to permanently damaging more modern music, like "My Heart Will Go On." I am all for swinging stuff and playing with it, but this woman was going so overboard with the melisma, it sounded like she was gargling. Dear Crappy Lounge Singer, Having people compare your singing to gargling is not good. Love, Me. She also had the WORST lounge patter the world has ever seen, and in this case you're talking about an aspect of performance that's traditionally very punny and "ain't I a cool cat"-y and what have you, but this woman my God. Scarlett and I proceeded to mock her all the way through, in order to distract ourselves from the RAGE building in us from her abuse of the music. I'm not sure if we were infuriating the man next to Scarlett or if he was mad about the music, too, but he definitely looked like he wanted to punch something. Once the woman had shut the hell up, all the bar staff was brought up on stage to say bye and be thanked, and the best thing about this was that The Peruvian was having his own adorable little party up there. Everyone else was just standing there or doing tiny little waves at people, and there's The Peruvian, flashing the peace sign and bopping around and generally not being able to clap in time to the music. It was awesome.

After The Peruvian had taken his party elsewhere, we stayed for the finals of karaoke. Scarlett passed the time by telling The Peruvian that The DR was her boyfriend now, because she's a complete idiot and told The DR this, and The Peruvian said he knew (not surprising, since The Peruvian constantly entertained us by having The DR's ENTIRE SCHEDULE memorized at all times, in great detail) and then asked Scarlett if he would see her in another four or five weeks. Neil Diamond had been asked to compete even though he didn't get voted in initially, so we were all excited. We had seen him and the Missourienne in Schooner, and he made us promise we would cheer for him. The Weege and I moved down to be in Neil's cheer section, where we ran into him - he was so nervous! Then the Missourienne arrived right behind him, and announced she'd been drinking since noon, so that was great, too. The Missourienne, The Weege and I sat together, while Neil had to go over to the contestants' seating area. By the way, while the karaoke was going on, Scarlett was up in the balcony still, talking with The DR and apparently even crying, because she is odd. So there's that.

The karaoke started, and although Neil Diamond did not win, he was the most entertaining. He sang "Sweet Caroline" and at the "hands/touching hands" line, he came along the stage and touched all our hands, which of course made all of us crack up, and he even had saved up all their little Royal Caribbean chocolates that get left on your pillow, and threw them into the audience. It was a riot! He finished the performance with - I shit you not - a full split, which was so effing cool, and that was when the Missourienne told us that he'd been an All-American gymnast in school! How cool is that? Like I said, he didn't win, but not because he was bad - he was quite good, but some of the people he competed against were AMAZING. There was this one guy who sang "Unchained Melody" that just...well he hit all the notes, which is a good place to start, because that is NOT an easy song for ANYONE, much less a guy. There was also a fantastic woman who REALLY liked Celine Dion. We saw her (and the Unchained Melody guy) in earlier rounds, and she sang Celine Dion stuff both times...but she was excellent so I didn't mind. I liked her a lot, in part because she was this teeny little woman who looked like she was probably an accountant or something, and here she is totally rocking the Celine. It was great.

That was when I decided to pass out - I had suburned the crap out of my legs, and they were tightening up to the point that I couldn't walk without looking like a complete weirdo, so I went to the room to slather myself with aloe and hang out until I fell asleep. The Weege and Scarlett decided to head up to the Viking, and this was where the insanity began.

So they headed up there, with Scarlett briefing The Weege on the College Roommates Lie which of course we'd been using ALL WEEK, but whatever, so they headed in and grabbed a drink and started dancing. After dancing quite a bit, they flagged down UnShy and asked him for some Jaeger bombs, which he agreed to bring them, but only if they sat in a sort of shadowy corner (basically so no one could see him serving The Weege). They were further convinced to have a seat when the Russian Mafia Dude who had been staring Scarlett down all night went up and requested a total rave-a-palooza of a song and proceeded to ROCK OUT to it up by the DJ, with whom Scarlett had once again been having cheersex with, because she cannot be left to her own devices.

