Sailing Like a Celebrity -- Day 3

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Day 3 -- Martha's Vineyard
Cold/foggy at sunrise. Sunny, 70°, by 10 am

We decided to have breakfast in the main dining room, instead of walking around the buffet. The menu was very basic, with eggs, pancakes, and French Toast. No interesting options. I had an omelet, which was very good; but the chicken sausage (which actually did sound interesting) was dry and crumbly and I didn't eat it.

Tenders were running to shore early, so we headed ashore pretty quickly after breakfast. Celebrity only offered one excursion for the port, and we didn't really like it, so again, we did our own walking tour. We visited a few of the shops that are right next to the dock where the tenders dropped us. Then we walked to the beach and saw a couple nice public parks. My mother-in-law really wanted to see the "gingerbread houses" (which I'd never heard of), but we walked through and enjoyed the cute design details of the houses.

These first two ports weren't all that interesting to me, personally, since we live in Massachusetts and have visited both Newport and Martha's Vineyard many times. We joked with some of our fellow passengers that we drove 3 hours to Bayonne in order to visit a port that's less than 3 hours from our house. But the day was beautiful and our walk was quiet and peaceful. We headed back to the ship around 1:30.

We got back before Oceanview Cafe stopped serving lunch, so that's where we headed. I had some really good chicken teriyaki from the Asian station, and of course, some pizza. Dale tried the quesadillas from the Mexican station, but again, they were way too spicy to eat. One other nice thing about the buffet restaurant is that there is an ice cream counter that serves both soft-serve and scooped ice cream. It's called Scoops (which should ring a bell for long-time DCL cruisers). They always had vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry "hard" ice cream; and then they'd rotate one other flavor each day. The soft-serve was much more hit-or-miss. Sometimes they had twist flavors, sometimes they only had vanilla, sometimes there just wasn't any soft-serve available. But it was nice to have some kind of ice cream as a snack any time we wanted it. Scoops also served fresh-baked cookies to go along with the ice cream. They had chocolate chip, or peanut butter, macadamia nut, or oatmeal raisin cookies.

There's also a place on Deck 5 where you can get gelato for an extra fee. We didn't partake. It's directly across from a really nice coffee location (Cafe al Bocio) that also serves small sweet snacks. We enjoyed the coffee and snacks there frequently.

After lunch, I headed to the Solarium for a long afternoon of doing nothing. It's a great location. I swam, I hot-tubbed, I caught up on my trip notes. Kathryn says I napped, but I think she made that up.

The evening show was comedian Orlando Baxter. He was funny! He did a clean show (even though there were no kids in the audience for our show). You could tell that it was an edited version of a more adult show, but it was still very funny and well-written. It was a story-telling style of humor, as opposed to one-liners or "bits". We all liked him a lot.

Straight to dinner for our regular 8:00 reservation. The menu didn't really grab me on this night. Kathryn was excited about the shredded lamb in a puff pastry, and she loved that. The only thing that interested me was a chicken pasta dish, which turned out to be quite good. But the appetizers and desserts were uninspiring, so we skipped dessert. The nice thing about the dinner menu in Cosmopolitan is that there are a few items that are available every night. So when the appetizers aren't to my liking, I would just choose the Caesar salad or the shrimp cocktail.

Kathryn's lamb. She loved this.

My pasta dish, topped with arugula. I hate arugula.

After dinner, we sat in one of the lounges to listen to Ocean Beat, another of the live bands onboard. This group is a jazz quartet. The singer, drummer, and bassist were all women; only the pianist was male. They were really good and not having any guitar at all made it very interesting, with the bass really coming through, almost as a lead instrument, instead of just being support in the background. I liked them very much.

The casino was running a promotion that night, giving away $25 gift cards every 15 minutes. So I wandered in and played roulette for an hour. I didn't win a gift card, but I was up $90 at the end of my night. After playing for a while, we went up to Oceanview for a piece of pizza for dessert (they serve until 1 am), and then headed back to the room for the night.