Day 9: At Sea

I may have retired to our room early last night, but I was up until the wee hours of the morning for the second night in a row watching football on my iPad.  

With not nearly enough sleep despite the extra hour we got last night, we made it to breakfast in the Allegro Dining Room. Our “two meals a day” theory fell by the wayside today as we’ve met amazing waiters and we want to return to see them time and again. In fact, if we miss a meal we almost have to present a note from home as an excuse. 😉

Keeping it light with fruit and a mimosa (naturally)

The Terrace Deck is G’s favorite hang out, and apparently the favorite of many of our fellow cruisers. There’s the same “save a chair” mentality that exists on the pool decks, though, frankly, it was the frequent deep coughs that kind of turned me off. How ironic that, at the same time the weather improved enough to enable sitting outside, the coughs are multiplying and deepening. So far so good with us though. 🤞🏼🤞🏼🤞🏼🤞🏼

The rest of the day involved food, The Enclave and listening to live music in the Piazza and the Wheelhouse Bar. G also went to tonight’s Princess Theater show but it was a hypnotist and I consider life too short to watch hypnotists and ventriloquists. Instead we met up afterwards at the Wheelhouse Bar where we enjoy all the musical entertainment, especially the Lilo Duo. They are from Argentina and play lots of contemporary music. 

Today’s dining room lunch was the pub lunch menu

Salad with goat cheese- fantastic  Next time I will order two of these. Maybe three. I love big salads!!

Roasted red snapper -decent but a little dry

And, finally, McGee sent me his running stats for the last four weeks. He is a machine, and despite an injury (not running related) keeping him from competing right now, he still manages to log 100 miles a week. I don’t know how he does it, but I remain in awe of his commitment and ability. In fact, it reminds me of a story, perfect for today’s telling, that I’ll call Running Spikes and Rear End Collisions. 

On a very busy day in May 2022, McGee and McGuy’s separate high school sports required all day spectatorship in two different venues. McGee had a conference track championship, with a few events spread over several hours. McGuy had a basketball tournament. We decided that I would start the day at McGee’s track meet and watch him run in two esrly events, go home for a short time and then drive downtown to the college campus where McGuy’s tournament was taking place. Meanwhile, their parents would go to McGee’s later track events and then when the meet was over, join me at the tournament.  It was a beastly hot day, and that early schedule outdoors followed by an air conditioned afternoon suited me just fine. 

The track meet was at a stadium perhaps 35 or 40 minutes away, and I left home at 7am because I knew that my only hope of finding a nearby parking spot would be to get there before the start time of 8am. I watched McGee compete and drove home. My plan was to have a quick breakfast and then head into town. As I walked into the house, McGee texted me. He had blown out one of his running spikes. Help!

Fortunately, I had at least minimal experience with running spikes repair. A couple of weeks earlier, he had brought one by for a repair, so I knew what I was going to need. I immediately felt bad that the repair hadn’t held, but later found out it was the other shoe that ripped, and much worse than the one I’d already fixed. 

I ran upstairs and grabbed embroidery floss, heavy duty but sharp pointed needles, thimbles, scissors and an old bath towel (those spikes are sharp!), packed a couple of water bottles and started to drive back to the track I’d just left. By then it was around 11am on a Saturday and traffic was fierce.  I was waiting at a light near home to turn left onto an expressway on ramp when I was rear ended by an SUV (larger than mine). Ugh. 

I got out of my vehicle and walked back, and the teen aged girl who was driving was already in a flood of tears. “I was just looking at my phone!”  I offered that maybe that wasn’t a great idea, which brought on more tears and then I realized that I was going to have to do the adulting here and suggested we pull into a shopping center parking lot nearby and I would report the accident. 

Luckily my SUV was driveable; hers was, too, and I found two small trees with a little shade to park under while we waited for the police. By the time we drove that short distance, her mother, father, grandmother, sister and brother were all showing up, with the adults sniffing around the back of my vehicle and saying things like, “Well, that’s not so bad” and “How old is this SUV anyway?”  

It took awhile for an officer to arrive, and meanwhile McGee was texting me for my ETA and telling me when his next event was taking place, and, yes, I was definitely stressing but I also sure as heck hoped I’d get a good story from this debacle. 

Finally, a police officer arrived and I explained that I was really sorry but I needed to be somewhere immediately and since it was obvious who was at fault, to her credit she took my information and got me away from the situation as fast as she could. 

So I drove the 40 minutes back to the track, but by the time I arrived, the stadium was packed and the closest parking was a 20 minute walk away. I texted McGee and he instructed me to drive to the back side of the stadium where he would meet me. I parked along the street where there was an uninterrupted eight or ten foot chain link fence enclosing the stadium. McGee was already there; he tossed his shoe up and over the fence and I sat in my vehicle (for shade) and started working on trying to do….something to make this shoe wearable and strong enough to race in. 

If you’ve never seen running spikes, they are basically mesh and a sole and spikes and little else. He had obliterated the mesh on the inside edge of the shoe, so I had to first use the embroidery floss to create a woven mesh, and then attach that mesh to the hard sole.

Even using a thimble was not strong enough to do that, so I tried using the road to push the needle but it was so hot the asphalt was swallowing it up and then I had to get the needle out of the blacktop. Finally, I saw that dented bumper on the back of my SUV and, with nothing to lose, used the steel to push the needle into the sole, over and over again. I closed the gap, tossed the shoe back over the fence, and it survived not only the rest of that day but got him a third place finish in the state championship two weeks later. 

I was so happy when he was recruited by a D1 college. I knew my running spike repair shop would be closing forever as he is now awash in new Nike swag every season. 

But there was still a basketball tournament to get to. I don’t know what made me happier:  watching McGuy’s team win their first and second games, or sitting down for a few hours in a cold gym on a 100° afternoon. 

These guys:  never a dull moment since 2003.