In the meantime, every time Scarlett went up to the bar to buy a round, these officer type dudes (one of whom apparently told The Weege that he was going to be moving to Worcester, for some reason...yeah, I don't know) kept buying their drinks, but were behaving LIKE BOB by not TALKING. I ask again - where did Royal Caribbean find these people? And this time I mean the STAFF, not the insane tourists. Scarlett and The Weege also ran into Minty Guy from Costa Maya, who proceeded to illuminate his own personal level of Costa Mayan drunkenness by starting the convo with "don't think I'm weird, but I think I've met you guys..." which Scarlett was able to clear up, while explaining that they thought he was yelling at us for swearing, which he apologized for. With that sorted out, they were all able to chat a bit and get some more background on each other - he was a really cool guy who was unfortunately going through a divorce and was on the cruise with his family.


The ladies also ran into Texas and Tex...who The Weege promptly tried to start a fight with. Poor Texas just wanted to give them hugs and say bye, but instead, The Weege turned around and was all "so I hear you were talking shit about me" (a reference to a convo Scarlett and Texas had had about how The Weege had been being kind of hermit-y at various points). Interesting note about The Weege - get a drink or two in her, and she wants to fight EVERYTHING. So in any case, Scarlett intervened and told The Weege to shut the hell up, and the crisis was averted, although Texas and Tex probably still thought she was nuts.

So then there was more dancing, and at one point Scarlett looked over at the bar and saw Buttnuts looking at them. He apparently took eye contact to mean "feel free to come over and begin your campaign of weirdness," so he came over and started chatting with them. He started chatting with both of them, though primarily The Weege since Scarlett was still busy having cheersex with the DJ. He was 100% That Guy, because he definitely pulled out his sherriff's badge and showed it to them. Now, to Scarlett and I, that just explained what KIND of douchebag this guy was, but The Weege promptly began panicking internally over the idea that he would arrest her. We explained jurisdiction to her the next day. In any case, this was particularly hilarious because while Scarlett has a definitely uniform fetish, flashing your damn badge does nothing because a.) she is from DC, where everyone and their mother has a badge, b.) she dated a United States Marine who worked security at the West Wing of the White House for two years, and c.) she is currently dating a federal agent (who does NOT work for Interpol, however!). In any case, after The Weege danced with him for a while, the club started to slow down, so the girls started to head back to grab swimsuits since they wanted to take a late night swim. On their way, they ran into the two Bob-like Officer Guys who finally learned how to talk, so they asked for the girls' numbers...Scarlett gave them a fake, but The Weege gave her actual number, for the seventeen billionth bizarre and completely confusing act of the trip. They continued downstairs, with Buttnuts still chatting with The Weege, and at some point, Scarlett managed to fall down some stairs and sprain her ankle. Buttnuts was all "let me help you," picked her up, and then proceeded to start kissing her neck. As she put it, "and I was too drunk to be like ewww weirdo, so I kissed back," which was the beginning of NO END OF TROUBLE.

So I was laying in bed, in my underwear and aloe vera, and in walks The Weege, Scarlett...and some dude I don't know. He sits down and starts icing Scarlett's ankle while she proceeds to flail around and act like a ho (reporting facts). Initially, he actually seemed all right, like he was sort of thinking "all right drunkie, let's get this ankle dealt with and put you to bed," but then he kind of got more boisterous, and at one point thought I was not having enough fun so he decided the remedy for this would be to SIT ON MY LEGS, which OW, and of course he doesn't KNOW my legs are sunburned (obviously, at the first sight of someone with no boobs, I pulled as much of myself under the covers as possible), but...why would that ever improve someone's mood? Anyone? Right then. So then he took his boots off, and that was it for me, because something about the way he took them off just flashed "PROBLEMATIC SITUATION" in gigantic neon letters to me, so I BELLOWED at Scarlett to stop acting like a slut, got dressed under my covers, and stormed out after telling The Weege to hose them down with the shower if they started fucking. I headed for the lounge area and finished my book while thinking murderous thoughts towards Scarlett, and then after maybe 45 minutes tops, headed back to the room, with the intention of beating Scarlett to a bloody pulp if necessary.

