Woke up for the first morning on the ship thinking, “What’s that noise…and how hungover am I?”  I kept hearing the clinking noise as I wandered to the bathroom and stumbled from side to side.

Then, I realized, it was the hangers in our closet swinging back and forth into one another.  We turned on the TV to sea what that bridge report was, and the waves were swelling over 11 feet.  I had been told you don’t feel the waves on a ship that big.  I had been told incorrectly.  We tried to look for a few other things on television, but there’s really nothing except Fox and MSNBC, so we kept switching between those two so that we could yell at the left and the right equally.  If we wanted to, we could have gotten wifi or movies and watched more things, but it was expensive on the ship. REALLY expensive.   I didn’t know that about cruises.  I just assumed they were like all-inclusives where I could stream away merrily.  No streaming for me.  Instead, I just watched the only movie I had downloaded, Wine Country, over and over again.  (It’s cute…if you haven’t seen it nine times…)

A few times while I was blow drying my hair, I felt that cold sweat start and had to go outside to get some air.  That helped with the nausea.  If I had known, I would have taken Bonine the night before.  Now, I do.  (Oh, that hair dryer in the room?  Pretty good, actually.  It is attached under the desk, so you have to do it in the middle of the room. But if you care about hair products, bring your own.  It’s that 2 in 1 shampoo/conditioner stuff.)

So… we were at sea all day, and I immediately started marking all the things we would do on my app.  Our only plan was the first of our 3 dinners as part of our package.  We were going to the Italian restaurant with my in laws.

For breakfast, we went to The Local  (midship on deck seven.) They had an abbreviated breakfast menu and a little bowling alley right behind. We ran into the Herbst family there who were also struggling with the ups and downs of the day…  but they said that dinner at La Cucina had been quite good.

I decided I wanted to go check out more of the ship… have a look at the racetrack and the pool…

It was definitely a challenge to walk around up there on decks 19 and 20.  I literally thought the pool was a wave pool.  It wasn’t until I went back to it a few days later (and got MUCH better pictures) that I realized it was just the motion of the ocean, baby…

On the top of that ship there are two water slides, a race track, a putt putt course, and laser tag.  This is a BIG SHIP.

It was too cold and rocky up there, so we went back down to 678 Ocean Place (that’s floors 6, 7, and 8) for awhile.

I threw five dollars in a slot machine…  immediately won 6 more; then, lost it all in a matter of moments.  That’s how you’re supposed to do it, right?

We took a crab-walking stroll through the duty free shops, hung out for a few games in the atrium.  We kept going out to get some fresh air from time to time.

After all that wandering, we got back to what we’re really supposed to do on a cruise:  eating.  We hadn’t braved the buffet, yet… so we decided why not… just for snacks…

This may have been the most enormous and overwhelming thing I’d seen so far.  It was TEEMING with people.  Some looking worse for the wear.  It was still quite rocky.  There were a few areas roped off where people had lost their battle with the sea.  We had some cheese and meats and then ran away…back up to the observation lounge.  I saw my sister-in-law there again, sipping on Ginger Ale (Have I said it was rocky)? I grabbed a glass of rosé  that I just had to pay a little extra for.  I mean Jon Bon Jovi owns the label, and I’m from New Jersey, sooooo  The captain came on and said things would settle down soon.    We were truly starting to feel better by then… so we went back to the room, opened up the cheese we bought in Seattle, and had an appetizer.

This was the night that we had plans for dinner at La Cucina, the Italian restaurant with Richard’s parents.  The whole family was feeling much better by that point.

When you have the meal package, the food consists of two appetizers, one main, and one dessert per person.  I’m used to the smaller portion sizes that you get at all-inclusive restaurants in Mexico.  These are not small sizes!   You can eat youself silly on a cruise ship if you’re not careful!  The food was good, but I didn’t want to be taking pictures through the meal with my in-laws.  I may be well-planted in the family by now.  I still don’t want to be “that girl.”  It was a great meal, though, right by the wine cellar.  I did force my in-laws into getting pictures taken.  We went by on the last day to take a look at our binder (indicated right on our handy dandy key card), but we didn’t really want to spend $25 for picture or $50 for a flashdrive, so you get to see the NCL watermark on our faces.  If you go to login.com while you’re on the ship, but DON’T login, you can see all the pictures the ship photographers have taken from you as you’re going along.  Pretty cool!

After dinner, I still had my list of things to do that night…  so we went to go see Piano Paul Mullen in the observation lounge  He did your typical piano bar fare.  Lots of Neil Diamond, Elton John, and Billy Joel. (The video in the link is from the Norwegian Sky, but you get the idea.) He did them all quite well, and he became our “go to” guy when we had downtime.  I have videos, but I’m too cheap to pay for videos on WordPress, so you’ll just have to imagine that it’s happening in the observation lounge on the Bliss.

Feeling spunky, we went down to “Q.” It’s another of the a la carte restaurants, but it turns into a country bar at night, so we went to listen to that for awhile before retiring to bed.  We went to check out Mickey Utley.  It was pretty fun semi-modern country.  We were having a good time. We knew we’d be waking up the next morning in Alaska, however, so it was time to hit the sack for our first day with an excursion!