Back from Bermuda

This family hardly ever takes weeklong vacations. It's my fault. I've been chained to my mouse colony almost since we've been married--can't leave them for more than 3 days. But finally, the papers are almost done and the mouse babysitting duties have significantly decreased, so I can leave them for a whole week. And when one of my summer teaching jobs got canceled and I had two months of flexible schedule, Jim announced that we were going away. Somewhere. For a whole week. But we didn't have much time to plan on such short notice, so we booked a cruise to Bermuda. You can only cruise two places out of Boston: Bermuda and Canada. Not that we don't love Canada, but... So on two weeks of notice we put the cruise on the calendar. I told the kids all the things that would be there and their eyes got bigger and bigger. We packed up and took an Uber car (Jim's new crush) to the cruise terminal. The kids didn't really believe me that it was a boat because it looked like a hotel. We spent the first afternoon exploring the boat and dancing on the pooldeck. Jed was in as soon as they started playing "Gangnam Style". The kid can't walk across the pool deck all week without a hip swivel. They don't really understand the words, though--after a few tries they settled on "Hey, chilly lady!" Find that poor woman a sarong for her shoulders; she can't have mine, the kids are obsessed with it. They were in a singing mood that day. We've been teaching them the Doxology so that they can participate in the singing in church, and took the opportunity to sing it as loud as possible all afternoon all over the boat. Next day was the sail to Bermuda. We took the kids to the kids' pool and water slide area in the morning. Jed is water slides and Gus is calm pool; their swim styles say a lot about their personalities. In the afternoon we took them to kids' club to play. Jed was fine, but in Gus's class they started teaching them circus tricks. Gus couldn't do them straight off, and somebody laughed at him, and then he was just miserable so I picked them up early and we had snack instead. The cruise we went on doesn't have scheduled seating; you can show up whenever you want at the nice restaurants or the buffet. We had eaten the buffet on the first night and wanted to try restaurant for the second night; unfortunately it was "dress-up night" and everyone else wanted to eat in the restaurants too. We waited about 45 minutes for a table and then had ridiculously slow service (I'm quietly wondering if they make this night difficult to encourage people to go to the expensive restaurants later in the week instead). But the kids did well and earned some video games the next day. On the third day we arrived in Bermuda. We started by swimming the kids around in the big pool, then had a late second breakfast. By that time we'd moored and we all headed downtown. Bermuda is in the shape of a fishhook, and the cruise termainal is at the Royal Dockyard which is way at the end. In order to get anywhere more interesting, you have a bus ride of an hour or a ferry ride of 20 minutes. We voted ferry, but it only leaves once an hour. During the wait, Jed discovered that you could see fish in the shallow water. Huge schools of minnows, some bigger fish eating the minnows, and some yellow striped fish we called bumblebee fish. Once we got to Hamilton, the main city, it was HOT and time for lunch. After that we didn't have much exploring time left so we went to a local oceanography museum called BUEI. The kids loved it, we loved it, and everyone should be eating lionfish. When we got back to the boat, they were playing "Gangnam Style" again and Jim rode on down the tiny hallway, taking up all the available space with limbs flying. The kids talked about that all week. After the previous night's debacle we were going to eat at the buffet again, but Gus begged for the nice restaurant because they had excellent macaroni and cheese, so we went to the other, slightly nicer, restaurant. The wait and service were reasonable the rest of the week (enough people were scared off?) and the kids learned that "dressing up" for dinner means putting on a nicer pair of shorts. They did a great job all week having dinner in the restaurants with napkin in lap and behaving (mostly). Jim took them to play the videogames they had earned the previous evening and Jed fell in love with skeeball. Jed loves to hold things in his hot little hands, and skeeball gives you tickets --it's like the game that pays you back! Day four was our only full day in Bermuda. We had hoped to see Crystal Caves, but since it's clear on the other side of the island it just wasn't doable in half a day, so we went to Fort Scaur instead. You can get there by local bus; the driver was a little concerned, since the entrance is 2 blocks from the bus stop and