Mystery Cruise

Today I went to the rainforest and fed pigs non-alcoholic beer with Spice Girls, Talking Heads, and TLC playing in the background (Wannabe, Road to Nowhere, and Scrubs).

I have wanted to start a sentence that way for weeks now!  At our last divisional safety meeting our cruise director, Mark, told us about a place up in the rainforest of St. Croix called the Pig’s Pen.  This Saturday will be my friend, Doug’s, last day on the Serenade, so we decided to try it before he left.

I know-today is not Saturday.  Summer is hurricane season, and there is a form starting around Barbados (tomorrow’s scheduled port).  To avoid the storm, we’re in St. Croix a week early and we’ll wait before trying Barbados.  Don’t worry, the captain knows what she’s doing.  Ships are very good at avoiding hurricanes since they have so much money tied up in cruising.  When I left the ship this morning it was still unclear about where the storm will hit, so nobody knows which ports we’ll see this week.

This morning we set off at 10:30 because we thought it would be a long drive into the rainforest, but it ended up taking just fifteen minutes!  The Pig’s Pen costs a dollar admission and the beers for the pigs are around a dollar too. We had to shake up the cans of O’Doule’s, place them unopened in the pigs’ mouths, and step back before the beer sprayed us.  The pigs loved it!  They were huge pigs-tall, I mean.  Not as big as the ones at the Iowa State Fair, but they were actually moving around and having fun drinking the beer.  After they finished the beer they just casually spit out the cans.  We each had a drink before we left, and we still had time to come to the deli!

So far the Mystery Cruise is going well, and I’m optimistic about the rest of the week!

 

By the way: I’m sorry this post was so much later than the others.  My computer crashed and I left it in St. Thomas for repair.  If anything exciting happens I’ll let you know!