Travelogue Two, Day One: Bumbling Around in Blunderland and Other Misadventures

God, someone shoot me now.

I think everyone was expecting that, right? Did we really expect day one to sail smoothly by like a greased up sled over a lake of oily lard? God, I’m too tired to even be particularly original. As is usual with my procrastinating self, I stayed up too late last night doing…I can’t even remember what, actually, so it couldn’t have been terribly important, and as a result I got maybe two hours of sleep when I finally was able to make it into bed. Packing had gone fairly quickly so I convinced myself it wouldn’t take me very long to get ready in the morning.

Well, I was very wrong, and it took very long.

No, that’s a lie. I just said that because I wanted to make a cheesy rhyme. Actually, it only took me about twenty minutes to shower, eat some breakfast, and pack what I figured were the last remaining items that I needed into my suitcase. It’s worth mentioning here that this is the same suitcase I effectively snatched from my cousin, complete with a shredded back wheel that makes pulling it around feel like I’m dragging a dead body around behind me. It was probably about six thirty in the morning when I lugged that particular corpse out of my apartment and yeah, I was totally feeling that fact, as well as the fact that I don’t even go to bed until six thirty in the morning some days.

Everything went pretty much as expected until I got to the airport. Regent had effectively forgotten about me when we requested air for the actors and for the rest of our crew, so I ended up having to book my own air through Continental. Newark to Fort Lauderdale at 9:15 in the morning, arriving around 12:30. The train ride to Newark was unremarkable, although I did note once again that the route that snakes from New York Penn Station to Newark, New Jersey looks like the industrialized outskirts of Hell, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if that’s where yuppies end up when they die. Anyway, after checking in and arriving at the boarding gate (stopping briefly to pick up a protein jamba juice), I learned that the airline had had an equipment change and now my flight was severely oversold.

Um…what?

So I went into standby for the time being, waiting out the standard volunteer time period while they asked people if they would be willing to take a different flight in exchange for a $300 travel voucher. I watched as a few people volunteered, some names were called, and people who had been shuffled onto standby were allowed onto the plane. Finally, we were down to two spots, and there just happened to be two elderly couples waiting in line in front of me. They got onto the plane, and I got a “I’m sorry, your flight is full.”

Son of a bitch!

Fortunately, I managed to retain my composure and an excellent, excellent Chinese face as I informed the service representative that I had to be on a boat by 3:30 pm, and if they didn’t get me there I was going to personally brain them with a trash can and then take a dump on their chests. Okay, no, I didn’t say that, but I did infuse my voice with a low, angry, and undoubtedly very masculine intensity that I’m sure was very intimidating. My obviously irked exterior was clearly able to cow the service lady into putting me onto the next available flight at 11:00 am, arriving into Fort Lauderdale at 2:00 pm. Not only that, but I was pushed into first class and given a $300 travel voucher for my troubles. Sweet! I should totally be late and inflexible for more flights.

First class was nice, but honestly, the first thing I thought upon sitting down was, “People pay five hundred bucks for this?” Yeah, the seat’s a little wider and you get a little more leg room, but for five hundred bucks more than economy class I feel like it ought to blow dry my hair, give me a manicure, and whisper sweet nothings into my ear before leading me into the back room. Oh, I did get a piping hot chicken burrito for lunch, together with a bowl of soup and some nifty cookies, but five hundred bucks for a couple of inches and a spicy burrito seems rather stiff (harr…)

Anyway, the flight got into Fort Lauderdale alright. Although the cab ride was nothing really to speak of, I was feeling oddly excited as we pulled into Port Everglades. It was a semi-cloudy day in Fort Lauderdale and patches of sunshine and blue sky were peeking through the waves of clouds, giving the city an admittedly cheerful look as compared to the damp, dreary, drizzly expanse that had been New York. I think I was also actually beginning to really look forward to getting onto this admittedly luxurious ship, despite my crankiness over all of the mishaps and misadventures over the past few days. Regardless of how annoyed you are and how much work you know you’ll be doing, there’s still something about getting onto a luxury cruise liner that makes your heart beat a little faster. The day that I start going, “Ho hum, another luxury cruise. How dull…” is the day that somebody with more sense needs to beat me over the head several times with a lead pipe. And then bury me in the basement and deny to the authorities that I had ever visited the area. And they’d be justified in doing so.

The check-in process was actually considerably smoother than it was on the Crystal Serenity. I dropped my bags off, gave the people my name, got a retarded-looking picture of me taken via web-cam, and less than ten minutes later I was on board the ship. The Regent Navigator is considerably smaller than the Crystal Serenity, so there isn’t that feeling of great…spaciousness, I guess…that you get upon walking into the atrium. It’s still gorgeous, mind you, but it does feel noticeably more confined. I snapped a few pictures, dropped some of my stuff off into my stateroom, and glanced around to make sure that I would be able to use my pull-up bar in my room.

Yes, I’m so obsessed with P90X that the second thing I did upon entering my five-star hotel room was to check and make sure that my pull-up bar could fit into the doorway. I’m totally turning into a meathead, and I can’t be bothered to care because I can actually see my abs sometimes, and that it kind of bothers me that that doesn’t bother me.

The answer to the burning question in all of your minds, incidentally, is…no, the fucking pull-up bar doesn’t fit into my room. I’m still working on how I’m going to do back and biceps tonight.

