cruising, wiping out and NASCAR

I wonder if Cody will remember as much about our vacation last week as I remember about our cruise back in November, which isn’t much. While I remember everything overall (the gorgeous dining room, the shopping mall in the middle of the ship, a few of the shows and how big and bright our room was) there are an awful lot of little details I don’t remember, food for example. I know I ate it but I couldn’t tell you what it was (aside from the milkshake I had at the onboard Johnny Rockets, that thing was delicious.)

One day when I was particularly unwell the medical staff had me take my nebulizer treatment in one of the treatment rooms with a bed. About 10 minutes into my treatment an older gentlemen came in and started talking to me about how I was feeling, how my treatment was going and if I liked NASCAR. When I said I was from Indy he instantly started quizzing me on my favorite drivers (um, ?) and asking me if I had heard of so-and-so or such-and-such racing. He then told me his racing team had donated a few items to the High Seas Rally on board to raise money for charity and the ship had asked him to come down to the ship’s hospital to say hi to the patients. He then pulled out racing cards and started signing them, it was at that moment I realized he thought I was a chronically ill charity patient there with the High Seas Rally in need of a little celebrity pick-me-up from one of the rally’s sponsors.

HA!

I took the cards and bragged about them at dinner, I also felt a little guilty that I wasn’t exactly the type of patient he had been sent there to cheer up, but I was most certainly cheered up in a strange and twisted kind of way.

The other thing I remember about our trip was Cody’s obsession with the Flow Rider, a surf simulator located at the front of the ship (or maybe the back? I was really sick.) Cody declared after one turn on the Flow Rider that we would only be cruising Royal Caribbean from here on out because of the Flow Rider and over dinner he asked the PR rep for Royal about each ship, “How many Flow Riders does each ship have and which one is the least busy?” I spent a lot of time watching him, and others — because even though I was sick, seeing other people wipeout never stops being funny.

Cody actually got really good towards the end of our trip, but no one wants to watch someone getting really good at something — they want to watch the process of getting good at something (aka they want to watch people fall. A lot.)

So I present to you Cody’s finest wipeouts in his learning-to-surf journey:

(Cody and I were invited to experience the Freedom of the Seas together back in November. Travel and accommodations were covered by Royal Caribbean. All opinions are my own. Especially the one about people falling down on the Flow Rider being funny.)