BerthaBlog

We’re mostly over our colds now, so we’re feeling lively enough to resume normal activities. Now I can talk about the cruise.

We went with Royal Caribbean, because they currently have the largest cruise ship afloat. As soon as the kids learned about this, they campaigned with great enthusiasm to go on that particular ship.

Liberty of the Seas

The picture just doesn’t give you any idea of the scale of the thing. It’s a floating city. You ride the shuttle bus up to a three-story building they process passengers through, and the ship towers above it. The thing has a promenade for Chrissakes. It has elevators inside it. It has a rock-climbing wall, a surfing pool, and a water park. It has an ice-skating rink.

My eldest took one look and declared that Liberty of the Seas is now his very favorite ship in the world.

Processing an entire city’s worth of people is not something that can be done quickly; it involved standing in line for over an hour. We arrived early in the boarding process; later arrivals had to wait even longer. Our fellow passengers were coming from numerous other countries, and I heard people speaking French and something that might have been Swiss or German. I asked the fellow in front of us if he had a pen we could borrow, and he replied with a Spanish accent, “No speak English.”

I was able to remember enough of last semester’s Spanish to dredge up, “Una pluma?” He brightened at once and got a pen out of his knapsack.

The crew was also widely multi-national. Our cruise director, Dave, had a wonderful Australian accent. The lady running our trivia contest and other activities was from Pennsylvania. The nice man who made my Marguaritas for me was from the Caribbean. There were people from Asia, Europe, and the Americas—I think every continent was represented except Antarctica.

Within an hour of boarding the ship, my sixteen-year-old had discovered the Johnny Rocket’s and wanted to go there for a hamburger.