4-night Merrytime cruise out of Galveston - Day 3 - Cozumel
Cozumel
Strap in, this is a long one. Oh, Cozumel. What a day. I’m sure it will be funny in a few years, but this whole day was a comedy of errors. Now, I’m normally a pretty positive person and if you’ve read any of our previous adventures, you know we’ve had great fun and I don’t usually complain… But I’m getting ahead of myself. I woke up early again. My plan was to sleep in, but I woke up around 6:30 and after laying in the dark for awhile, I finally got up around 7:15, tossed on my clothes from the day before (that I had stashed in the bathroom for just such an eventuality) and quietly slipped out to grab some fruit and a warm drink on deck 9. I took the forward elevators all the way to 9 and then traversed the deck all the way aft. This was a huge mistake. It was absolutely pouring and there was water everywhere. By the time I reached Daisy’s, my feet were drenched and my shoes sodden.
I found a slightly dry-ish spot to eat my fruit and hot cocoa and watched some funnel vision and our approach into Cozumel. This early it was just trivia. After awhile it stopped raining hard and was just lightly sprinkling so I went up to deck 10 to watch our approach. It was too windy and cold so I went down to deck 4 and watched a bit from there. Still sort of crappy. By 8:15 I was sort of antsy and Emmaline had expressed that she had never seen us come into port. We’re always there already when she wakes up. I went back to the room and those two sleepyheads started to rouse. We went to Cabana’s and had (cold) breakfast.
We went back to the room to get ready for our day. The clouds were starting to part and I used a little of my data I had gotten (pro-tip, get the free 50 on day one before you leave port) to check the weather. 11-3 looked to be our magic window. Online prior to our sailing I had booked what looked like a really fun little excursion. We had booked with Disney because it seemed like the safest option with everything going on. Well, then the week before the cruise we got an email from DCL that our excursion was cancelled. We went back to look at the list and there were very few options left and we weren’t really into any of them. Our daughter is 13 so she’s vaccinated and so we didn’t necessarily need to stick with a DCL excursion (and mostly we don’t, actually, and have had really good experiences outside DCL). So we scrambled about and I scoured through some threads on the DIS and found mention of Paradise Beach and had good recommendations. For $50/person it was all you could eat/drink and they had lots of activities and a nice beach area. Apparently it was about a 15 min taxi ride from the port and the taxi was $15. Great. I reserved our spots and we were set.
Since the weather was supposed to be good between 11-3, we got in the queue to disembark at 10 AM. It didn’t take long and by 10:10 our number was called to disembark. It started to rain again just as we did (figures) and the terminal building is this long winding two story thing and the tiles were SUPER slippery in the wet and we had to go up stairs and escalators and down and it was really confusing. As we were crossing a pedestrian bridge we looked down and saw Mile 9, Ironman Cozumel. Huh. An Ironman. This could be interesting. I’ve done two half-Ironmans (yes, that’s the plural) and the swim and bike legs of a full distance and that can really mess with traffic. It appeared that the road below us was closed.
The main thoroughfare through town was closed and not a taxi in sight. We walked for a bit to see if we could get to a road that wasn’t closed to find a taxi but the race was everywhere! We walked for nearly 30 minutes before we finally found an open road and some taxis. We had help from one local, one race spectator, and a group of tourists, but we finally got a taxi. Then our 15 minute drive turned into 30 minutes because of race traffic, but we finally made it and I realized I had forgotten to grab towels on my way off the ship. UGH. No worries, I could buy them at Paradise Beach for $25/each. I bought one, we settled in, ordered some drinks and got to the water. It was overcast, gloomy and a little chilly but Emmaline and I played around on the inflatable structures in the water for about 45 minutes while Roger relaxed on the beach. Then we were hungry so we went up to the restaurant to order lunch.
While waiting for lunch I noticed that my “waterproof” phone case was not so much waterproof. My phone seemed okay though. Lunch took a long time and was tasty, but the portions were super small. I wanted a bit more but I was wet and cold and it was raining again (so much for that window of nice weather from 11-3) and the food took so long that I didn’t want to order more and wait again. We decided to try some of the other activities like stand up paddle board and kayak. As we made our way down there, it started to thunder. So we waited a bit and my phone started to act up. It kept giving me an error about the camera and it started to get hot. Really hot. And it shut down and remained hot, like almost too hot to touch! Roger and Emmaline hadn’t brought their phones thinking one of us with a phone would be enough (lesson learned: always have a backup phone). We waited awhile longer but more thunder came. Finally at 1:30 we decided the clouds were looking really dark and the weather was not looking promising and we decided to go.
