236-242/366: No-Kids Cruise Photo Dump

Since I’ve given up on the strict daily arrangement, I’m going to somewhat arbitrarily assign photos from the cruise numbers corresponding to the days of the last two weeks. I’ll do this in two big photo dump posts, grouped by whether or not SteelyKid and The Pip are in the shots. And since this is a little cheesy, I’ll throw in some extra bonus photos as well…

236/366: Ships

The Disney Magic, from the dock at Castaway Cay.
The Disney Magic, from the dock at Castaway Cay.

It seems appropriate to start with a picture of our ship, the Disney Magic. This is out of chronological order, as it was taken the last day of the trip, but this was the one stop where we thought to tie something to the balcony rail so we could spot our staterooms. If you squint really hard along the last row of balconies, you’ll see a little red dot near the middle of the ship. That’s us.

And here’s a bonus photo:

A couple of cargo ships passing us off the coast of Cuba.
A couple of cargo ships passing us off the coast of Cuba.

This is me playing with the telephoto lens, taking pictures of merchant shipping in the Caribbean.

237/366: Slide

Maintenance workers cleaning and checking one of the waterslides on board.
Maintenance workers cleaning and checking one of the waterslides on board.

It took most of the trip to get the kids interested in going down the waterslide on board, but once they did, they were really fired up about watersliding… This is from earlier in the trip, when I was wandering the decks not long after sunrise.

238/366: Sunrise

Sunrise on 4/25/16.
Sunrise on 4/25/16.
Sunrise on 4/29/16.
Sunrise on 4/29/16.
Not long after sunrise on 4/30/16.
Not long after sunrise on 4/30/16.
Artsy shot of the rising sun refracting through a lamp at the front of the ship.
Artsy shot of the rising sun refracting through a lamp at the front of the ship.

As mentioned above (and also in a physics post at Forbes, which includes yet another sunrise photo), I woke up early pretty much every morning of the cruise, so I spent a lot of time wandering the decks with my camera. This led to some nice pictures of sunrises, with varying degrees of artiness.

239/366: Birds

The osprey that rode with us from Grand Cayman to Cozumel, and an ibis that flew out from shore.
The osprey that rode with us from Grand Cayman to Cozumel, and an ibis that flew out from shore.

One morning when I walked up to the bow of the ship, I was surprised to see a raptor perched on the flagpole at the bow. Another passenger, a British man who was apparently a birdwatcher, said it was an osprey that had landed there the night before. I guess it was just hitching a ride from Grand Cayman to Cozumel.

Sadly, I didn’t have the telephoto on the camera, so I couldn’t really zoom in (and I just knew that if I went down to get the telephoto from our room, it would fly away…), but I did get this nice shot of the perched osprey and an ibis (I think; I’m going on what another passenger called it) that flew past not long before we spotted land on the horizon. The osprey took off shortly after this.

240/366: F*&k Yeah, Fluid Dynamics

Swirls and eddies in the wake of the ship as we maneuvered into port.
Swirls and eddies in the wake of the ship as we maneuvered into port.

Wave patterns are pretty. That is all.

241/366: Cartoons

Animated drawings by the guests at dinner one night.
Animated drawings by the guests at dinner one night.

One of the onboard restaurants is called “Animator’s Palette,” with an obvious cartoon theme. One of the nights we ate there, we got placemats with a crude figure outline and instructions to color it in. They collected these while we were having appetizers, then scanned and animated them into a little cartoon that played during the main course. The red one just behind the Lion King characters was The Pip’s.

242/366: Beach

The beach at Castaway Cay.
The beach at Castaway Cay.

This one’s cheating a bit on the “no-kids” thing, as you can see Kate and the kids in the water if you look carefully. They’re hard to spot, though, and I like this both as a jealous-making shot and for putting our grand snorkeling adventure into perspective. The nice woman in the yellow-and-blue shirt is watching over the snorkel-only part of the lagoon, where we entered the water with SteelyKid. We left the water over an hour later, down at the far end, by the rocks that you can just barely make out. So, you know, quite the swim for SteelyKid…

That’s also a nice lead-in to the next batch of photos, tomorrow or Friday, which will be seven days’ worth of cute-kid photos. Get your insulin shots ready.