When you’re racing with the clock
When you’re racing with the clock
And the second hand doesn’t understand
That your back may break and your fingers ache
And your constitution isn’t made of rock
It’s a losing race when you’re racing with the
Racing, racing, racing with the clock!
The adjustment is always a bit unusual. Going from a Grand Voyage, where three quarters of the guests are four and five star mariners and often know more about our jobs than we do, to a relocation cruise, where a lot of people are first time cruisers or lower level mariners, who have to be “trained” for lack of a better word. The ship takes on a whole different personality. Gone are the sweeping evening gowns and theme nights, in come the party bands and the mixology classes.
Truly, life is crazy. The team has changed over, but thankfully the new team here is wonderful. I miss my people, and I miss my cast-girls, but the new arrivals have blended in nicely. The new band includes at least one member I know, though none of them are “my” band. In all honestly I don’t know where all of my ‘Cats are, once we leave the ship we tend to scatter to the four winds. I know where Hunt is, but the rest of them? No idea. Anyway…
When a switchover like this happens, my days jump from a standard of 7.5 hours to a crazy 10.5 (yes it’s supposed to be 10, but it never quite works out that way). That’s not necessarily a bad thing, it makes the days go quickly and you actually end getting a whole heckuva a lot done. And it means your down time feels that much better when it does come around. It’s not even quite the same as Alaska, where I actually have a fair bit of downtime – especially in ports like Juneau where I have almost an entire day off to wonder around looking at jewelry I can’t afford…but I digress. While I’m not doing activities anymore, I am still running bingo sales (voluntarily, since I’ve become quite good at it, and our DJ is great fun to work with) – which have skyrocketed from a modest 15 people or so per day on the Grand Voyage to 50 + people and climbing, with larger cards and higher numbers, which means slightly more complex paperwork, and since there’s only one librarian and only one internet manager now, we’re both covering a lot more duties. When one of us isn’t here, the other one does our job.
In short, life is busy. Very very busy. My shore-side friends and family often comment that I always look like I’m in a hurry, I walk very quickly. In fact, even some of my ship-side family teases me about it, both my shipside Siblings learned very quickly when I could stop to chat, and when they were better off getting out of my way. In truth, that comes almost completely from working on ships. Especially since I started out on the larger ships where it takes ten minutes to get from one place to another. Now it’s become force of habit, and since on a regular cruise I do always have somewhere to be…most people have figured out by now not to try and stop me in the hallways.
Having left behind Asia and Australia, we’re now heading into the more typical tropical ports. Tomorrow we port in the sun drenched shores of Mexico. This will be the third time I’ve been in Pueta Vallarta, and only the first time in 15 years I’ve seen my old dance teacher, I’m actually quite excited about that. Almost as excited as I am about the possibility of para-sailing (finally).
And so it goes…what goes up, must come down, spinning wheels and all that …