So…vacation…took a week to process/catch up/decompress/figure out the correct time zone.

Word to the wise: don’t do Daylight saving, then change 3 time zones in the same day.

And can we talk about the weather?  It ran the full spectrum, and I was (of course) somewhat unprepared.  Imagine my surprise when I stumbled off the red-eye flight from LAX to Dulles to find 34* temps and rain/snow mix.

Yuck.

And I swear, that wasn’t in the forecast when I checked a couple of days before.

Thankfully, we managed to make it out of the DC area before the snow slammed the east coast.  The big boat to Bermuda with our friends Jason & Christina was a welcome respite.  Although, I seriously get annoyed by how many staged photo ops they want you to do.  I can’t count the number of times I waved off a photographer with a “no thanks.”

We arrived in Bermuda on day 3 to cloudy skies, and no set plan.  In fact, we weren’t even sure WHERE we were in Bermuda.  So lack of plans means that we ended up going to the “private beach” by the cruise terminal.  But that was OK, I read my book while Steve snorkeled in the fake reef (where they also provide food each day, so as to keep the fishes in ample viewing supply) and J&C rented scooters to ride around.  We all took a ferry boat into the capital city of Hamilton, where we wandered a bit, and ultimately came up with a game plan for the next day.

Side note: I think we were all amused to see that Bermuda shorts are, in fact, acceptable business attire.  We saw many a man with gigantic calves sporting shorts, knee-high navy socks, and black dress shoes/loafers (and yes, the calf size did seem to matter – I didn’t see any skinny calves).

We went back to the boat for dinner, and since it was Halloween, we had to don our costumes (and don’t I look thrilled to be on the other side of the camera??):

The staff on a cruise ship is almost entirely non-American, so the dining room staff weren’t actually sure of what our costumes related to, lol.  But I was able to impress some of the passengers with my ability to do the Vulcan salute with both of my hands on command (it’s one of my hidden talents, HA!).

We got up the next morning and were off the boat before sunrise (aka – 7am), and took the ferry back to Hamilton with the local commuters, and then hopped a bus to Elbow Beach, with the goal of checking out the pink sand beaches.  We’re now aware that the term “pink” sand is somewhat ambiguous.  It is more of a faint peach sand, pinkified by small specks of the pink corals within the fine grains.  It probably does look pink when compared to straight-up white sand, I dunno.  And holy moly, was it windy on the beach!  I think we were getting the remnants of the east coast storm.

(Oh, to give you perspective, it was a 900-mile one-way trip from Baltimore to Bermuda.)

But beautiful… I love seeing water that is actually blue, as opposed to the dingy gray water that surrounds LA.

We only had a couple hours of beach time before we hopped a bus back to the dockyard.  And imagine our surprise when we acquired about 15 preschoolers on the bus, also on their way to the dockyard (but to see fire trucks).  I had forgotten there were so many versus to “The Wheels on the Bus.”  And I was utterly charmed by the squeaky, high-pitched, British-accented voices singing this little ditty to the tune of Frere Jacques:

Where is Michelle? Where is Michelle?
There she is.  There she is.
How are you today, ma’am?
Very well, I thank you.
Run away, run away.

Seriously, what is that song called?  So cute!

But alas, the youngsters marked the end of our 25 hour stint in Bermuda.  We headed back to the boat, and out into rocky waters, definitely feeling the remnants of that nasty storm.  At one point, we were churning thru 25 foot waves.  It’s always awesome to drunk walk through a hallway when you’re stone-cold sober.

Thankfully, none of us got seasick.  I saw a lot of Dramamine dots stuck behind the ears of my fellow passengers, and noticed the dwindling supply of barf bags in the stairwells.  I will say that the constant rolling motion got old after a while.  The winds were also quite impressive – gale winds, which are less than storm, which is less than hurricane… but windy nonetheless.  So they actually closed down the open pool deck, it was just too crazy up there.  And the captain slowed the boat down, as the winds were actually pushing the boat even harder thru the crazy waves.

But we made it back to Baltimore safe & sound.  I’ll talk about DC & NYC in my next post.