We were so GLAD that we did go with her that day. By chance we ended up at a table with two young ladies whom we had already noticed dancing and participating in everything. They turned out to be two of the sweetest, most fun people. We really enjoyed talking to them that morning, and made plans to find them and be on the same team for The Quest that evening.
After breakfast we headed up to the cabin to throw on sunscreen and hats, planning to wander around town on foot again, but with Marika in tow this time. As we were applying the sunscreen the phone rang: it was guest services. Amazingly, given that we had not made any complaints to them at all in the last 2 days and had already received that wine and strawberries the night before, they were calling to let us know that they were still unable to fix the a/c or the keys and asking if Dave and I wanted to move into a junior suite! Uh, well, yes, that sounds lovely, thank you!
Soooo, we headed down to guest services to have one of the keys to 6516 replaced with one key to 8574, and kept the other at 8516 so we could have access to both rooms while packing and moving our things. Dave made a point of remaining both the person on the phone, and the person who actually changed the keys, that we were not disembarking until Genoa, and confirming that this would not be an issue. We were told not to worry; it would be no issue at all.
Rather than heading out into Palma as planned, we spent the next hour packing up and moving and unpacking again. Marika was kind enough to help out (Rio was off somewhere and did not even know we were moving at that point). When we arrived at the room with our first batch of bags, the stateroom host came running up as we opened the door. Apparently he had not been notified that guests were being moved into the room. There were 6 or so large plastic bags full of extra pillows, blankets and towels scattered over the be and sofa. We told him not to worry, just left the bags packed up there and as much out of his way as we could and then told him we would need another 20 minutes or so anyway to get another load of stuff, and took our time gathering the next batch to give him time to clear things out.
Here are some photos of Junior Suite 8574 on Legend of the Seas. Other than the larger bathroom and balcony , it was about the size of a normal balcony stateroom on a newer ship:
(as you can see, there is no walk in closet, only the little one Dave is modeling back there)
The addition of a bathtub, means that the base of the tub is set higher off the floor than a shower base would be. No problem for someone my size, but as these photos taken later show, it is a not so comfortable if you are 6' 5"! (see below)
One nice benefit of a junior suite was that we finally had somewhere to keep our wine cold. The mini bar fridge was not initially set to a very cold temp, but Dave wasted no time finding the tiny dial on the top of the box and fixing that (I thought he was funny crawling around on the floor and had to snap a photo):
It turned out that our tablemates from breakfast had the room directly across the hall! Poor girls had prepooked a private shore excursion that they were really excited about when we spoke to them at breakfast, but had since learned that we were not docked where they had expected and they could not get all the way across the island to the excursion in time. They were trying to salvage their day and find out how to get to a good beach from the ship. Living in Germany, Dave's iPHONE has a European data plan, so it was easy and inexpensive to look that up for them, and we could point out the bus stop location right from our balcony--so that worked out nicely. That night they said the beach had been nice, and easy to get to and they were able to ride a banana boat and do some other fun things while there.
Being less ambitious than the 20 somethings, by the time we had everything moved and put back away and had hunted down Rio to tell him where we were, and had changed all the keys over and let the stateroom hostess down on deck 6 know what was up, etc it was already lunch time, Dave and I decided we were not up for a jaunt in town and decided just to remain on board for the day. We ordered room service for the group, s owe could enjoy our new, bigger balcony.
We relaxed and played Pictionary and trivia, swam, played some game in the Centrum that I cannot recall the name of:
(there were a LOT of games that involved standing back to back and wearing hats throughout the cruise)
In the early evening we made it to the Crown and Anchor Welcome Back party that we had missed the week before. It was pretty much the norm for such things, free but cheap drinks, the captain and CD talking about the newest ship on the way, etc.
After dinner in the MDr we watched the "Sun" aerial show in the Centrum, and then hung around having some drinks in the R Bar (the first week we really did not have the hang of arriving early for Centrum activities, getting one of the comfy seats at the R Bar, then ordered one of their much better quality drinks--so says Dave, I am a Coke girl myself--and REALLY relaxing. It was nice to have two weeks and have that sort of thing down by the second go around!). At 10:25 there was an enjoyable song set by Porter and Amy called "Summer Breeze"
After relaxing at R Bar we headed over the Anchors Aweigh for The Quest. We easily found our tablemates, Andrea and Elisa, and were happy to see that they had already assembled a good sized group of outgoing and energetic people--all out to have fun. Marika and Rio came along shortly (and it is unusual for Marika to like something so loud and chaotic--you KNOW this was a good group when Marika was up for being a part of it) and they had some teammates to frag in as well--some fun people that they met playing 80s tune trivia earlier in the evening. Our normal experience with Quest has been that a team usually has 2-4 people who are willing to participate in actually Doing things, and the rest get excited cheering, might had things to those who will go up, or even push us crazy ones forward, but will not really participate fully. WE had the best Quest team EVER. Every single person of our 15 or so member team was wiling to go up and be silly and I think every single one did go up at least once. Everyone was really into it and really out to have fun and it showed! I have rarely laughed so hard. Oh, and we DI win, of course.
Sadly, I did not have my camera on me then. You will just have to trust me that we rocked :) (EDIT--thanks to Elisa for sending me this awesome photo of the greatest Quest team of all time!):
After Quest, the kids were actually so tired they went to bed before the adults--we went up to the "nightclub" which had been moved to a dance party in the Solarium (a very fun venue for that, though the hard tile is rough on your knees if you do a lot of dancing) and hung out for another hour or so before turning in ourselves.
Up next, a day in old town Valencia
--Hadley
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