Oh but what a 45 minutes I missed.

I came back and kicked over the stainless steel ice bucket in the dark, since the lights had been turned out and all seemed calm, and the noise made Scarlett sit BOLT UPRIGHT, in full freakout mode. And then I get the story.

Apparently while I was gone, Buttnuts COMPLETELY STRIPPED DOWN (Who called it? That's right. I called it.) before being evicted to the room...apparently it took full frontal nudity for Scarlett's brain to identify the situation as problematic. Shortly after he left, there was a knock on the door, which Scarlett assumed was me (but was unable to verify since Royal Caribbean appears to consider peepholes as an unimportant detail), so she opened it to find some random woman on our threshold...asking if her husband was there. Bear in mind that Buttnuts had told us that he was on the cruise with friends, not with his family, and CERTAINLY NOT HIS EFFING WIFE. So the woman looked up at The Weege and informed Scarlett that her cousin had seen Buttnuts dancing with The Weege in the lounge and later come back to our room. Scarlett kind of semi-freaked, told her she had the wrong room, and shut and deadbolted the door. Problem solved.

Except NOT, because a few minutes later there was another knock on the door, and for whatever psychotic Norwegian reason, The Weege INSISTED on opening the door, despite the fact that Scarlett climbed into her bed and was holding her down to prevent her from doing so. The Weege's logic was apparently of the opinion that it would be "better this way," which...okay. If it was the first night of the cruise, this is a whole different situation. We would have be bound to run into them again throughout the week, so yes, clarification and convincing them to not try and kill anyone involved would be good. But we were about FOUR HOURS FROM GETTING OFF THE BOAT, NEVER TO SEE THESE PEOPLE AGAIN. The Weege is both stubborn and made of 95% muscle, so she went and opened the door to greet the wife, who now had her MOTHER with her. They went through the same conversation, and The Weege explained that they danced and Scarlett's ankle got busted but nothing happened, which...not entirely true but we'll take it, and it did in fact make them go away.

So we got to sleep for the three remaining milliseconds we had before we had to vacate the room so they could clean it. This is an interesting system. They take...well basically your check-able baggage the night before and turn the US customs folks loose on it to make sure you're not smuggling Cubans in, and they give you colored luggage tags for this stuff. In the morning, you then need to get out of your room by 8am so they can clean everything (this particular day they were sailing again at 5pm), so you pretty much go lurk around the boat like homeless people while waiting for them to call your bag tag color. The Weege had to go for a separate customs check at around 6:45, so she got up and began DITHERING AROUND, trying to figure out what the hell she needed to bring, while Scarlett and I yelled at her from our beds to just take her BODY and if they needed her other stuff she could come back. She finally did, and it turned out that she did not in fact need her carryon, so that worked out well. At some point, Scarlett thought she heard her name being called, so she bombed out into the hallway with crazy sleep hair and a wild look in her eye and scared the pee out of Super Steward Alex one last time by desperately asking if someone called her name, to which he just replied, "no, but go get dressed," probably drawing his calmness from the knowledge that in 15 minutes he would never need to deal with us again.

So as we sat at the top of a stairwell across from the Schooner (most of the actual seats were taken up by the people who HADN'T been out until 4 am trying to get their asses beat and making their friends want to kill them, and thus got up at a reasonable hour), The Weege turned to me and said, in a perfectly normal volume and tone, "that's the wife." I assumed that The Wife was, you know, out of earshot, but nooooo....she was DIRECTLY IN FRONT OF US, and of course heard The Weege announce her presence and whipped around in MurderDeathKill mode, then continued walking, only to make the turn down the staircase and give ME the look of death. Now, at this point, I'm sunburned, I'm tired, I'm done with Buttnuts and all his attending drama, and this woman is staring ME down when I'm the only one who had not a single thing to do with it and also hated him from the get-go for sitting on my legs and making me feel like they would then fall off. I was about three seconds from just jumping up and yelling at her, "you know what, bitch, I don't have a DAMN THING TO DO WITH YOU, so pack your hairy eyeball away and get the fuck out of my face. If you want to have a stare-fight, take it up with these two dirty pirate hookers over here." But anyway, she left, never to be seen again, so it was all right.


