2026 B2B Day 8: Sea Day #1 (Cruise #2: 6N Mexican Riviera)

Day 8: Thursday, March 5, 2026

Lost an hour of sleep again as we travelled into MST overnight.  Up around 845A and did our standard WJ breakfast.  The morning and afternoon were spent doing trivia and watching some things we'd never seen before. 

On the trivia front, we did:

·         Movie Catchphrases: 17/20 but the winners had 19
·         Logos: This “race to the finish" took another team only 5 minutes to get all 25 answers, shocking not only the room but the Activities host!  The team HAD to be long-time cruisers because there's frankly NO WAY anyone could know all 25.  We had 13/25 and were quite pleased with ourselves.  Unlike prior cruises, thie time we knew the Buckee's logo J.
·         True or False: Sadly, 18 of the 20 questions were the same as the prior leg, the 19th question was predictably about the national language of Brazil, and we got one of the two new questions wrong!  We weren't going to compete for the win, but the winners claimed 20/20 anyway, besting our 19/20.
·         Afternoon (general) trivia: As usual, these tend to be more difficult, and we were pleased to find our 13/20 good for a 4-way tie for the win.  None of the teams got either of the 1st two tie-breaker questions (Q: what was the English name given to Pocahantas when she was taken to England?  A: Rebecca   and Q: How long had Romeo and Juliet known each other before deciding to marry?  A: 1 day.)  One team got the 3rd question: Phantom of the Opera was the longest running musical on Broadway.  What was 2nd longest?  Our guess of Cats was wrong – it was Chicago.
Among the things we saw that were new (mostly because we arrived early to a venue in order to get nice seats to read and then enjoy trivia) were:
·         Flash Mob class in the Music Hall after Movie Catchphrase Trivia:  They will be doing this as a “surprise" on Day 5, outside the pub around 230P (when we scheduled our Royal Puzzle Society session, so we'll miss it).  The piece is a mash up of several well-known pop tunes and is about 3:40 seconds long.  Today they learned the 1st half, then they'll have two more rehearsals before performance time.  Folks were having fun! 
 ·         Line Dancing class in two70 before lunch and the game show: Pretty well attended with the lower floor area of the stage pretty packed as well as small groups all around the upper seating area of the lower bowl.  Couldn't see into upper deck area so not sure if there were folks up there as well.  Pretty low impact exercise, and lots of age ranges.

·         Game show “60 Seconds or Less": pretty mindless as one group of 8 were challenged to place pick-up-sticks on the backs of their outstretched hand and then pop them into the air and catch with the same hand, increasing the number of sticks by one each time.  The folks who tied at 9 sticks did a playoff where 7 sticks won.  A second group of 8 had to balance a small key chain fob on their heads and (somehow) drop it into a small cup about 12’ away w/o using hands.  AFTER everyone failed the host showed the trick: while balancing, lay down on the ground so you were next to the cup and then twist your head so the object fell into the cup.

There are still a lot of young kids on this leg, but we're not seeing as many school-aged kids this time, suggesting that the last cruise may have coincided better with spring break.  That's just a guess, however, and might not make sense since the prior cruise encompassed Friday plus 2 more school days and this one encompasses 3 days of the same week.

Dinner this week has moved for us.  Last week we were in American Icon Grill, but this week we're next door at Silk, a consequence of Veronica and Kadek being assigned to this side this time.  Again, we had been unaware that the waiters moved around each cruise.  The table we had last night was situated in such a way that it was hard to get to it and also hard for them to service it “the right way".  It wasn't a bad table – just the victim of the room's specific layout.  Our lunch yesterday was on 3rd deck, in the Chic room.  We didn't like this room at all.  VERY open and sterile with white walls and furnishings.  Nothing to break the room up into sections or anything.  Of the 3 (out of 4) dining rooms we've seen we rank American Icon Grill as 1st and Chic as a distant 3rd.

Dinner was pretty good.  An interesting event: at the table next to us (but blocked from my sight by a wall although E could see) someone's water glass shattered as we were having dessert (and the other table was waiting for dessert).  Not sure what happened as there wasn’t anything obvious going on – no staff was serving them, no guests were walking by.  There was just a loud “pop" and suddenly a water glass was in many pieces in front of the female guest.  Two waiters (including Veronica, whose table it was) mobilized extremely quickly.  The first waiter moved all the large pieces to his serving tray, then used his crumb scraper to scrape as many small shards as possible, following which Veronica placed down a double layer of napkins and together they reset the diner's place for dessert.  Quick and extremely efficient.  I assume the diner didn't get wet as she remained throughout and I couldn't see any “drying movements" coming from her.

We re-watched the production show Sequins & Feathers tonight.  Unlike last week, where we never saw any seating reservations in the balcony for “status" guests, tonight the three central balcony sections, including where we had sat all last week, were manned by ushers with signs reserving them when we arrived 30 minutes pre-show.  As the HR and HL balcony sections have terrible sightlines we moved down to the orchestra level and found seats in the center back which were just fine.  We'll probably end up there again the rest of this week.

Having lost an hour of sleep and having skipped nap time this afternoon, we decided to turn in for the evening after the show was over.


 


0 comments: