Bahamas 2019 Day 2

D2: Nassau

Having been to Nassau previously on our Enchantment cruise we already knew that we were going to spend the day onboard. There’s nothing here that is our kind of thing. An expensive day at Atlantis holds no interest, and of course we LOATHE shopping. Finally, heading to Senior Frog’s sounds like our idea of hell – so ship day it was to be.

We awoke around 745A docked in Nassau, between Disney Dream and Carnival Liberty. At breakfast we watched kids shoot down the water river/water slide on Disney. On our way to morning trivia we took a quick spin through the very sad Library. Decks of cards and several chess, checkers and Scrabble sets. Three bookshelves of sad looking books (oooh – look – by Lenny Dykstra!). After coming in 2nd w/14 of 15 on trivia, we spent the next 30 minutes pleasantly chatting with the Ohio couple next to us – scoping out our main competition! They normally cruise on Celebrity so asked them a few questions about the entertainment. Sounds like they don’t have the large theaters on their ships so the entertainment is more about bringing small acts onboard.

Our balcony that morning was perfectly situated to give us no direct sunlight, so we spent an hour of so pre-lunch sitting outside (during which time I wrote up Day 1). Later in the afternoon we figured we’d probably need to move to the other side of the ship to avoid the sun. A quick WJ lunch around 1220P and then back for another trivia game at Schooner at 1P.

…AND THE STREAK CONTINUES! Another win, albeit a shared one. This game was “Name the Celebrity” from a set of photos. We (and the other three teams/6 people) all got 15 of 20 and all shared in the joy of priceless RCCL keychains. This was our 6th win in 5 cruises, so we’re feeling pretty good. It certainly made up for last night’s pathetic showing. Of course, we still want an undisputed win – and it would still be nice to have more people competing…but we still took the prizes!

With about 75 minutes to kill prior to our scheduled time at the escape room we returned to our balcony for a bit more relaxation and still-manageable sunlight. Once we found the escape room starting area up in the VCL we sat down with (staff) members Chris and Luciana to await the arrival of the other couple signed up. Chris was hysterical, telling us we’d interrupted his moves to get Luciana to “say yes” – to what, who knows? Anyway, we ended up rescheduling our time to Day 4 since the other couple didn’t show up.

Since we now had time, we once again made our way to Schooner for more trivia. Along the way we stopped at the Sports Bar and grabbed some new-to-us drinks to enjoy during our game. (E had one of the hard ciders while I had…I forget. Whatever it was it was NOT a short-list candidate.) This time it was brain teasers along the lines of those things where they’ll write “ROBIN” in a circle and you have to figure out that the answer is “Round Robin”. This time we won fair and square, with 11 out of 20. As the prizes were more keychains we gladly gave them up to whoever wanted them, which in this case was a couple of young kids.

After that, we grabbed a couple of snack sandwiches from Cafe Promenade and made our way out to two deck chairs out on the (extremely) quiet Deck 4. These were out of the sun, facing the Disney Dream. Here we relaxed with our tablets and read until it was time to catch one more trivia event. This was Name That Tune: Pop Songs where we once again showed our “skills” by scoring a measly 4 out of 32. The only song we could ID by title AND artist was “Hand in My Pocket” by Alanis Morrisette, plus two other songs where we got the artist only. We’re SO un-hip.

Dinner was at Chops, which turned out to be underneath the Adventure Ocean deck – so lots of stomping overhead through dinner. Apparently, there were about 500 kids aboard our cruise, which certainly matchee the eye test we’ve already done. We each got our own 1st course (me: Lobster Bisque, E: Crab Cake) and shared the Black Pepper Bacon (really, pork belly) since we’d never tried that. Glad we tried it, although not going to be a go-to dish in future. I think the steaks were among the best prepared we’ve had on any ship. More flavorful than expected. We finished up the wine we’d bought on the prior night and also started on a new bottle.

We rounded out the night by seeing the Gallery of Dreams production show. Strange production. Pretty much a “nothing” musical score, and the dancing didn’t really seem to give all the dancers that much to do to really show off. A couple of interesting set pieces crammed onto stage showing some technical artistry (but certainly not up to the standards we saw on Freedom OTS), but the costumes were mostly “meh”. Eileen thought that the Russian costumes were pretty good but the others didn’t show much in the way of design or execution skills. (E and I met doing community theater and have been involved in theater tech for decades, so we "see" shows differently that most people.)

We had planned to walk back via the Promenade to give a listen to the salsa group in Boleros as well as the guy performing in the pub, but our timing was wrong and they hadn’t started up yet. Since we were getting a bit pooped we decided to head back to the cabin and relax. We never did manage to hear the salsa group. We eventually did find the pub guy. He was a guitarist and we got bored with him midway through his first song.