Our color was called pretty quickly, so we got off and went back into the port building from whence we came a whole week ago. Apparently the organization had been vastly improved, with clear signs directing you to your stuff. We found our bags in the red heap, and were adopted by this great dude who was just like "I'ma get you to a taxi!" then flung our bags on a cart and hauled ass out to the taxi stand, at which point he tried to jump the line. It was to no avail, and we wound up standing next to this couple...oh god these people. I can't remember if I mentioned them before, but the female half was Australian and apparently had a successful career identifying people as sunburned, because she stopped both me and The Weege at one point or the other to tell us we were sunburned (thanks, I hadn't noticed) and then to give a lecture's worth of unrequested advice. It was particularly aggravating on the tender from Cozumel, where she went on AT FUCKING LENGTH about how awful The Weege's face looked, like...are you kidding me with this? The kid KNOWS. God. Thankfully these douchenozzles didn't notice us, and our baggage dude got us a cab right quick. While we were waiting for the taxi, The Weege felt it necessary to go into her bag for some reason, and pulled out...A TOWEL FROM THE POOL! Needless to say Scarlett and I immediately hopped on her case about her towel theft, which was odd because TO BEGIN WITH she had brought a towel WITH HER on the cruise, apparently thinking that there would be no towels on the seven-day trip in a floating hotel. I don't know. The Weege then proceeded to try and tip our baggage-schlepper with a pocketful of change, even though we had JUST TOLD HER we would rather overtip him than hand him SPARE CHANGE, so of course he looked at it like it was made out of cholera until one of us scrabbled a twenty and handed it to him. Good lord.


It was in the taxi that The Weege's long slide into dementia began in earnest. We were all SUPER overtired, naturally, both from the adventures of the night "before" and from the accumulated lack of sleep, and when we finally arrived at the airport, we found out that we couldn't check our bags more than 4 hours before our flight. We orginally had planned late flights so that we could do lunch in New Orleans, but we lacked the energy. We plopped down in the airport, looking like a bunch of refugees, adrift in piles of our junk and looking completely disheveled. I got up at one point to see if we could move our flight up...there WAS another flight but we'd have to pay $200+ extra, so it was not to be. Couldn't hurt to ask, and the lady was nice, so it was a decent way to kill 10 minutes. We finally checked our bags and wandered towards the security checkpoint. The Weege was carrying her sombrero on, as well as her purse, and Scarlett and I had pretty standard carryons...Scarlett really just had her purse, since she had checked a bag she carried on the way down. The Weege didn't get the memo on hanging on to your boarding pass, so the TSA lady told her to just wait and not touch any of her stuff until they looked at her boarding pass. She then proceeded to stick her hand into the x-ray machine to get said boarding pass, despite the facts that a.) the TSA chick had just told her to keep her mitts off her stuff and b.) you don't stick your hand in an x-ray machine.


Once The Weege had stopped sticking her hands in TSA equipment and had gotten the boarding pass located and dealt with, we headed for the gate. The one we were loading from had a ton of people in it, but there was this one mysterious gate that was not in use but was COMPLETELY decked out in Valentine's Day colors. It was so odd. In any case, we invaded that area, and I read and charged my phone between attempts to nap and talking to The Weege and Scarlett. The Weege was at the point of not making a ton of sense, and eventually got bored and went to find ice cream. She proceeded to devour THREE GIANT ICE CREAMS during the times we were there, and then mysteriously vanish to go on the internet, because she is addicted to the internet. And ice cream, for that matter. Various people came into our area and then were scared away as Scarlett and I (who were still mostly making sense when we talked) recounted the highlight reel from the cruise, including one dude who bitchily asked if I had just bought Marley & Me, the book I was reading. I quickly decided to hate him.


