Century Celebration

For my grandfather's 100th birthday, we all joined him on a short cruise to Cozumel on the Carnival line. As it turned out, my grandfather was in much better shape than a lot of the other passengers! He struck quite a figure with his distinctive beret, but was a bit disappointed to find that his 2000+ fellow cruisers were not particularly keen dancers.

The journey started nicely, as five or six dolphins frolicked in the wake of the ship as we left Galveston. (Probably just picking up fish, really, in this particular instance.) I didn't get any pictures of the dolphins, but here's our last glimpse of the sun:

Yes, the weather deteriorated from there. Throughout the journey, the sky was overcast and the seas were a bit choppy at times. On the roughest day, some adventuresome souls ventured out on the sun deck and discovered that a doorway toward the front of the ship created a lovely wind tunnel. My niece kept circling around to run through the doorway with the wind at her back, thus becoming a champion sprinter for the nonce:

It really felt like you could just lean on the wind and just stay there, and a lot of the grownups played with this in different ways:

It was great to see everyone. While most of the grownups and Felix seemed just as I remembered them, I had a great deal of trouble reconciling the Deirdre and Ethan I remembered from two years ago with the Deirdre and Ethan I encountered on this trip. They were probably 10 and 3 the last time I saw them - a little girl and a baby - and are now very clearly a young lady and a boy. It took all my self-control to suppress the urge to say "My, how you've grown!" But they have grown, and it becomes them well.

Highlights of the trip (other than the wind tunnel) included an expedition to the beach in Cozumel where five of us splashed around in tidal pools for an hour, watching snails, hermit crabs, augers, lots of darting little fish, a bright red sea urchin in a crevice, and some things that looked like living trilobytes, although others later identified them for us as chitons.

The cousins all got together for a rousing game of boggle on the final night of the cruise, where I learned some new words such as "ani" and "fado". I can't necessarily define them (other than to note that ani is a kind of bird), but I now know that I can use them in word games...