We had a leisurely breakfast and set off to explore. Check out Siobhan's tricorder purse, I love it:
We found the transporter pad on the pool deck! One to beam up. Bring a towel.
Playing around on the sports court:
Checking out the tenders, little boats that bring people to the island and back:
John's aggressive pawn+king strategy was amusing (we saw one of the crew members watching and grinning) but Rodney effectively countered and mercifully the game was short:
On the wall at the Captain's Club, hmm, I could use some coffee right about now:
A little Borg humor that an electrical engineer can appreciate:
We moseyed down to the tender boats for a little trip to Roatan, since we were here and all.
After evading a bunch of hawkers trying to get us to hire a guide, we found the busy little downtown which was only slightly quieter but at least folks there mostly left us alone. This nice park provided a peaceful moment:
John found a guy selling papaya pieces and successfully "negotiated" unintentionally (basically telling him he'd buy one later) for a half-price piece. Almost as good as in Hawai'i!
We popped into the grocery store, one place I usually try to visit in other countries in order to see what goodies (and unusual things) are on the shelves. Honduran coffee, why yes, that seems worth carrying home to try out (it's pretty good - and for real, I'm going to make some now).
OK, back with coffee, let's proceed.
A bit incongruous but pretty:
Back on the ship, plenty of time for more exploration. I love the license plates at the bar overlooking the pool, especially the one from Hawai'i:
The daily drink specials with fun names:
Cheering on Kip at the running track. Our marathon cruise last year had a much better track, however we have also seen much worse. No complaints here!
Hey, there's a window to view the actual bridge of the ship, that's really cool. Not so unlike a starship:
Apparently door decorations are a thing on cruise ships, how did we not pick up on that before? Trekkies can be pretty ambitious, so it was fun to walk all the floors and check things out. Here you can pet the Tribbles (I did, of course):
A nice compilation of ships named Enterprise:
Many, many memes on many doors. I learned I've been missing a lot of funny things on the internet:
My favorite:
Finally, one that looks good in a photograph (or maybe my camera isn't built for shooting doors in a hallway with challenging lighting):
This wall communicator actually whistles when you push the button, too funny:
One room dedicated their door to the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition - posting the entire list, among other things. We were impressed (and John was momentarily sidetracked):
Well, we still ran out of time to see all the doors, good thing there are two more shore leave days.
Everyone's back on board, so a bunch of us squeezed into 13 Forward to find out what "A Visit to Original Trek" was all about. Gates and Jonathan had assembled a cast to read "The Trouble With Tribbles" - fun! Lots of laughs, accents, overacting (Gates played Kirk), physical comedy (even as simple as the script instructions for "Kirk reacts"), and furry Tribble balls being thrown around. Awesome.
We got in line early for a good seat at the next show - George Takei was going to come talk to us! I love George! We met him briefly (the day before, I think) for our photo session and hopefully in the near future we'll receive those pictures so I can share them.
Oh, so while waiting in line I noticed this on display and took a picture to review the list of people confirmed for next year's cruise - Wil Wheaton, should be fun! Great to see that many of the same actors are enjoying this enough to come back. And a couple new folks from Discovery:
Hello George! I was thrilled, just love listening to him talk. He described many interesting parts of his life, and even though we'd heard some of it before in his book, I would sit and hear it again in person anytime.
We were in the front row, and I didn't take any photos (per production's request) but I did snag this from a Twitter post:
So exciting!
We managed a relatively quick sit-down dinner, and this is not normally how we act on a cruise. Usually lounging through dinner is one of the day's highlights, here we were just happy if we could fit it in. I learned we could get in and out in about an hour if we skipped dessert (sacrilege!) or came back for dessert later (John was OK with that).
Happily we had time for it tonight, and happily John ordered the Volcano Cake (sometimes called Lava Cake - we couldn't figure out why the name changed) because it came with a special white chocolate treat this evening:
One of many adorable towel animals:
OK! Time to dress up. This all started with me saying that I liked Rey's outfit in Star Wars and maybe I should get one for the costume contest and Kip saying he thought Q (aka John de Lancie) would find that funny. Normally Star Trek and Star Wars don't mix well together, although I don't know why not, it's all about space and action and good stories and a touch of geekiness.
Anyway, I offered to get John a Jedi cloak and he was all in. Kip went looking for a costume and came back with Chewbacca that matched his hair, and a nerf bow and a cute Porg for accessories. We were pretty wary about venturing into a hoard of Star Trek fans wearing this, but people mostly thought it was funny and the ribbing was all good-natured.
So, here are a few photos that are blurry, poorly-lit, and taken by a guy with a hood over his face:
The best part was getting to join the group of excellently-costumed characters on the floor for inspection by John de Lancie. Seeing all the great outfits up close was great. I think normally this party takes place on the pool deck where there is a lot more room, but it was super windy outside so we crowded into 13 Forward.
And we got to stand next to John de Lancie! He went around and interviewed a few people, and focused on the best-made costumes (especially the homemade ones). We were next to a couple from Austin dressed in an elaborate Dia de los Muertos outfit - and she started crying when John de Lancie talked with them! So sweet.
John de Lancie is super friendly and nice (and tall); Kip says he likes the character Q better but I'm more of a de Lancie fan. Kip was also hoping to get heckled by Q during the proceedings, but I was perfectly content not to be asked to speak into the microphone. The best I'd come up with was that we were "Star Trek fans from a galaxy far, far away."
A gathering of the best costumes, and some pretty amazing ones at that:
The audience votes came down to wonderful representations of Guinan (Whoopi Goldberg's character) and Moogie (the mother of Ferengi's Quark and Rom). Moogie gave a really funny little interview about how she made the infant she was carrying around because "you can't just buy a baby Ferengi" and she won the contest. Well done!
A Twitter photo of Moogie up close:
Yay for Q's Costume Party, that was fun!
One last show for the evening, some comedy with Ethan Phillips. He mentioned a couple times that he doesn't do this for a living, telling mostly-raunchy jokes that he has collected over the years. But he was really good at it. I can't repeat here any of the ones I remember, plus they wouldn't be nearly as funny without Ethan telling them.
One last attempt at a decent group photo before we stash our sacrilegious costumes and illicit play weapons and adorable Porg:
While we were posing, a guy walked up asking "could you use another Wookie?" Too funny! Of course, always! Happy to see we weren't the only ones with this silly idea:
Another fun day, I can't believe the journey is half over already!
