Carnival Pride - Day 2 - Sea Day (Part 1)

Pretty much any cruise out of Baltimore will require a couple sea days at the front of the voyage to get out of the Chesapeake Bay and start our way south down the east coast. Today was the 1st of those 2 straight sea days so we woke up early for breakfast in the buffet in order to get to a 9:45AM trivia.

Not having been on the Pride since they instituted the more important Funship 2.0 upgrades of Guys Burgers (wouldn't a breakfast burger of sausage and a fried egg on a biscuit from Guys sound good? Someone submit that to Guy Fieri and John Heald) and the Blue Iguana Cantina, my first stop was to the Blue Iguana for one of their famed breakfast burritos. Breakfast is definitely less of a line than lunchtime. Side query: why does these eateries close so early? So many people who don't want to dress for dinner would gladly grab a Guys burger or Blue Iguana burrito.

For my breakfast burrito, I went with a wheat tortilla, scrambled eggs, cheese, sausage (which was in link form and cut lengthwise in half even though he still gave me both halves together), and hash browns. The cheese had to rely on the hot eggs to melt it as there was so no heating once put together. I couldn't finish all of it. Next time though I'd leave off the hash browns as it was a weird texture change since the wrapping smashed the hash brown into more of a hard chip. I'm also one of those people who put ketchup on my eggs so this needed a little something for extra flavor.

I included a yogurt for the appearance of culture

About the size of a 6 inch sub at Subway

Joni isn't normally a big breakfast eater but she frequently wound up with a bowl of oatmeal. Her only lament was the lack of a crunchy topping like walnuts. I love drinking orange juice in the mornings so it always made me laugh to fill my cup from the dispenser marked "Orange Cocktail." On many ships I happily drink tons of water from the buffet dispensers but after finding one time the water dispensed here to taste like a salt lick, I stuck to lemonade for every non breakfast buffet visit. Would have been fine if I didn't despise lemon flavored drinks or dressings. That's one of the things I like about the other lines. Within minutes of sitting down with your food in the buffet, there was a crew member offering to bring you a drink whether that was one of the free options of water, iced tea, or lemonade, or something from the bar like soda or a beer. In this case, I'd have had to go leave the buffet, fetch a soda from the bar, and come back to the food. 

After trivia, Joni wanted to attend the Fun Ashore & Fun Aboard talk as she heard the magic words "chance to win free stuff." Off we went to the Taj Mahal where we each put our names on a raffle slip. We sat back listening to Leigh run through a slide show about select port activities. He had a small pile of useful port items like snorkel sets on the table and started tossing them out to people who raised their hand saying they liked snorkeling. Red from the fun squad was his helpful assistant and whenever Leigh got to an excursion choice in his slideshow that they had tickets to give away for, Red would signal him to pull a raffle ticket out of the box. A few people won the classic beach break or snorkel excursions. Then Leigh got to talking about Half Moon Cay and the stingray excursion. Each time an opportunity to win would come up, Joni would get super excited but I'd mostly sit there wishing one of us would get picked for something simple and low key like the beach break. Whose name does Leigh pull out of the box for this HMC stingray excursion tickets for 2? 

Yours truly, the one person in the room who'd rather just wave and admire them from afar and otherwise wouldn't have bothered coming to this talk, gets called to win an excursion to swim with stingrays. Leigh asks if I'd ever swam with stingrays and I said no. He then asks if I want to swim with stingrays and I said no. Leigh offered words of encouragement for me to face my fears and try something new while Red tried to abscond with my prize. Leigh made him give the ticket envelope back to me. The "tickets" were in the form of a letter saying to give the bearer the equivalent of admission for 2 to the excursion. They also made sure to point out in the fine print that there was no monetary value and you can't exchange it for another free excursion choice. I briefly toyed with the idea of giving it away or Joni going by herself since the actual envelope was not personalized to any one person but Joni wouldn't hear of me not doing this with her.

The app when I purchased the soda package said that the first bar I visit and show my card will put the sticker on it for me. Visited the atrium bar for a quick soda and the bartender never bothered with a sticker but did honor the package after swiping my card. Unfortunately, they also dropped my card into the wet area behind the bar in the process of handing it back to me so I got one napkin for my drink and one to wipe down my card. I did notice that more times than not, the bartenders and bar waiters would not include a straw unless you specifically asked for one. Drinking the sodas straight from the glass was usually fine but I can see why a lot of cruisers plan to bring their own drink cups.

We returned to the cabin around 11AM and was surprised to find that Purwanto had yet to clean our cabin. To give him a chance to do so, we left after a quick pit stop and headed up to Guy's Burgers to have lunch. While the specialty burger concoctions are posted on the wall by where you walk up to order, if you don't specifically ask for one of them, they automatically hand you the plain cheeseburger and fries. There is an extensive toppings bar though with everything from caramelized onions to pickles, and sautéed mushrooms. Dispensers and little metal cups to put it in if you'd rather not just squirt it onto your plate provide the self serve condiments along with some separate squeeze bottles of various barbecue sauces. I found it odd that the ranch sauce came out like a snail but it took 2 seconds to fill up one of those little tins with ketchup. The burger itself was fine and actually well cooked despite the frequent turnover of supply they served. I found the fries to be a little too spicy but many times during the cruise Joni would go back just for a plate of fries.

