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Day 7: So much to do, so little time!
Cathy Every morning when I wake up, the first thing I do is open my cabin door and pick up Reflections, the daily list of all the activities on board the ship. The kids have their own list called the Surf Runner. Whenever people tell me, gosh, how can you be cooped up on a ship for so long? I always tell them you can be as busy or as lazy as you want to be.
Click above schedules to enlarge
Today we’re showing a broad array of the activities to give our readers a flavor of ‘the Crystal experience.’ Being that we’re exploring a possible Invitation to Design workshop on board Crystal, what better way to whet people’s appetite than to show them?
So our routine is to go have our breakfast and coffee at the Lido Cafe on the 11th deck—
Lissa We’d all talk about oh, what are you going to do today? Who’s doing what?
Cathy Before we’re even finished with breakfast, the girls are bugging us to go to Fantasia. That’s the kids’ area where they have a little mini theater, video games, arts and crafts, and the junior activities directors keep an eye on them. I call it free and fun babysitting! They make lots of new friends and they always have a great time—but then again our girls have a great time anywhere!
Lissa This particular morning I wanted to go down to the Computer University @ Sea because they had a couple of great classes.
Cathy You always led me to believe you were a computer whiz. Wasn’t that why we partnered up together?
Lissa There’s always more to learn. You should be taking those classes.
Cathy They had great lecturers on board, like Jan Wahl, who is a film critic. She is San Francisco’s answer to Ebert and Roeper. They call her ‘The Woman of Many Hats,’ because every time you see her she’s wearing a different hat. She is just such a fun and really warm person. She would always stop to talk to Nicki and tell me the importance of raising our girls with girl power!
Then you had Dr. Michael Ball, he’s a political science historian who’s worked for the CIA and the Pentagon and taught at military schools. Darrell really enjoyed his lectures.
After breakfast I popped back to my cabin and found a message from Mimi Weisband, who is Crystal’s vice president of public relations. Throughout the cruise we had been playing phone tag because she was really busy with all the dignitaries and press people on board. We had dropped off a little gift at her stateroom and left a message saying we would like to meet for business.
For those people who have never been on a cruise or been on Crystal recently, they had just done a complete refurbishment. Well, RSVPstyle is all about design and décor, and while this may be a ship, the concept still remains the same: updating, new finishes, color schemes and textures.
This morning Mimi and I finally got ahold of each other and I told Mimi that we were really interested in videotaping an interview with her about how Crystal did their shipboard renovation. She was very nice and promised that she would make time for us on her last sea day before she left the ship in Shanghai.
Mission accomplished—step one, anyway! Then I had to run and meet Lissa and Kara for my first activity of the day, a caricature, we thought that would be fun! We wanted a group one that we could put up in our office. In 15 minutes, which is amazing, Greg Dohlen did all three of us, and I thought he was really pretty good! He’s cute, too!
The funny story is he recently became engaged to Tori, who’s a junior cruise director in charge of the kids’ program. They met on Crystal. There’s a lot of love stories on board, you know!
Lissa Doing a caricature was funny because he’s trying to get your essence. So Cathy’s trying to be in front, and I forget we don’t have to pose like for a photograph, so we’re holding our smiles for like five minutes, which really isn’t easy to do.
Cathy We told him we wanted to be like Charlie’s Angels, all holding a different weapon. I wanted to be carrying the Style Kit on my shoulder.
Lissa I wanted my computer in my hand.
Cathy Kara was going to hold her camera. He couldn’t get it all in, all he could get were our bobble heads, but it was so cute.
Lissa You think that looks like us?
Cathy Yeah, I think he got it. By the way, he told me, you’re the boss, aren’t you? Does that mean my essence is bossy?!
After that I convinced my parents to take ballroom dance lessons. They have that every day at sea.
My mom prides herself on being quite a dancer when she was younger. The problem is she wants to lead. She was like, never mind what the teacher is saying, this is how I do it!
Oh! On sea days, the casino is open. Shhh, don’t tell anybody, but my mom likes those slot machines! I keep telling her the slot machines don’t have the best odds, but she always keeps to a budget and that’s what she likes to do.
The guys did their own thing that day. Darrell went to a lecture and played ping pong.
Lissa Dan learned how to write his name in Japanese. He took Megan and they said it was really fun.
Cathy Keoni got my dad to take a golf lesson with him.
By now the three of us really needed to meet up to coordinate our work. Lissa and I arrived at The Bistro first and ordered our cappuccinos. But where’s Kara? Twenty minutes later she sort of stumbles in with this blissed-out look on her face—she told us she was late because she couldn’t tear herself away from her hot-stone massage!
I filled the girls in about how I got us an interview with Mimi. Next on our to-do list was a meeting with Scott Peterson, the cruise director. So we looked over Reflections to map out our plan of attack: we determined that probably our best chance to ‘bump into’ him would be just before he introduced the comedy act at the Galaxy Lounge that night.
Scott being the cruise director, we knew he was the person to talk to about dates and venues for a potential Invitation to Design workshop. We booked this cruise just before our last big workshop in February, and the travel agency thought it was great and came up with the idea of having a fun and interactive interior design workshop aboard Crystal! They like to create experiences where people can leave the ship feeling like they’ve done something new and exciting.
Everyone I mentioned it to said they would love the opportunity to come aboard and mix learning and pleasure, with a group like us that would be fun! People have been asking us, when is this cruise going to be?
Lissa I never thought I’d be a cruise person. But the thing about Crystal is it’s cruising for all types of people, all ages.
Cathy People don’t realize it’s a great family vacation with something for everybody, from kids to grandparents.
Lissa So that was our meeting at The Bistro: what kind of information we would be gathering, who to talk to, how to schedule…
Cathy Business and networking. When we wrapped up it was time for—what else? Another party!
Every evening they have a drink special, and that night it was a Cable Car, and Lissa liked that! Now I don’t want you sounding like an alcoholic…
Lissa Well, this was a time to relax, and Crystal has a reputation for these flavored cocktails, so I tried a Cable Car. It had orange zest with spiced rum, orange curacao and fresh lemon sour. Then the bartender recommended the Sake Berry—that one had Nobu’s signature sake and it was my favorite of the cruise.
Cathy My mom looked really happy but at the same time a little sad. I said, Mom, aren’t you happy? Aren’t you having a great time? She said she was happy and she was glad she came, but she really missed my brother Mike and his family, and her sadness was that they weren’t there.
Lissa And you know what Cathy said?
Cathy It’s OK—your favorite is here! She just laughed and swatted me like she usually does. Dan, my other brother, was sitting on the other side of Mom and he said, ‘Who, me?’
We had to put our dance lessons to use. We met the dance instructors on board—a really cute, fun young couple, Roanna Yapp and Goran Simpraga. This was their first cruise.
I love the show Dancing with the Stars, and Roanna, who is a professional ballroom dancer, trained with many of those dance professionals. It was fun talking and dancing the night away!
Before the evening ended we had one more mission. Lissa and I hoofed it over to the Galaxy Lounge in our full dancing regalia. We noticed two entrances—we strategized to have Lissa at the right door and I’m on the left. When Scott appeared and headed toward the right, I ran over and Lissa and I cornered him, introduced ourselves and quickly asked him for a meeting. He was delightful! He said absolutely, just call me and we’ll set up a time.
Mission two accomplished—over and out!
