Cruise Day 2 – At Sea
September 23rd, 2007I know that some of you are patiently (and not-so-patiently) waiting to see the photos, but it’s going to take a little while longer. I have most of the pictures ready for the website, but I haven’t started captioning them yet. I should have them up somewhat soon. I was hoping I would have them finished by the end of the weekend, but since it is now Sunday…I’m not so sure. In the meantime, I will entertain you with more information than you ever wanted to know about our trip. Aren’t you excited?
Today was our first full day on the ship, and it was an “at sea” day. We learned that we rather enjoy being “at sea!” I could feel the movements on the ship more than I expected to feel them, but neither of us felt sick from the motion. We started our day with breakfast in the dining room. We thought we had enough time to make the 9:45am trivia game in the Schooner Bar, but we ended up being a few minutes late. We each joined a different team and were able to play for most of the game. Since we didn’t have too many people playing, we all received prizes…our first “crappy prize” from the trivia games, a leather-like document holder.
After trivia, we went next door to the Some Enchanted Evening Lounge to play Bingo. We thought, why not? It seems like a cruise thing to do, right? They had a special deal with the bingo cards. If you bought two 6-packs, then you would get a 3-pack for free. We took advantage of the deal, which means that we played a total of 15 bingo cards every game (for a total of 5 games).
Here’s Gabe with the Bingo cards:
Gabe used to play bingo with his Grandma, so he was familiar with the procedures. This was my first time playing a real bingo game. Gabe also told me that he used to be quite lucky with the game. He proved himself and ended up getting a bingo on the third game (and he had to split with another player)! We got our money back and enough to play more bingo later in the cruise. We were very excited by the win!! Turns out that Bingo is fun!
After we collected our prize, we went to the Library to see what types of casual activities and meeting groups were happening. Turns out that they were having a casual bridge game in the card room, so we headed over to see if we could play. We found two ladies who wanted to play with us, so we played for an hour or so with them. We ended up meeting the same people in the cardroom for bridge on all three “at sea” days.
Now we had some time to kill before dinner, so we went to the casino (naturally). They never did get a Texas Hold’em game going while we were on the cruise, so we ended up playing video poker and random slot machines. We had a little bit of luck with the Piggy Bankin’ slot machine, so we revisited it. We put about $10 into the machine without being able to play the “Piggy Bankin’ Big Bang Game,” so we decided to put in another $20.
When you get three pigs on the line, like this…
…then you get to play the bonus game. The bonus game starts with 10 pigs in a circle and a spinner in the middle. Each time the spinner spins and lands on a spot. If it is a spot with a pig, then you collect the number of coins indicated on the pig and the spinner spins again. Once you’ve landed on a pig spot, it turns into a bomb. If you land on that spot again, your “Piggy Bankin’ Big Bang Game” is over. Once you collect a few pigs, you start getting bonuses for subsequent pigs. The bonuses start out small, like 5 or 15 coins and build up until the 9th pig is worth 1,000 coins and the tenth is worth 15,000 coins!! The game makes a TON of noise during this game. I kept cheering for the pig with 60 on it, and as we kept hitting more and more pigs, I was saying “any of them, any of them, any of them!!” By the time we got to the 7th or 8th pig, I was pretty excited. Then, I couldn’t believe that we ended up hitting ALL TEN PIGS!! Holy crap! We ended up winning a jackpot of 16,928 credits (in quarters). That’s $4232 for those of you who don’t want to do the math! We had gathered a crowd behind us with all the noise (and my yelling at the pigs), and for the rest of the cruise people would come up to us and say “hey, aren’t you the ones that won the big jackpot?” We were a little nervous for the rest of the cruise since they paid us in cash. We ended up carrying it around with us at all times until we got back home.
I was too excited to realize that vertical orientation video is a bad idea, but here’s the machine just after hitting the jackpot:
++CoolPlayer_BLOCK_1++
We weren’t quite sure what to do with ourselves afterwards. It seemed a bit pointless to spend any more time in the casino…we’d just end up throwing away money, and we knew we weren’t going to win like that again!!! We walked around the ship and hung out in the room before going to dinner. We had to take a little time getting ready for dinner since tonight was our first of two formal nights. Gabe and I wore our wedding attire and had some photos taken before dinner. Here’s one of the ones that we bought from the ship’s photographers:
At dinner, we had to skip dessert because we knew that we didn’t want to miss Name That Tune trivia!! We were glad that we were able to get to the trivia on time, too, because this turned out to be one of our favorite trivia sessions. The piano player in the Schooner bar ran the game, and he did a good job playing a variety of songs from different genres and eras. We were on a team with one of our bridge friends, Bekka. We ended up seeing her quite a bit throughout the cruise. We were also excited that our team won! This was the one game where they had a real prize in addition to the “crappy prizes.” Not only did we win keychains, but our team let us keep the real prize which was a $75 art print from the art auction! What a lucky day for us!!!
Possibly related posts (automatically generated):
- Seattle Day 3 / Cruise Day 1
We had a little time in the morning to do our last bit of touring of Seattle, so we headed...