Joni also tried the Quatro Formaggio pizza. Plain burger to which I added ketchup, pickles, and sautéed mushrooms

I needed a dessert to get that spicy taste out of my mouth. Fruit and the fudge heart was the best choices.

As we sat eating in the buffet, we noticed throughout the cruise a few costumed characters going around offering to take pictures with the cruisers like a sailor girl and a guy who resembled the Gortons Fisherman. I know every cruise line has the costumed characters that want you to pose for pictures as you get off the boat in ports but asking you to pose while eating in the buffet was new to me. Another new costumed character to me was the giant towel animal standing by the photo department for people to take pictures with him. I'd heard of him but also heard that he's a bit of a recluse when it comes to grabbing a picture with him. I tried to persuade Joni to get her picture with him but she wouldn't. 

One of the trivia sessions Joni was really excited about attending was Harry Potter themed trivia. We teamed up with some young adults whom at least one was on their first cruise and what they didn't know as casual fans, Joni told them in full detail. The one answer I was able to provide was actually a byproduct of getting it wrong on the Harry Potter trivia session on Oasis - the Dursley's address of 4 Privet Drive. I guessed at the house number getting it wrong on Oasis so believe it when I advise trivia players to learn the right answers to questions they get wrong as it might repeat itself. We ended up winning that trivia. It was a little odd that depending on who was running the trivia, they either insisted that the winning team only got 1 prize (in this case a ship on a stick) or some would be more generous and offer to either go grab some more or at least promise to send a prize to the cabin. I've already won more ships on a stick at this point than I care to keep dusting so I was happy to let someone else take the 2 ships we were offered. Of course everyone was all for Joni getting one of them and the other went to the young lady who was on her first cruise.

Ahh, the PRIDE at getting her first ship on a stick

To celebrate the win, we headed up to Lido for some soft serve ice cream. While Joni opted for a cone I went with filling one of the drink cups. 

I think they might be making their soft serve a little too thick these days:

We returned to our cabin to drop off Joni's trophy and finally found that Purwanto had done the morning cleaning. The new trend this trip was receiving our towel animals during the morning cabin cleaning. I enjoy seeing each new towel animal creation but I like it better when it's a treat to come back to when you're ready to settle down in the cabin for the night. Also noticed that he neglected to take my used soda glass but had taken our previous day's towel animal. Usually the stewards don't bother to take them unless we've already dismantled them so that was a little sad. I like the look of a growing towel animal menagerie by the end of the cruise.

We next headed down to the Butterflies lounge to watch the Celebrity Heads game that had started early as it was already in progress when we arrived at the scheduled time of 2:15PM. It was basically a version of the app game where you have to hold up your device above your head and everyone else gives you clues as to what it says. This panel of 3 cruisers sat on the stage in front of a screen so that the audience could see the names projected on the screen but they couldn't. Each participant could keep asking yes or no questions until they got a no answer and had to pass the microphone to the next person. 

We had also decided to attend this game because the next suspect eliminating Clue was to be revealed right afterward. The Clue game was very popular and lots of the small venue's seating was taken up by Clue players resulting in lots of angry Bingo players who were coming in to get ready for the Bingo game scheduled at the same time. I heard several cruisers complaining to the fun squad staff while waiting to grab a soda at the bar. As soon as the Clue was revealed, Bingo players could stop getting all RED in the face as 1/3rd of the lounge's occupants gave up their seats. Joni went the extra mile in kindness by holding our spot with a table so two of the complaining ladies could move over to it before anyone else swooped in. 

Our afternoon trivia session was run by Bradley from Belgium who yes is as sweet as Belgian Chocolate or so he told us every time he introduced himself before hosting an activity. When us and another team were the only two still cheering when he narrowed down the score range, Bradley made a big show of walking over to each of our teams, looking at our papers, and then pretending to announce that he was giving us the ship on a stick only to yank it back and hand it to the other team for getting 1 more point than us. Kudos to the other team for winning but honestly, the joke by Bradley wasn't all that funny. 

We stuck around for TV theme trivia - a favorite of mine. We missed a handful of them this go round because they were more toward the sci-fi or cartoon genre and a fair amount of people missed them too. The bane of my TV theme trivia existence as I missed it on Oasis too is the theme music to Grey's Anatomy. I've seen every episode and whenever I hear the music I instantly think medical show. But for the past several seasons, the show just features the opening monologue and a white background with the show logo. At least that was the only one we missed that I felt I should have known.

With nothing else of interest on the schedule until dinnertime, Joni and I decided to split up for a couple hours. I used the downtime to relax in the cabin fighting with our TV remote only working 1/6 of every button push and Joni wanted to head up on the pool deck to read and get some sun. We rode back up to our cabin together so Joni could change and spotted a sweet surprise in the corner of the atrium elevator:

The back says to post a picture saying you found it on Happiness Rocks on Facebook but we couldn't find the proper group amidst the multiple search results.

While we were each doing our own version of relaxing, we heard an announcement over the ship intercom citing a cabin number associated with a call for medical assistance. It was for a different deck than I was on but I silently sent up some good thoughts that it was simply a false alarm.