They called us a taxi and we waited for a taxi to come for 30 minutes. As we made our way back (again, should have been an hour drive) the sky opened up and it absolutely poured. There was water everywhere even causing some small flash floods around! People were wading through water that was nearly up to their knees in places on the street. The race continued on despite the rain and thunder (which is crazy because I’ve actually been pulled off a triathlon race course in those types of conditions - not an Ironman, but it was an olympic distance race here in Austin). An hour later (I’m not exaggerating) we finally made it back to the ship. Meanwhile my phone was still off but it wasn’t hot any more. I periodically tried to power it back up.
We showered and Roger ventured back out to grab something he had wanted at a local wine store while Emmaline and I watched tv and ordered room service: All Hands on Deck (which strangely only came with 4 crackers), fruit bowl and chocolate chip cookies. Room service was super fast this time - maybe 15 minutes. I’m used to it taking 30-40 minutes. Everything was great except we could have used more crackers and I didn’t feel like calling and asking for more.
Roger came back awhile later empty handed. Google Maps was completely wrong regarding the location of the shop., When we got back to real Internet, it turned out Google maps had it in the wrong spot and it was a 10 minute walk in the opposite direction. At some point my phone came back to life and I quickly transferred all my photos off it onto Roger’s phone. It seemed mostly okay. I was still getting an error about the front camera and now and then the screen would flash. What a day.
We changed into our pirate outfits and at 5 PM we decided to hit pirate trivia, which was actually different from the last time we did it, but I think the last time was 4-5 years ago. This pirate trivia was a little more of a mixed bag. The older one was harder, I feel like, and asked a lot of history questions about Blackbeard and such. We nearly won last time (we know a lot of about pirate history and we got second place), but this time we weren’t even close. Ah well. Being pirate night, we got a few pics in our pirate costumes (which we didn’t purchase). I forgot to mention we did take some formal portraits in our nice outfits the previous night. It didn’t indicate that it was formal night or anything in the Navigator, but night 2 is usually formal night or on the shorter cruises “optional dress-up” night. Even though it wasn’t indicated in the Navigator, we saw a lot of folks dressed up and taking advantage of the photographers and photo op in front of the tree (which we did purchase).
We went to dinner after that and enjoyed some of the pirate fun there. They had a cute little (very little, like 5 minutes) show that they put on. Tiana’s was a great place to have pirate night - perfect atmosphere. I’m not a huge fan of the pirate menu and our server had asked on night one if I enjoyed the Indian food onboard. I told him I loved it very much (having had it many nights in Europe and then again in the Southern Caribbean) but I told him I never wanted to put anyone out before when I’ve had it and certainly not now with things being so different. But he asked me again the second night and seemed really eager to get it for me so I agreed to have it on pirate night and again it was super yummy and I was so grateful. They always go above and beyond (and we always increase our tips accordingly).
After dinner we attended “A Pirate’s Life For Me” game in D-Lounge which was cute and fun. We changed clothes (we were done being pirates for the night) and went to see Disney Dreams in the Walt Disney Theatre. We’ve seen it several times before, but it’s always fun and I love some of the musical numbers. We arrived around 8:20 for the 8:30 show and there were very few seats left. I would say if you have a larger group, arrive early! Since they are only seating every other row and spacing out groups, it can get full, even with two nights. I suspect many people didn’t want to see it the second night in order to pack.
After the show we went back to the room for a bit to wait until it was time for fireworks. I had heard that they had two nights of fireworks and we would be assigned a night. This was not the case. There was only one night of fireworks and it was at 10:45. When we got to deck 10 at 10:30 it was already really full, but we were led to a spot that we were to stay on. The fireworks were very short, but they played Christmas music during them and it was cute. Not other show or anything - just the fireworks. We made our way back to our room and collapsed into bed. (After I put my workout clothes in the bathroom for the next morning.)
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