The Cruise - Part 2

"Troy, wake up. Troy. TROY!"

As I blearily opened my eyes, I noticed Katie was walking back to the bed from the door to the balcony. Even half asleep I could tell she was bordering on panic, but being as how this is a condition that she frequents often I wasn't too concerned. What was she afraid of? The fog outside. She was afraid that she couldn't see the water. I muttered something about her going to bed and when she wakes up it will be gone and then fell back asleep. That's my Katie: afraid of the fog (I love you babe :P)

The first day was the Bahamas. We had to tender in, which means that the ship wasn't at a dock. We had to ride a smaller boat to shore. We went over at about 10:30 in the morning, set down our things and went over to the small booth set up for kayak rentals. We got in the kayak and I quickly learned something: neither of us had any experience in a kayak. As we bobbed around in the water, I got more and more frustrated. Pretty soon I was yelling at Katie that she was doing it wrong and she was yelling at me to shut up. Ahhh. Vacation.... (I want to interject here that we were asked several times during the course of the vacation if we were on our honeymoon. People said we seemed so happy together and in love. I guess when we're not yelling at each other, we get along pretty well...) We eventually got a system down and had a good time. As we were headed back to turn the kayak back in, we were in about 4 feet of water as we passed over a stingray. I'd forgotten that they like shallow water. Despite Steve Irwin's assertions, stingrays are mostly harmless. We floated by, got back to land and turned the kayak back in. A few minutes later Katie's back started to tighten up. We only ended up spending another hour or so on land. We got something to eat, I went over to buy some cigars and souvenirs, and we laid out in the sun for a few minutes. By then Katie's back was hurting her bad enough that she wanted to get some medicine. I didn't mind. We could lay out just as easily on the ship. As the day progressed, Katie was hurting bad enough that we started worrying about the rest of the trip. We called the service department there on the ship, but they had no ice packs or heating pads. Turning into Macgyver, I remembered I had a few Ziplock bags I kept deodorant and toothpaste and such in to travel. We called for some ice, and once it showed up Katie had a ghetto-fabulous icepack. She had pain for a day or two more, but we stayed on top of it and disaster was averted.

That night, we went to a 'Friends of Bill W and Dr Bob' meeting on the boat. How ironic is it that on a boat that holds 3200 passengers and 1000 crew that the only room they make available to have an AA meeting is the one room in the ship with a camera in it streaming on the internet? Maybe they don't realize the second A stands for Anonymous? More likely they don't know who the friends of Bill and Dr Bob are. Anyways, there was a better turnout than I've seen on a boat. There were about 11 of us drunks (strangely, The Flapper wasn't there...) , a couple of compulsive overeaters and an Al-Anon (Katie). I'm normally a stickler for who should go to AA meetings, but when you're on a floating bar and buffet the rules are relaxed a bit. By the end of the trip, nobody had relapsed so the meetings were a success.

On Tuesday (the day after the Bahamas), we had a sea day on our way to St Maarten. We slept in late and laid low most of the day. Katie's back was still a little sore from the kayak, so it worked out perfectly. At dinner we ended up seated by a friend of ours (random thought: I always liked how in the cosa nostra/mafia movies all the made guys refer to other made guys that way. For example 'Joe, I want to introduce you to a friend of ours' would mean the guy being introduced was a made guy. 'Joe, I want you to meet a friend of mine' would be a non made guy. I think I'm going to steal the term and refer to my alcoholic cohorts as 'a friend of ours' starting now) and his girlfriend. I'm constantly amazed by how quickly people in recovery can be good friends and so comfortable with each other. I don't even think people in the same church are able to come together so easily as 2 sober drunks. This guy was from Chicago. I'd never met in my life until the day before, but I felt like I could have been having dinner with my sponsor and his wife. I love recovery.

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