Carnival Pride - Day 7 - Sea Day (Part 1)

Our final sea day and our final full day of the cruise has arrived. The ship had been rocking so much during the night and this morning that my shower felt like I was inside a washing machine.

Our last Clue presentation was scheduled for 9:15AM so we decided to skip breakfast in favor of attending the sea day brunch later. The Clue was scheduled once again for the same time as the morning show with Leigh. This time he broadcasted the morning show from the open stage of the Taj Mahal theater inviting anyone who wished to come sit in the theater and watch. He even made jokes about how most of us were probably there for the Clue and not him. During the show, Leigh mentioned that the first person to bring him a breakfast burrito from Blue Iguana Cantina would win a prize. I have a feeling that one of the audience members texted a friend because when the burrito showed up, the woman brought it to the people in the audience first.

In addition to a little conversation with Fran (tastic), Leigh rambled on for so long that he didn't get to the Clue until after 10AM. Fran handled revealing the giant cards while Leigh started reading off the eliminated suspect only to be confused by everyone's reaction. The group gathered informed him that we'd already gotten that clue yesterday. Fran ran off stage to fetch the right set of cards only to drop them onto the stage in her rush to put them on the easel. She tried to scoop them up but Leigh just announced who the eliminated suspect was since we'd all seen the card when it fell. I hope Frantastic wasn't too GREEN with envy at having her reveal ruined.

Our final towel "animal"

At 10:30AM, the Debarkation Presentation was to be held in the theater and a first for me was that this was also the time they put out a display of luggage tags for you to pick your own based on when you wanted to leave. They had a sign at the top explaining that the lower group numbers of 1-14 would go first and gave a time frame of 11:15AM-11:45AM. The time frame for the groups 15-25 was from 11:45AM-12:15PM. By the time we came out of the theater this morning, there was a line from the computer kiosks almost to the theater of people already waiting to be allowed to pick their tags. You'd think they were giving out free money the way people were being so territorial. I heard there was even arguments about who had what place in line. Without a plane to catch and Joni having made arrangements for her husband to come give us a 20 minute ride home, we opted for group #15 after the line had cleared and we were back in the area for the Calling All Nerds trivia.

Since Leigh revealed during the morning show that this morning was when they'd decorated the Lido deck with towel animals, something I'd missed catching in all my cruises, I wanted to hop up there to see it. We altered our plans slightly when the morning show Clue reveal ran long and we decided it wouldn't be enough time to attend sea day brunch in the dining room before our next activity. I was disappointed when I didn't get to share this ritual with Joni on her first Carnival cruise and was even more disappointed when we got upstairs and 95% of the towel animals were gone! I found one towel creature sitting on one of the counters and a couple on one of the tables.


There was remnants of felt eyes and tape on the deck just taunting me! Ahh well, something to strive for on the next cruise I suppose.

After a quick hodgepodge of what I could grab easily from the breakfast buffet remnants and a lecture from Mama Joni who'd noticed that I'd taken a bagel a few times this week only to not eat it, we headed back to our usual hangout of the Piazza Café. Calling All Nerds trivia was followed by Game of Thrones trivia (my only help was knowing who wrote the books) and we were determined to stick around for today's session of Trivial Pursuit since we'd missed it every other time.

During the downtime between trivia sessions, Joni went to get another coffee and must have given in to the barista's insistence on a caramel latte. She came back sipping and making a face at the taste after each drink. She'd also now been given an almost fully punched frequent buyer coffee card so she'd have proof of being entitled to the next coffee being free. The barista even told Joni that she'd told her co-workers to look out for her too.

