Wednesday, March 30th
8:15 AM – I had a good sleep and am up and ready to attack the day.
Oh, it turns out that today we are in the British Virgin Islands, not the Isle of British Virgins. No Harry Potter-philes anywhere to be seen. Amazing what a difference a tiny bit of grammar can make.
I open the window to get a view of the island of Tortola. It’s beautiful, of course, but not all that much different than St. Thomas. Similar architecture and feel. We have nothing booked for today so I just have to wait for my wife to get up and get going.
She’s up!
And she’s down.
I think I sensed an appearance by Grumpy Bear there for a minute; but maybe it was my imagination. Could have been her lesser cousin, Discombobulated Bear. She can be a real pain until bobulation is achieved.
9:30 AM – The Bear is awakened and finally ready for breakfast. She says she slept well but I have to challenge that, as during the next few hours we get brief appearances from Grumpy Bear, Bitchy Bear, Cranky Bear, Sarcastic Bear, Bewildered Bear, Grouchy Bear, and finally, Happy Folksy Bear. I was almost going to send out for some Park Rangers to handle the wildlife problem.
After breakfast we walk off the ship onto Tortola and walk down the mail street to see the sights. There aren’t really that many of them honestly; eventually we find a little craft market with a bunch of vendors peddling the kinds of things you will find vendors peddling in this kind of place. Touristy crap, basically. But we support the local economy, Tracey gets a pool bag for $10 (haggled down from $12) and I get a super-cool shirt for $20 (haggled down from $20. Wait that doesn’t sound right…..I actually haggled it to $18 but I didn’t have exact change so I just let her keep it. I drive a hard bargain. I sure took advantage of that poor rube. As the saying goes, “There’s a sucker born every minute”).
Speaking of wildlife problems, this island has one of it’s own, these little suckers are EVERYWHERE.
Chickens! Everywhere!
That may explain why a mysterious stranger is trying to buy the island. They are hush hush on his identity, but apparently he goes by “Colonel”.
12:30 PM – Back to the ship after our sightseeing and we head up to the Irish pub for lunch just to shake it up a bit. I have nachos with bacon. BACON. Hmm, I don’t often frequent Irish pubs, is that an Irish thing? Or just a very bizarre thing?
As you can imagine, they were kinda tasty.
After lunch straight to the pool where we are delighted to find two of the best seats in the house. Right into the pool which is damn cold, but who cares……2 seconds after getting out of the pool we are warm again. It’s the Caribbean for goodness sake! After a short rest I leave the Bear behind at the pool in her natural habitat while I go back to the room to shower and relax out of the sun and heat for a little while. We are meeting for a couple games of Trivia around 4:30 and I’m in charge of getting there early to procure good seats and also of bringing the wine. I’m on it!!!
3:25 PM – Tracey returns from the pool as it has started to pour rain! But oh my it’s still so warm out. A beautiful tropical rainstorm, quite different than what we get at home. It’s beautiful. Of course all the stuff I had sitting on the balcony to dry is now considerably wetter than it started, but I guess the rain will stop eventually. This isn’t Vancouver, after all.
4:30 PM – down to the Atrium to relax with a nice bottle of wine and take in a couple of trivia games, the first one being 80’s music trivia. You would think this would be a slam dunk for us, and we did well getting 18/20, but we missed one that EVERONE missed and one that they played for a split second and we mistook for something else.
The one everyone missed was Together Forever by Rick Astley. Why would THAT be so tough, you ask? Because they played some sort of strange extended dance version. Nobody had a clue. The other one we missed was Hurts So Good from John Cougar Mellancamp. Yes, I feel much shame.
Next up was John Hughes movie trivia where they just put a picture of a Hughes movie up on the huge video screen and you just had to name the movie. Many were laughably easy, and some were so obscure I’ve never heard of them. We got 18/25 of those and weren’t even close to winning.
Off to dinner with another bottle of beautiful wine, the 2010 Brunello di Montalcino that we bought at Costco earlier. We went back to the Manhattan Room , the place where we had a great meal on the first night of our cruise. It’s another great meal this time, and if the great food wasn’t enough, we get live entertainment as well! First a Mowtown-themed band and then a piano guy. What a great experience.
After dinner, up to the wine bar to indulge once again, this time into a Washington State Gewurztraminer which was tasty. By the end of this Tracey was getting tired so she headed back to the room to read and relax and I went to play some poker. What a night of poker.
I had no great starting hands all night. In 6+ hours of poker I never saw a hand better than AJ or 88, but I used my skills and people reading ability (combined with my opponent’s horrible play) to absolutely run over the table, being up just over $500 as the night was coming to a close.
Oh, if I had only got up and left. As I was just minutes away from doing so, I pissed it all away by misplaying a hand so badly that I turned a nice win into a small loss. I’m not going to go into details as it’s too upsetting to think about, but it just goes to show how quickly things can turn with one poorly played hand. Focus is so important, and I lost mine for a second and got outplayed by a player who was drunk and stupid. I didn’t get unlucky, really, I just got outplayed by a buffoon. That’s going to hurt for a long time.
4:30 AM – Back to the room to sulk for a while and then finally sleep. In the grand scheme of things, the money I lost (even counting what I should have won) is going to have zero effect on our vacation and zero effect on our lives, but even though I’m going to be able to move on with a great trip tomorrow morning (or later this morning really), I am going to be living with this one hand for years, I’m sure. Such is the life of a poker player.
Tomorrow is a sea day as we head towards the Bahamas. It’s still been a pretty perfect trip save for the above, and I have nobody to blame for THAT but myself.
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