Midnight for the Bendites

Well, I guess I’ll start by filling in what happened with the luggage. This morning I had set the alarm on my cell-phone for 4:00AM (7:00 if you look at the three hour difference. I forgot, however, that if it receives a signal, it automatically sets itself for the correct time, so at 4:00 in the morning, I had a rude, and definitely unwanted awakening. I eventually got back to sleep, luckily I was so exhausted after only a few hours of sleep over a few days it took only a few minutes. A few hours later, a call came for me to come and go help with finding the missing luggage, so I showered quickly and went downstairs. By the time I got down there, they were just getting around to realizing that the mother had her name down for the luggage, so she would need to go down to the airport to get the luggage anyway, so I was basically unneeded. Another fantabulous morning. ;) Well, I may as well take the time I have to describe the group I’m traveling with. The group we first met up with was Berni (My half sister) and her husband Sean, who are nice people, good fun. Also joining us are the Carringtons, Sue and Aaron, who I was elected to help with luggage. Sue is an.. Interesting... character. She is a single mother, and is very outgoing. There have ben a few times when she has suddenly appeared in my house, having entered because it was the house of someone she knew. Then we come to the group we met up with on the boat. The Powrie family is what I think of as a modern Brady Bunch family, minus Alice the maid. Both parents began as single parents of three children, and they now make up a family of eight people. The younger wife has children that are almost the same as the older set of children when their father was the age the mother currently is. Its kind of disturbing actually. The young boys are close in age, and distanced a bit from the prima donna with blond hair, which is exactly the situation when I first met the Powries before the father’s first wife passed away. The boys are now older, and the girl has evolved from a prissy princess to a fashionable popular girl (the only 12 year old I’ve ever known to give Kelli twenty minutes of fashion advice all at once), but the idea is the same. The last two to join our party and bring us within one of twenty people are my grandmother and disabled aunt who my grandmother takes care of. All in all we make up a pretty random and oddball group, and consequently are the life of the boat. I say we are the life of the boat not because I’m so vain I think that our random group can be better than everyone else, but because we somehow ended up on a boat where people between the ages of 8 and 75 are incredibly rare. In fact, the closest person to my own age is 17 year old Graham Powrie, who was a close friend of mine before he moved a few years back. The closest after that is my own sister, who is twenty. In other words, there really isn’t going to be anyone my age to hang out with aside from my own group that I’m with, and not a whole lot of meeting up with new and interesting people. The one plus to this is I’ll get to spend time with people of my own party, as Graham and his brother won’t be searching for the “hottest girl” for 10 days ;-) (in fact the first words I heard out of Graham were, “I can’t believe we ended up on the over 60 cruise.”) His assessment isn’t very far off. I have a feeling if we wanted to form a game of basketball that was more than 3 vs. 2 (say maybe 5 vs. 5 like I saw on an adjacent boat in port) I have a feeling we would need to be dodging wheelchairs and walkers. Anywho, enough of complaining. The boat is still beautiful, and food is great, and its fun to be with old friends. I’m also anxiously awaiting the 800 feet submarine dive and Mayan ruins. (The reasoning for the lack of under 60 year olds may be attributed to the fact that this is a ten day cruise, and anyone who anted to go on it would have to miss at least four days of school, and that kind of presents a problem.) I’m off for now, I have to be awake in a few hours, so ta-ta for now. Oh, and I saw some flying fish from the deck of the boat after we finally left port. A seagull pointed it out for us by trying to catch it in mid air. It as quite exciting to watch. I use the word exciting far to much in here, I need a new word.