There WAS, however, a bottle of complimentary champagne that I managed to mostly ignore before running upstairs to check in with Philip and Marilyn. Naturally, the actors had had a major air malfunction – Donna McKechnie ended up having to buy her own ticket to fly with the rest of the actors, and Lee Roy and the rest ended up being nearly an hour and a half late, which almost resulted in a panic attack on my end and a heart attack on Philip’s. You’d never have noticed, with the way we calmly sat on the pool deck eating our bratwurst and cookies, but there was definite tension. Mmmmm…bratwurst.

Oh, that actually reminds me – as I was running around on the pool deck, I ran into one of the actors from The Wild Party, that I stage managed about a year ago. That was one of those incredibly odd Twilight Zone moments, because as I was walking past we both sort of eyed each other in that, “You look so incredibly familiar but you really shouldn’t be here because reality just doesn’t work that way and oh my god it’s actually you!” sort of way. Turns out he’s been singing for the ship since January. What are the odds? He introduced me to another actor on the ship, name of Stewart, who winked at me twice as we spoke.

I have to say here…that always kind of weirds me out. I always wonder if I’m supposed to smile and ignore it, wink back, make some kind of innuendo, poke out his other eye with a sharp object…what? Is that another one of those gay signals that we were supposed to learn back in homosexual school? I think I must’ve ditched class in favor of doing linear algebra or something that day, because whenever someone does that to me it becomes a serious deer-in-headlights moment. I need one of my fag hags or less clueless gay friends to tell me what, exactly, that’s supposed to mean and what, exactly, is the socially acceptable course of action in such a situation.

After a brief lunch there were, naturally, already issues to deal with and messages to send out, and naturally, in the middle of sending out a message to all the passengers instructing them on how to sit with the rest of the group during dinner, we get a bloody fire drill. So I’m toting my bag and folder and other essentials, fiddling with my terribly gaudy and even more terribly awkward life preserver, knowing that the message about dinner is very unlikely to get out to everyone, and that there would probably be Drama (yes, with a capital D) come dinnertime.

Yup. There was Drama at dinnertime. To set up the overall scenario, we made a request with Regent to have everyone in our group sit together in the same general area. The maitre d’ of the restaurant took note of this, but told me when I spoke to him earlier that the people in our group would have to arrive promptly at 7:00 pm in order to be seated together. Naturally, nobody got this message from me in time, so although most people were prescient enough to ask about sitting with the group, a few people didn’t and were consequently upset when they got seated somewhere else. Then someone else tried to hold a table for certain people to arrive, which really can’t be done in a situation like this because the restaurant doesn’t know who’s arrived and who hasn’t, and that became a big mess because they started antagonizing the head waiter. Then the maitre d’ and the food and restaurant manager got involved, and THEY became upset that the passengers were upset. And I was upset that they were upset and we ended up having to just solve everything in a free for all melee.

Or maybe I just told them I’d handle it and went back to schmoozing with the passengers. That was actually, for the most part, very enjoyable. Despite whatever complaints I’ve had in the past about incredibly demanding passengers, a lot of the people who come with us are genuinely nice people who understand that I’m pretty much stretched to my limit trying to accommodate all of them, who are willing to cut me a little slack, and who are fairly pleased just by the fact that I’m going around to greet them at dinner time. There are more than a few on this cruise, in fact, who are truly extraordinarily friendly, including one man who actually managed to dig up my blog. (Yes, I realize he might well be reading this, and no, I’m making no effort to change what I write on here as a result of it. This is my blog, dammit, and I’m not going to start censoring myself because I’m afraid of what other people might think of me.)

Anyway, it’s worth mentioning here that I’m one of those people who’s more likely to work hard for someone who’s friendly to me than for someone who just complains endlessly. If someone’s nice, then I don’t want to disappoint them by messing up. If someone’s consistently being a temperamental bitch, however, I’m somewhat more likely to let someone else, who probably cares a whole lot less than I do, deal with the issue, and if the passenger decides not to sail with us again, then…well…frankly, I’m not going to be heartbroken over it.

Anyway, dinner was basically a big fracas and I didn’t manage to sit down and eat until it was about three quarters of the way over. On the bright side, today also happens to be my freebie day, so I was able to eat whatever I wanted and choose some delectable desserts to boot. I think that may end up being something of a problem on this cruise, though. Half the fun of cruising comes from the truly incredible food you’re getting, and it’s going to annoy the shit out of me if I can’t sample some of the stuff because I’m trying to stick hard and fast to the P90X diet.

I think Rob would forgive me if I pulled myself off the diet for the duration of this cruise. ‘Cause honestly…five star restaurant! How often do you get to basically eat at a five star restaurant every single evening for two weeks? They offered bloody crème brulee as one of the dessert options tonight! I am not skipping crème brulee ‘cause of Tony fucking Horton, and I am DEFINITELY not skipping a chateaubriand, assuming it’s offered tomorrow night, just because it’s not a “clean, high quality protein.” I’ll do the fucking exercises as usual, but you know what, I’m making the decision right now – I’m on a goddamn luxury cruise, and anyone who thinks I ought to stick to my strict, clean diet while I’m here can shove their head up an elephant’s ass. I’ll try to eat decently during the day, but all bets are off come dinnertime.

Anyway, we have a meeting with all the passengers tomorrow, and Bermuda is until two days after that. Plenty of time, I’m hoping, to get everything sorted out and ready. God, I really don’t want another series of shore excursion debacles.

Shit, it’s almost 1 am and I still need to do back and biceps. Okay, going back to my stateroom now.

On a random note, I ought to take more pictures. The ship is lovely and I ought to capture more of it before it’s time to go.