JoCo Cruise Recollections

JoCoCruiseCrazy started, for me, with a quest giver.

My wife and I were eating breakfast in the hotel restaurant the morning of the cruise when a man walked by wearing a t-shirt with a golden exclamation point on the front.

“Huh, quest giver” I said to my wife across the table. I then started laughing when I saw the matching golden question mark on the back of the shirt.

“Well, I bet he’s on the cruise” was her only response. From this point forward, I knew things were going to be quite different. I told my wife she should ask what his quest was. She politely refused, reminding me she is far too shy to walk up and speak to random strangers.

There she was, however, 40 minutes later asking if the fellow had a quest for her. The entire cruise weekend my wife would actually take the lead on introducing us to new people, through games and shared nerd experience. She opened dialogs with more people than I think I have ever seen her speak to at any gathering of any sort. She doesn’t even speak to many people during my family reunions. When Jeff (or Mr QuestGiver if you prefer) reported he, sadly, had no quests to give, we invited him to play Fluxx, this brought another JoCoCruiseCrazy participant over to our end of the lobby, and we had a rousing game which I did not win. This is how we met our first two new friends on the ship, Jeff and Tracy (yes, Famous Tracy it would turn out).

We had come to JoCoCruiseCrazy with 3 of my coworkers and their various SOs. I had done such a good job explaining how amazing the cruise was going to be that I convinced three people who had only vague notions of who any of the performers were going to be to come along, and they dragged along spouses and girlfriends. I thought about asking for a commission from Insight Cruises, but I figure they were doing enough in organizing the thing to begin with.

I had kind of expected my wife and I to run with this comfortable familiar circle for most of the cruise. We tend to be the home body type, and this seemed like a place where we would yet again stick with the old team, not get out of our comfort zone. I should have known that the other people on this cruise would BE a comfort zone. With very minor exceptions, every person I talked to on the trip was someone I could generally see myself spending time with. If they lived near me, we would invite them over for a weekend game night and beers. The cruise seemed to appeal to the same people we enjoy spending our time with. I attribute a large part of that to the entertainers booked for the cruise. Every time a new entertainer was added, we were shocked to see another person that we were already familiar with and whose work we followed. We anticipated either the best or worst time of our lives.

Our last cruise experience had been an epic failure. We received a free cruise in lieu of a bonus from a job. It was a short, three-day trip from Los Angeles to Ensanada, and we really didn’t have much interest in getting off the ship in Mexico. We spent the entire three days reading, usually on the cold deck of the ship in the wind bundled up in sweaters and jackets. For this trip, I took along a Nook full of reading material, just in case. I think I read a total of 20 pages of any of the books I brought. There was not a time when I felt like we were bored and looking for something to do.

On the second day of the cruise, we wandered up to the game room to see if anyone would like to play anything we had brought. We had half a dozen card and boardish game we had packed in our luggage. The game room was actually kind of empty (probably the only time it was), but we found a table with a couple who didn’t seem to be playing any game currently and my wife asked if they wanted to play Bohnanza, a favorite of hers. We played through a full game and had yet again made a couple of friends we would spend a good amount of the voyage with. We didn’t know at the time that they would become the Queen of the High Seas and her royal consort at the show that night, nor that we would be helping the queen drink her official regalia (which consisted of several mini bottles of flavored rum) a little later in the week.

More to come...