Well, I'm not completely recovered from my cold, but I'm trying to get back to my normal stuff now. The first thing I'm attacking is food. My cold hasn't interfered with my ability to eat, like a stomach virus would. It just meant that I didn't care - I ate whatever I could find in the house. After a week of cruise eating, this probably wasn't a good thing. I don't think I gained a lot of weight. I mean, I did get a serious ab workout after coughing non-stop for a week, and I worked out a couple of times on vacation (a couple means twice - I worked out twice). So, I don't have a long way to go. But I do think I may have gotten a wee bit...fleshy, in spots that might have been less fleshy this time last month. So today, it's back to watching what I eat!
A word about cruise eating. You can count this as my first installment on telling about my Alaska trip. You always hear about non-stop gourmet food on a cruise. On my cruise, at least this wasn't entirely true. We did have some amazing food in the dining room for lunch or dinner (we never tried the dining room for breakfast). But we didn't always want to go to the dining room. You had to eat at a specific time if you ate there: 12-1 for lunch, and 8:15 for my folks and me for dinner. If those times weren't going to work for us, we had to eat from the buffet. I think the buffet lunch was 11-2 and dinner was 6-8 or something. For lunch and dinner, the buffet often had some of the same items as the dining room, but not entirely, and sometimes it wasn't all that great.
Now, what if I'm hungry at 5:00? Well, then my only option is the grill by the pool for hamburgers or hot dogs. They also had a nacho bar. This is a reasonable enough option if the food is actually kept at the right temperature. I have to assume that the day I had a hot dog there, it wasn't, since I spent the entire night that night in the bathroom with bad things happening above and below. It wasn't one of those viruses you hear about where the half the cruise patrons are taken out. By the next day things began to clear up. But I was wary of the grill after that.
What about breakfast, you say? Well, the best option we found was room service. We only used it a couple of times at the end of the trip, but probably we'd use it more if we cruised again. The taste and variety of the food on the breakfast buffet was fine, but the line was INSANE! It was so long. The lunch line could also get pretty unbearable, and there was rarely enough seating. But for breakfast, if you could hang in there, you could have yourself a nice breakfast. They had a dish I particularly liked which was a mueslix with yogurt and fruit and oats. It was goooood. I had it almost every morning that we ate in the buffet!
Dinner in the dining room was everything you always hear about with cruise food, though. It was awesome. One night I had surf and turf, and I swear, it was one of the best steaks I've ever had. If you've never taken a cruise, you eat with same folks at the same table each night. We had a great couple from Ohio at our table, and we really enjoyed eating with them. We were really lucky. How awful would it be to be stuck with someone you couldn't stand every night? You'd either have to endure them or not get the good food!
Well, for the moment, I guess that's all about the food. If I think of other things while recapping my amazing trip, I'll slip it in there. All I've accomplished at the moment, though, is making myself hungry!
1 comment:
When we took our Cruise-from-Hell (and it was), we ate in the dining room for every meal. EVERY.SINGLE.MEAL. Never did we go to the buffet. We had the most awesome mother/daughter couple at our table (it was her high school graduation gift from her mom), and our waiter was THE BEST. I loved it.
The dining experience on our cruise, however, was the ONLY part I liked. That's a whole blog in and of itself!
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