Our last breakfast at Cagney's and I toyed with the idea of getting both the waffles and the eggs benedict because I hadn't had the chance to try either yet. Visions of how I couldn't even finish the pancakes yesterday popped into my head and the eggs benedict won out. I don't get eggs benedict anytime except on cruises so it's become a thing now to try it on each sailing and especially each cruise line.
Baby jam jars - I wonder what they do with the rest of the contents since we always had sealed jars at the table.
I'm not usually a fan of super crunchy toasted bread but this was pretty tasty.
Checking in on Facebook this morning revealed lots of posts from friends back home talking about whether they'd get schools closed for a rare early snowfall. Part of me was thinking "Oh I hope it doesn't impact our flights home tomorrow." And the other part of me was thinking "Haha suckers I'm in shorts in Hawaii!"
I wanted to make sure we took advantage of the daytime trivia sessions and headed down to the "Are You Awake? Morning Trivia" session at 9AM. It figures though that while we now had the whole day free, this was the only trivia session held today. There was a handful of groups playing and I was surprised that we didn't score better. Ahh well all in good fun. I wonder if they don't get a lot of people playing trivia because once again the winners got a whole pile worth of NCL loot. One cruise we could have supplied the entire room of trivia players with pens because that's all they'd give out. I must give kudos to NCL on one aspect - they handed out pens for us to use during trivia (and then collected them). No having to use barely sharpened golf pencils! Regular trivia players get so tired of those little pencils that we probably could have paid for another cruise selling our winning pen prizes.
With time to kill we wandered the ship grabbing pictures of the more unique spots. I've started a new tradition of getting a picture of the life preserver on the railing showing the name of the ship.
I loved how the wording around the seal featured the states and their dates of statehood. It was fun watching other cruisers seek out their home state. That patriotic reflection is an added bonus that you never notice unless you are looking at it from above.
Off Dad and I went to enjoy some with our lunch at the diner. When we arrived the place was more packed than I'd ever seen! Dad questioned whether we should go somewhere else but I wanted to at least inquire as to whether they had an available seat. When they did, we decided to stay. One look at the menu, I realize that it does not show a couple things the TV menu did, most notably, no Fried Mozzarella Sticks. When our waiter came over, I asked about the missing mozzarella sticks and he told me that they had no such thing and I'd have to go to the Skyline restaurant for that. Instead I opted for choosing something else on the menu and ordered the Southern Fried Chicken Tenders (laughed at how the only difference between this and the chicken strips on the children's mini menu was that the adult order got a biscuit) and the Chicago Style Hot Dog. Having had plenty of fries this week, I asked about getting potato chips instead since the menu in front of me had a variety of options for sides like chips, fries, or mashed potatoes. Our waiter told us that the dishes I chose "come with fries" and refused to even bring me a side of potato chips after I pointed out the options on the menu.
This is a picture of the menu itself that they had on the tables. The guitar is even pointing to the written proof!
The waiter still refused so I gave in to the idea of more fries and off he went. The place continued to be busy and we sat there watching while tables got seated, brought food, and left all while we didn't have any food or water glasses refilled. I kept watching to be able to call over our waiter and inquire as to the status of our order and never saw him return to the floor. After sitting for nearly an hour, Dad went over to the podium to talk to the white uniformed manager. She rushed into the back to check on our order and had someone else come refill our water glasses in the meantime. Then she didn't come out from the back for another 20-30 minutes. Once she finally came over with our food, you could tell it had been sitting there since right after we ordered it. Dad's grilled cheese sandwich was now soggy and my chicken tenders was cold and nearly all breading. That extra addition of a biscuit was rock hard.
We called back over the manager and the best she could think to do was to offer us to order something else. I suppose there wasn't much else she could do since the venue was free unlike the other specialty restaurants. We've been on enough cruises now that we've seen them pull wait staff from other venues when a place gets busy. We deduced that we had the unfortunate luck of our waiter being one of those extra staff who put in the order and then left without letting anyone know to cover our table. By now it was just too many things on top of each other going wrong that neither of us wanted to wait another hour for them to bring us something else. We've also learned over time to use the crew hierarchy that is in place and to "work our way up the chain" when things aren't satisfactory at the first level. We asked the manager to call down the Food and Beverage Manager and to their credit, a Mr. Gregory McLurkin (his card refers to his title as the Director of Outlets?) showed up within minutes. We explained the situation from the start and Mr. McLurkin agreed about the potato chips, explained about the menu changes that the TV wasn't updated yet, and offered to have someone grab me some of the mozzarella sticks from the Skyline restaurant or at least some chips. The trouble with having to deal with bad food service is that I lose my appetite so I turned down his offer. He still wanted to make it up to us and tried to offer comping dinner in a specialty restaurant for tonight but we had already planned to use our last dining package dinner in La Cucina. He next offered to gift us a bottle of wine but we don't drink wine. He did seem genuinely bothered by our report and wanted to fix it. We decided to leave without eating anything more here and as we did, I noticed he pulled aside the manager for a talk.
To check, we headed over to the Skyline restaurant and viewed their menu to see if the waiter was right. And of course he wasn't. The poor host at the podium had no idea what we were talking about when we mentioned the mozzarella sticks. I've never cared this much about mozzarella sticks but once you get this much grief over it, it becomes almost a passion. Our next stop was the buffet where my appetite started to come back at the sight of carbonara pizza. Spaghetti carbonara is one of my favorite dishes to order and I've tried it on essentially every cruise line but never seen it as pizza!
For a taste change, I wanted to try the gelato since I hadn't gotten to try it yet. The young man working the counter today was treating the gelato like he was spreading peanut butter on a sandwich. He used the scooping tool to scrape the tiniest amount out of the canister and then tried scraped the tool along the inside edge of the cup before handing it to Dad as if he was trying to do a paint job instead of food service. Umm, we're paying for a scoop, not a spoonful. Dad asked him to put more in the cup since the first time he got gelato, the woman working the counter filled the cup. This young man agreed to add more to the cup all the while complaining that he can't help it because the gelato is melting. The gelato was in the containers it's always in when the counter is open. The only reason it would be melting was because the refrigeration mechanics weren't working. When he finally got around to adding Dad's second ice cream flavor (Dad had initially ordered two scoops), he added it falling over the side rather than trying to balance on top. As he rang us up, he remarked "If it falls off it's not my fault!" The pool deck was packed so by the time we found a place to sit down and eat, we had gelato soup and Dad's hands were covered in the dripping ice cream.
I guess the afternoon was just not our day for trying to eat on board.
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