there's no sidewalk. However, the roads are so curvy that traffic doesn't go very fast, and half the traffic are scooters anyhow which take up less space. We taught the kids the meaning of "single file" and came in a back entrance which was thoroughly explored (including a jungle portion which left us shaking off ants and amazed at the armored spiders) before we went into the fort itself. We brushed off our ants and explored the fort. The fort was constructed to protect the Dockyard, and we could see the cruise ship from the top of the hill. It was well maintained and explained, with lots of staircases inside the hill to explore. The last entry in the guest book was 3 days ago, so no large tours for the kids to interfere with, really the perfect size for us. We exited at the main drive and Jim scouted out the nearest bus stop while the kids and I had some munchies, and then we headed back for lunch. That afternoon we took a fantastic tour. The first part was in the open air of a small boat, hearing about Bermuda and some of its history. We passed a feeding ground for visiting sea turtles and saw a couple really well as they came up to breathe. Then we went to a shipwreck site (the ocean surrounding Bermuda is covered with shipwrecks) and gathered in the bottom of the boat to see the site and the fish through glass. This was Jed's favorite part of the day. Then we went to a snorkeling site with a tiny beach. Gus practiced with his mask and snorkel on the boat and decided he could do it. Jed tried, changed his mind, was bummed out and tried again, but just couldn't handle all the stuff on his face, so we played on the beach and looked at the fish in the shallows. My biologist heart wants to think he'll be a naturalist when he says "Mommy! Look at that fish!" but it's immediately followed by "I want to eat it!" Not a naturalist, a chef. Jim and Gus swam off with their snorkels. After about 30 minutes they came back our way and I asked Gus what he saw. "I saw coral, Mommy. I saw the brain!" Jim took Jed to try out the water slide on the boat, and Gus and I snorkeled around a bit more before it was time to head back. On the way home I had local ginger beer, Jim had rum swizzle, and my poor deprived children were in raptures over their cups of Coke. "Mommy! It's SO yummy!" Day five, last day at Bermuda. We took the bus down to Elbow Beach on the south Shore to see the pink sand. It's pink and very very fine; I was still shaking it out of my ears the next day. The water temperature was fantastic. Jim and Gus bobbed in the swells and Jed and I played in the shallow waves. We dug a few holes and built a sand castle that looked like coral, and after a couple hours of beach, Gus fell asleep on the bus back to the Dockyard. We had lunch and then shopping for souvenirs: necklaces with and without shark teeth, a Christmas tree ornament with pink sand inside, and some sea glass. Then an early dinner and all went to see a fantastic Cirque-like show before bed. Day six, back at sea. The kids club in the afternoon was doing more circus stuff, so we brought the kids in the morning. Today Gus's group was engineering ways to keep an egg safe. Jim and I did a crossword puzzle and played trivia. It was television trivia; and even though Jim knows way more random information than he should, we still bombed it. After lunch we traded off time in the sunshine watching the kids at the kids' pool. In the late afternoon there was face painting on the pool deck and Gus was a fearsome pirate and Jed a terrifying tiger. Day seven, last day at sea, looked much the same. General trivia this time: Jim's knowledge of random facts is a bit terrifying, and I filled in his (minor) holes and we won. The prize was beer coozies, solving the firstest of first-world problems, that my beer is TOO COLD. This morning Gus's group was building legos and Jed was offered a part in the circus show, so after lunch and some time at on the water slides, Jed went to rehearse and we all dried off to see him in the afternoon. His group was the fierce tigers, so he got to spend a second day in tiger face paint (some of the orange is still on his face). He marched across the stage and growled and jumped through the ring of fire (twice). These last couple of days we could really have used an indoor playground; there wasn't anywhere without a lot of sunshine for them to burn off energy, so the ramminess really set in. Day eight, we woke up and everyone helped pack. After breakfast we headed home. Jim went to the office to deal with his >1000 emails, and I dropped off the kids at camp and school to re-integrate asap. We slid right into Friday pizza-and-movie night and are readjusting back to normal. It was a great time, but we loved the island way more than the boat, so next time we'll just fly to Bermuda and spend a lot more time there.