I’m still in cruise reflection mode despite having been back almost four days now. I made some mistakes with this trip. It’s not the things I did because I didn’t know any better that bother me, like scheduling our spa appointment on what we thought was going to be the least hectic day but which turned out to be very busy indeed, but the ones where I did know better but forgot or ignored what I knew. I hope that writing them out will help me remember and do better next time.
Lesson Number One: Just bringing extra camera batteries is not enough; you also need to make sure they’re good batteries. Waiting to board the ship, I tried to take a picture of the scale model of the Wonder in the terminal building. I pulled out the film camera and it wouldn’t work because the battery was dead. I could fix that; I’d packed three spare batteries. I popped one of them in and the battery indicator was still flashing, but I didn’t worry; I knew that to get it to stop, I just had to turn on the camera. (Not knowing this on a previous trip is what led to having three spare batteries in the first place, as I kept buying new ones thinking the replacements were bad, too.) All would have been well, except I couldn’t turn on the camera because the spare was dead. As was the second one, and the third. At least I also had the digital camera along and could take my pictures with that. I was even able to get a good replacement battery for the film camera when the ship’s shops opened after dinner, so I was only inconvenienced for a few hours; still, it was frustrating. Mr. Karen tested the batteries for our AA devices before we left, but neither of us remembered the little CR-2’s.
Lesson Number Two: “Rubproof” on the sunscreen bottle does not mean it will stand up to the wide strap of a shoulder bag that’s picked up and put down about seventeen times during a day spent outdoors in the sun. My skin is pretty fair and burns easily, so I always put on SPF 30 when I’m going to be spending any significant time in the sun. I thought I was well protected when we went to Castaway Cay, but that night I saw red patches on my shoulders—the only sunburn I got the whole trip. I carried around our water bottles and sunscreen and such in a mesh bag and evidently wore all the sunscreen off my shoulders in the process of carrying it around. Oops. At least the strap shaded my shoulder part of the time, so the burn wasn’t too bad. Next time, I’ll carry a bag with handles or just reapply the lotion more often.
Lesson Number Three: All you can eat buffets are not a good weight loss tool. Neither are meals at which you can order anything you want off the menu because it’s already paid for and you may as well order an appetizer and a salad and an entrée and dessert because that’s what everyone else at the table is doing and you don’t want to have to just sit around and watch them eat. Okay, so this is obvious. It’s just really hard for me to control myself when faced with almost unlimited access to food, especially when I don’t have to do any of the prep or cleanup. The weight log tells the tale; post-cruise I was eight pounds heavier than my last official weigh-in. Even Christmas didn’t do that much damage. Fortunately, it seems to be coming off pretty quickly; I’m hoping most of the gain will be gone by this Saturday’s weigh-in, especially since I actually did a workout this week (and was finally able to update the exercise log).
I guess that’s not too bad—a few hours of only being able to take digital pictures, one overpriced battery, a couple patches of sunburn, and a few more pounds than I’d expected. If that’s the worst I can come up with, it was a pretty good trip.
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