Final Days

We had five sea days from Hilo to San Diego, which meant plenty of time for good byes, packing, and other activities. I’ll just touch on the highlights.

We entered our second ship building competition of the cruise. We built our ship, the “Can Do,” out of discarded aluminum cans, duct tape (obtained from fellow passenger Jeff), a coat hanger, dental floss, and twine (obtained from fellow passenger Angela). The sea trial day came and went without any notice and we thought the event might have just been dropped, but then it got scheduled for the next day. There were only two entrants, ours and Donya’s, which celebrated her late husband Patrick. We were both awarded first place.

We had a magic show on the first sea day. Fellow passenger Henry is a practicing magician and taught a group of us some tricks. We started out just messing around but then Henry thought maybe we could put on a show. So the eight of us got a slot in the Insignia Lounge for the pre-dinner show. It turned out great! All four members of our family performed and had a wonderful time. The only bummer was that CD Bryn promised to do a video recording of the show and failed to follow through on that. We did get David and Linda to record from their seats, so we do have that record of the performance. I was really proud of the boys for getting up and doing their tricks in front of a live audience.

The final Sing Out Loud performance was emotional as the group had secretly prepared a song for our ATW hosts Paul and Carolyn. As the show was ending they told everyone to stick around and then sang “Thank You for Being a Friend” from Golden Girls. Even Paul got a bit teary-eyed. Shout out to Devin for being the only performer in both of these shows!

Finally, on the last sea day, Elizabeth performed in a belly dancing show. Fellow passenger Valerie had been leading classes for months and, like Henry, thought it would be fun to turn the activity into a show. It was terrific! The ladies (and one man!) in the group were originally going to be background dancers, but Valerie wanted them to all have the spotlight for a while so they all got solos. It went very well.

Overall we tried to squeeze as much out of the final days as we could. It was hard to believe that our grand adventure was coming to an end.Læs mere