4-night Merrytime cruise out of Galveston - Day 2 - At Sea
At Sea
I put my running clothes in the bathroom the night before so I could change and slip out. I’m always up before my family, even though I slept all the way until 7:30 (though, remembering that we lost an hour it was really 6:30 so close to my normal at home wake-up). By 7:45 I was up on deck 4 running some laps. It was really quiet up there. Usually there are a number of people walking or running, but this time I only encountered one other passenger (many crew members were bustling around). I did three miles (9 laps) and finished up around 8:15 and went up to deck 9 for some fruit at Daisy’s while I waited for Roger and Emmaline to wake up. They were up by 8:30 and we all went to Cabana’s for some cold breakfast. *grumble*
We went back to the room and I showered and we got organized for our day. At 10 Emmaline went to Edge to see what the activities for the day would be. Edge was a little strange in that none of the activities were loaded into the Navigator app making planning a little difficult. She went in the morning and took a photo of the white board so that she could figure out what she wanted to do. After Edge, she went down to French Quarter Lounge to do some coloring and I dried my hair while Roger read his Kindle. (I have a lot of hair, it takes awhile to dry.)
At 11:15 we went over to D-Lounge to take an Animation Class. I don’t know why they call it that, because really it’s a still character drawing. Anyway, we drew Mickey, which was a lot of fun. We’ve tried Stitch and Donald on previous cruises, but I really did much better with this one. The Club Host, Gus was teaching it and he was fabulous. I was super impressed with his instruction.
After that it was time for lunch. I wasn’t keen on cold Cabanas again. They really needed to have fewer stations open. The turnover just wasn’t high enough to have that many stations open with the ship running at half capacity. Roger and I got some sandwiches at Daisy’s supplemented with some fries from Boiler Pete’s, soup from Cabanas and Emmaline got a few items from Cabanas. It took awhile to assemble everything and grab a table where we could eat and watch some funnel vision.
After lunch, Emmaline went to Edge for some activities there, Roger went for a walk on deck 4, and I returned to the room to write up some notes for this trip report. Often I start writing them while still on the cruise, but for this shorter cruise, I decided to leave my computer at home so instead I just made notes I could reference later. Roger returned from his walk and we decided to try the adult trivia in Azure. It was just sort of general knowledge trivia. We did…okay. After that, we went up to Cove Cafe and had a coffee. We both had enough punches on our respective frequent buyer cards from our last cruise that we were able to combine them (2 for me and 3 for him) to equal the 5 needed for a free coffee. Yay, free coffee!
At this point Emmaline sent a message that she was done in Edge so we finished up our coffee and regrouped on deck 9 for some snacks and watched some funnel vision under one of the overhangs because it was pouring rain. We enjoyed watching some Muppet Christmas Carol until we decided we were cold and returned to the room to watch TV. There really weren’t any afternoon activities we were interested in. This is the part where we were really missing a variety entertainer onboard. Usually on a sea day there might be an afternoon show with the juggler, illusionist, ventriloquist, etc. Or once we went to a juggling workshop that was a lot of fun. But it was sort of a lot of trivia so we were sort of at a loss. Every 15-30 minutes the app showed that characters were scheduled to “appear and wave” and sometimes Emmaline would go check who it was and report back. They were generally up on deck 4 on the side where the future cruise desk used to be and they would put the characters behind a rope. You could interact with them and take (masked) selfies with them. They did also have some time in the evenings with characters in the atrium that you could take photos with. They did allow you to temporarily remove your mask to take a quick photo with the evening atrium characters with ship photographer.
Dinner on this night was in Tiana’s and it was the Mardi Gras menu, which we enjoyed. The beignets were better than I remembered (but still not as good as those in New Orleans). I know some people aren’t into the music and show in Tiana’s, but I really like the music and the dancing and fun. We had a good time. After dinner we went outside for a walk on deck 4. It was super windy so we didn’t stay long. Somehow Emmaline had never been into the forward section with all the mooring equipment other stuff and she thought that was pretty cool. After that, Chip and Dale “appeared and waved” so we interacted with them a bit. They were at the end of their set and there was nobody else there so we had a little longer interaction with them, which was fun. I will say that with few people and no real lines for characters (for the afternoon/evening photos in the atrium with the photographer, yes, there were lines but for appearing and waving, there really weren’t) we got to have some good interactions.
At 9 PM it was time for another drawing class. This time we drew Minnie and at the end, she came out to greet us and see our drawings, which was a lot of fun. We went back to the room and got ready for bed and our port day the next day. They told us since we were late leaving Galveston, we would be late getting into Cozumel, despite the captain pushing the ship at 19-20 knots. It didn’t matter to us, there was rain forecast for earlier in the morning so we planned to leave the ship around 10 or 10:30. And yes, we skipped the show, Frozen (which also played on our first night and we skipped). We had already seen it twice before. It’s fun, but I actually prefer Tangled (on the Magic) and some of the other shows.
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