Carnival Sunshine Trip Journal: Part 6 – Sea Day #2featured

There’s a comfort in the formulaic way we approach sea days.

We wake up, we grab breakfast, we find loungers and we sit out for hours, soaking in the sun as much as each other’s company, but often in silence. We have lunch, we take a nap, we play a round of trivia, we drink some tea, we get ready for a party or a dinner, we see a show, we go to bed. I’ve kept this blog of trip journals for, what, seven or eight years now? Every cruise sea day feels like it keeps close to this.

There’s not a lot of excitement there, but there’s a lot of comfort. But you know what gets me about cruising, even after all of these years? There’s always something new somewhere. That thing you discover, that thing that just completely entrances you and consumes you in the moment.

We’ll get to that. After I tell you that we woke up, we grabbed a quick breakfast at the Blue Iguana Cantina (where, once again, my amigo with the arepas had a plate ready for me as soon as he saw me approaching) and we grabbed loungers up on a crowded Serenity deck.

Today it was so bad that people were putting down towels on the ground to lay out on. I love the Sunshine. I don’t love the lack of space for sun soaking.

We laid out, not until the sun reddened our shoulders, but until we couldn’t bear the wind anymore. I thought the seas we encountered last year were a terrible anomaly, some untimely and unlucky winds that were the exception, the story you tell about that time you couldn’t walk in a straight line on a cruise ship because the forces of gravity kept pulling you towards the nearest wall. At this point, the motion of the ship was just as bad, if not worse, than it had been the year before and it was too unlikely for this to be an anomaly. Maybe the waters are always angry and turbulent in the winter time heading down to the Lesser Antilles. We pondered this over a sea day brunch, seated in the back of the aft restaurant with motion so heavy, our plates were nearly sliding off the table.

After brunch, that’s when we discovered our thing. Mom headed back to the room to shower and Stephanie and I decided to test our luck and see if the promenade on deck 3 was open. We found a sign warning of high winds and requesting we kindly keep out on one door, but across the ship on the other side, there was no sign. We went outside, but the brilliant sunshine and fresh ocean air were marred by the constant barrage of salt water blowing in off the wake of the bow. As we headed inside to the lobby, we noticed a passenger bypass the keep out sign, and then another. We took a peek outside and noticed a group of smokers sitting out – the port side was the smoking side – and a bit more shade, but plenty of crisp ocean air blowing the wake in the other direction, away from the ship. It was completely mesmerizing to watch, but when we realized that the act of the wake hitting sunshine was causing vibrant, fleeting rainbows that danced over the waves and disappeared nearly as quickly as they appeared, we knew we found something special.

We spent over an hour sitting outside, marveling at how the size and vibrancy of these rainbows would differ depending on how far back the wake would travel after a wave would hit the bow of the ship. It was fascinating and inspiring. I lost myself in a thought spiral, the act of carefully watching for colors to appear enough to entrance me into deep thought.

Stephanie needed to get some work done, so we returned to our cabin to grab her laptop before heading up to Ocean Plaza to gauge the wifi signal. After two days, we still couldn’t figure out the best place to get the best wifi signal. Sometimes, it was on deck 14. Others, it was in our room. Regardless of where we were, the wifi wasn’t terribly fast, but it wasn’t unbearably slow, either.

The VPN she was using to connect to her work server wasn’t working, so we ditched Ocean Plaza for the Sunshine Dining Room and tea time. Tea time was quieter than the day before, but this time, they had music playing. Service was beyond attentive and we enjoyed the quiet time to enjoy a quick cup and reflect on what we wanted to see and do this evening.

Stephanie wanted to see if she could get a decent wifi signal on the Lido deck (big no on that one, too), so our foray upstairs only lasted a few minutes before we headed back to the room to take a nap and start getting ready for formal night.

When it came time to check in for our dinner, Mom had asked the hostess at the Taste Bar check in table for a different table than the evening before (which she had found uncomfortable). Unfortunately, this meant a new set of servers and this evening’s servers were not to par with our servers from the evening before, forgetting some of the items we ordered.

To their credit, though, our meal was paced perfectly and we were on our way to the early show of the evening’s headliner show, Latin Nights. The early shows were significantly less busy than the later shows, which meant we could show up later and get better seats, all good things in my book.

We had plans to go out after the show. Change shoes and go upstairs to watch a movie, or down to the piano bar, maybe sing along to a terrible song at the deck party, but we settled in to end our evening with the premiere of The Bachelor. What can I say? This is how we vacation.