Winter Break. Part II - Day 9: The Cruise Ship Curling Iron Catastrophe.
Today we woke up and were immediately confused.
I looked at the clock and saw that it was around 7:40-ish and thought, that can’t be right. At some point, Tzvi’s alarm went off, and then room service arrived… except room service was scheduled for some time between 8:30 and 9:00. That’s when it finally dawned on me that there was a time difference between Honduras time and ship time—something nobody bothered to tell us. Normally on a cruise, they make announcements the night before or give you some kind of warning. This time? Nothing. So I was totally confused and called Guest Services just to confirm what was going on. They told me that if we had booked a shore excursion through the cruise line, they would have notified us—but otherwise, we were on our own.
That’s when I realized I had booked our taxi for 10:00 a.m. island time, which would have been 11:00 a.m. ship time. Thankfully, I was able to call and move it and we were off the ship by 10:00 a.m. ship time—9:00 a.m. island time. We walked through the port, and our driver and his helper were WhatsApping me, so I was eventually able to locate them. But getting out of that port was a disaster. It’s insane. It’s disgusting. There are basically two narrow lanes, traffic everywhere, and it’s completely disorganized. We finally found the guy we were meeting, but then he told us he had notified the driver we were there—and it still took forever for the car to actually get into the port. I truly don’t understand why they don’t plan better, since they know exactly how crowded it’s going to be.
We ended up having to walk along this awful road. I don’t even know how to describe it—we were walking through mud, broken sidewalks, stray dogs everywhere. It was disgusting. Eventually, we reached the car, which, thankfully, was very nice, and took about a half-hour drive around the island to the Kimpton Grand Roatan in West Bay. We had booked a day pass through ResortPass at this hotel since it looked nice and there were no shore excursions we wanted to do. Last time we came to Roatan we did a shore excursion and were taken to a gross beach that we couldn’t get away from fast enough. We had contemplated just staying on the ship, but then we found this hotel and it looked nice, so we figured we’d give it a shot.
We checked in, got settled, and they set us up with seats by the pool. We spent the entire day there. The hotel is actually beautiful, the pool is really nice, and the beach is nice although very small (just a few feet of shoreline). I don’t know if this is somewhere we would ever go for a dedicated vacation, but definitely a nice place to spend a day. Hallie made a friend from the ship and spent a lot of time hanging out with her in the hot tub. The sun came out, we went to the beach for a bit, ordered chips and guacamole, and just relaxed. It was honestly a really nice day and a great way to spend time in Honduras. Highly recommend doing it this way.
Sitting in the pool in the sun, I finally felt relaxed for the first time on this trip. It was very nice, but it begs the question of why it took me so long. Maybe it was a combination of the poor weather the first few days and Tzvi’s sickness. I should mention that by this time everyone we knew were trying to change their Sunday flights. We looked on JetBlue and the flights we had booked for Tuesday were now almost sold out, and the last remaining tickets were selling for three times what we paid for them. You’re welcome, Tzvi.
We took the car back to the port, got straight back on the ship, grabbed some drinks, hung out at the hot tub for a bit, and then went back to the room to get ready for dinner.
And then… the excitement.
I was curling my hair when Hallie came in and asked me to blow-dry hers. I started blow-drying it, and I don’t know exactly what happened—someone moved, the curling iron fell off the counter, and by pure instinct, Hallie grabbed it. Unfortunately, she grabbed the hot end. Immediately, she burned the palm of her hand and started screaming. It was awful.
Off we went to the medical center. She was in so much pain—biting down on a towel so she wouldn’t scream—and it was really, really bad. We had to wait a bit, but the staff clearly understood how much pain she was in. She was seen by nurses and a doctor, and they treated her hand with Silvadene, aloe, and wrapped it up. Hallie did great, and everyone there was incredibly kind. And because she had to go through all of this, she got a bonus: she got to meet Sailor. Sailor is the ship dog we’ve been looking for the entire cruise. On the new Icon-class ships, they have a resident dog, and Sailor is ours. She happened to be in the medical center, and Hallie was thrilled to meet her, which made the whole ordeal a little better.
All of this delayed our dinner, which was scheduled at Giovanni’s Table, the specialty Italian restaurant. We ended up starting dinner about an hour late, but thankfully they had no issue holding our reservation. Dinner was pretty good. It started with these amazing buttered rolls, then we had salad, pizza, pasta, and salmon—everything was very tasty. For dessert, we ordered fried chocolate ravioli that were supposed to come with Nutella. Dessert took over 20 minutes to arrive, and I’m fairly certain it didn’t come with Nutella. I think they made fresh ravioli with chocolate sauce instead because they were worried about the allergy, even though we told them Nutella was fine. They were very nice and accommodating, but still—not what we wanted. And it took forever.
Because of the delay, we had to rush out to make it to the ice show, which started just minutes later. We hurried over and managed to get seats together, so it all worked out. The ice show was themed around the sun—focusing on different regions of the United States and how sunlight plays into them. For each region they played different music and brought out different staging. It started with Miami and Latin music, moved into Texas with cowboy hats and Beyonce, and ended in LA. It was actually a great show. The ice skaters were fantastic and some even did ‘extreme’ skating with flips. All Russian, obviously.
After the show we put the kids to bed and then walked around a bit. We sat for a while at the jazz club in Central Park, where we had probably the best cocktails of the trip.
Good day.