Carnival has a whole set of Trivial Pursuit made just for playing on the ship with giant size color wheels, wedges, and a multicolored die. Each wedge in your wheel starts out the color of the category and if you get the question right, you flip it over to reveal the color of your wheel. Since there are only 6 wheels, everyone had to merge into larger groups and meet new friends. We paired up with a couple on their honeymoon and the new bride was in charge of writing our answers on the dry erase board. There were a lot of teams super close to completing all their wedges but many of them needed a color that Blake couldn't seem to roll. The play went clockwise around the room and if you didn't get your answer right, it was the next team's chance to steal. If they got it right, they could turn that colored wedge over. If they didn't need that wedge anymore, then their only consolation was that it stopped anyone else's team from getting it. There was one rule that said if it was your turn and the die rolled to a color you already had, then you got one more roll to try and get a color you didn't yet have. If that still didn't fit what you needed, then you essentially lost your chance to answer a question and Blake moved on to the next team.

After a while of many teams getting the true/false questions wrong, Blake offered to toss out all true/false questions to which everyone cheered their agreement. It came down to several teams being one wedge and our last wedge just happened to be the color of our wheel, yellow. History is not my strongest category but I wished Blake would roll a yellow on that die with all my might. We all started even chanting yellow, yellow, yellow as Blake rolled. It did land on yellow and lucky for me, our history themed question was "Which department store is credited with being the creator of the Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer Christmas carol character?" That random fact of it being created by Montgomery Ward as an ad campaign has always stuck in my head for some reason. Our whiteboard wielding teammate wasn't sure whether to accept my answer and debated for a while but my serial killer stares of desperation finally convinced her to take my word for it. Our answer was declared correct and we triumphantly flipped our last wedge in the pie over winning the game. Blake was kind enough to bring ships on a stick for everyone (the newlyweds agreed to share one) and I tried to send Joni home with mine but she was happy just taking home the two she'd helped win.

After Big Bang Theory themed trivia, we rushed upstairs to find a quick lunch. I was going to try the deli sandwiches for the first time this trip but as soon as Joni said the words "taco bowl" I did an about face and reported for my new favorite lunch. This was also the chocolate extravaganza day in the buffet and I found cake and chocolate donuts among the choices to hand the crew member dipping our choices into the chocolate fountain. Not quite the donuts I'd been hoping for but I'll take it. Mmm, donuts! Hey, who let Homer Simpson in here?

We headed back down to the theater catching the last several minutes of Leigh's Q & Awesome talk. His story of a rogue wave reaching up to deck 6 was quite interesting. That's a topic I hadn't heard mentioned in other similar Q&A with the crew talks. After a while of listening to the talk, we realized that the entry forms to put our Clue answer were sitting on the edge of the stage and Joni went up to grab us each one. A woman in the row in front of us heard us talking and started arguing with us about how there was still two suspects left to choose from. We tried to explain that with this morning's clue, they'd eliminated all but one but she was adamant. It was a little confusing because everything we'd say to explain, she'd agree with and then still insist there were two left. Between the talk, the Clue reveal, and the upcoming Bingo game right after, the theater was filling up fast.

When Leigh was done he called Fran up to do the reveal. She made such a big show of lifting up the raffle box in order to draw a name that a slip fell out of the box on its own. She picked it up, confirmed that it had the right answer and declared them to be the winner. The woman whose name had been called came down from the back of the theater and collected her prize winnings of a ship on a stick, a magnifying glass, and the same Hasbro card deck game the losers of Hasbro game night got as well. The woman in front of us who'd been arguing turned back around and asked if we'd gotten the right answer. Umm yeah, how could you not get the right answer if you'd attended every Clue reveal? Rest assured, we responded more politely than that before walking away.

Joni wanted to get some more time lounging in the sun so she headed for the pool deck while I attended Full House trivia. I played by myself but the place was packed so almost every question I had to tune out the group of young girls yelling the answers to each other despite sitting next to each other at the couch next to me. I had a good high score but another lady got all but one question right. Not wanting to play another round of Speak Out, I headed upstairs and took the empty lounger next to Joni. We chatted and polished off the last of my sour gummies before heading back down for Movie music trivia and Scattergories. There was such a large group gathered to play Scattergories that we were only allowed to run one round. Most everyone of my answers got eliminated and I think the woman who won managed to do so by having a super low score.