Bahamas 2015 Day 6
Thursday, October 1: Sea DayOur final full day started in the MDR for a more formal breakfast. The MDR was staying open an extra 30 minutes today (closing at 930AM instead of the 900AM of prior days) which made the difference for us as we generally couldn’t get moving in time to make the 900AM deadline. My oldest son and I both opted for Eggs Benedict (with a side of bacon because…well, just because
) while my wife went with the pancakes and the youngest opted for granola and yogurt. The EB was OK – about the best one can expect from mass-produced hollandaise and poached eggs that no doubt remained soaking in a low-temp water bath all morning. We both remembered to order hash browns on the side – we should have thought about asking for a 3rd muffin half, too. (When I make it at home we both eat 3 eggs worth of EB.)We finished up breakfast a little after 10AM and went straight over to Schooner Bar for “Morning Trivia”. We had a different host at each trivia event that we went to, but “Isaac….from Spain” is the only one who made enough of an impression for us to remember him. He was a hoot, and engaged in a lot of interaction with the audience. The fact that we won this round also helped us remember it! We actually won a 3-team playoff by correctly guessing the color of Isaac’s underwear. (Black, that particular day, for those wondering.) We walked out with priceless RCCL pens for our efforts. Oooh….ahhhh!
The next three hours included mostly relaxing in our stateroom, interrupted by lunch. In the cabin, the kids enjoyed the in-house TV channels, and there was some fun stuff featuring CD Marc and a prior Activities Director (I assume) playing various games involving different candies from the UK that they particularly liked.
Mid-afternoon we grabbed some window seats in the Centrum on Deck 6 and listened to the 200PM “80s & 90s Tune Trivia” being played on Centrum Deck 4. Good thing we didn’t attempt to enter this competition – we STUNK at ID’ing the theme songs. We got something like 5 out of 20. We then stayed on and listened to the Q&A of the production show singers and dancers at 230PM.
The next trivia was the 315PM Harry Potter Trivia down in Schooner, which was PACKED. Given that we like hanging in the Schooner we’d moved over from the Centrum at 245PM and therefore had seats, but this was the first (and only) time we saw people sitting on the floor. We also saw the highest concentration of kids here – overall, this cruise didn’t appear to have a large percentage of kids. Not surprising given that most kids probably didn’t have the luxury of a school vacation like we did. However, there were still a large number of “adult-only” teams there. Lots of passion about the Potterverse in the room! This is apparently a pretty new trivia topic and they are still tweaking the questions – I’d say that close to 80% of the teams scored at least 20 of 25 points. There were really only 2 questions that weren’t universally known and therefore acted as the main differentiators. We had 23 of 25 right…which wasn’t enough to make the 3 team playoff made from those teams who got 24 of 25.
We finally made a visit to the photo gallery pre-dinner, mostly to say that we’d been there. Buying the available photos isn’t generally something we’d do. Most pictures were $10-$20 each which is over-priced…but IIRC this may have been a bargain compared to Oasis. For some reason I feel like the cheapest photo on Oasis was $30. Probably wrong, as I would assume pricing is pretty standardized across the fleet…but, all the same, I didn’t have the same feeling of “huge ripoff” as I recall having on Oasis.
Our final MDR dinner was next and included the (new) standard parade of staff down the grand staircase. Because the staff all have to assemble in order to march, this dinner took longer than prior evenings because there was a long gap between dinner and dessert. Not a problem, just an observation. We fall firmly in the camp of passengers who do NOT want to be expected to sing/applaud/dance on command, so the lower-key ceremony compared to last year’s Oasis trip was much appreciated by us.
Post-dinner we were disappointed that there was no live music in the Centrum this evening. There was a demo of martini mixology instead, so we repaired to Schooner Bar once more to listen to Ronilo on the piano while we waited for the Farewell Production Show. While in Schooner we saw the Adventure Ocean Pirate Parade pass by the doorway, so we wandered back to the Centrum to watch a few minutes of the kids performing before making our final trip back to the Orpheum. I assume that this farewell show also follows a predictable formula, including a pre-show video recap of onboard events of the past days and what is – I assume – a standard “thanks for cruising with us” song to close out the show. From here it was back to our cabin to pack up. Once again, we didn’t have the energy to stay awake for The Quest – so seeing that for the first time will have to wait!
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