Eventually, we moseyed over to the gate after Scarlett went to yell at The Weege for being addicted to the internet (I think because she was bored), where we promptly made friends with this really sweet guy. It started off with The Weege coming in, bringing up the rear, and plunking herself down not in the seats next to us, but instead, across the aisle and squarely in the middle of two seats between two strangers. Scarlett and I started with the exasperated explaining to her that she was being weird, at which point the man on her left started eavesdropping on us, clearly smelling crazy on us and being intruiged. The three of us continued the recapping of the cruise, and he was trying to be unobtrustive about his eavesdropping, but eventually just couldn't contain himself and jumped in with the "wait...what happened?" questions. He had that weird Donald Trump thing going on where he's normal looking until he stops making facial expressions, at which point his face kind of dies. This guy was actually pretty good-looking when he was talking and smiling, but then he'd look at his cell phone or something and his face would die. In any case, we told him about our trip, and he told us he'd just spent a week on Bourbon Street but thought we'd had more fun than him, and then this other woman felt the need to ingratiate herself into the convo as we were showing him the fake tattoo on The Weege's ankle. She was NOT as much fun, and basically wanted to get into the convo so she could make disapproving "oh, tut-tut" faces and/or noises. I decided to hate her as well.


We finally got on the plane and tapped out...I read for a while before zonking out, while The Weege and Scarlett chatted then fell asleep. As we were taking off, The Weege felt it necessary to grab our hands and make this totally bizarre wincing face since Scarlett had said she was nervous about the takeoff part of flying. We got to Tampa on time, where I declared Tampa as the new reigning champion of my Favorite Airport Bathrooms list since they were SPOTLESS and awesome, and we grabbed lunch/dinner at Chili's, where we stuffed ourselves silly since we were so hungry. Then we split up the WonderTeam and headed for our respective gates. The Weege roamed around a little, I think to go to the bathroom or the bookstore, while I reserved our spot in line at the gate and chatted with a nice family from New Hampshire who had won a gigantic 6 foot stuffed tiger (which was regrettably getting home some other way) at Universal. The Weege came back shortly and immediately instigated a near-riot by starting to babble about why we had a delay. Now, our flight was supposed to get in to Manchester a 10:30pm, and that is definitely in the range of flight times where a delay = panic, so of course everyone was all "WHAT DELAY?" while I pleaded with The Weege to just shut up and stop panicking everyone. She finally stopped with the delay talk after saying "but [Scarlett] is already ON the plane," at which point I reminded her that we were on DIFFERENT FLIGHTS TO DIFFERENT LOCATIONS. You see what I mean about the overtiredness.


We flew into Manchester with no problem, and waved at The Marine, Diamond Lil, and mini-Lil's house (read: waved out the window without any real concept of their actual geographical location) on our approach. We got inside, collected our bags amongst the most irritating people in the world (mostly bad parenting issues), then headed out to the parking lot to drive home. The Weege sort of zoned out until we were on 495 or so, then tuned back in and we chatted the rest of the way home, about the Phenomenon of Scarlett and my family and stuff like that. We got to my parents' house around 12:30, and Ma had hung a banner in front that said "Welcome Home Girls!" which I thought was sweet and The Weege reacted to with "I don't want a banner, oh my god," which defied explanation, particularly because she said it in a tone that suggested she thought enemy spies were after her and the banner would alert them to her location. PLUS, the next time I saw her, she commented on how cute the banner was, so I guess it's yet another "I dunno." I drove home and saw Speed, which was so, so awesome, and that, my friends, was the end of the Cruise of Legend.



Scarlett and I saying bye at the Tampa Chili's...unfortunately there are no post-cruise pics of all three of us! We also sucked at taking pictures, so there's that, as well.