Bob:

Somewhat short on sleep, we skipped the stretching class in favor of a leisurely breakfast, then Walk-A-Mile, a dance class on East Coast Swing, and a final round of mini-golf. Playing mini-golf while the ship is rolling, by the way, adds an element of difficulty to the basic game that makes it a lot more fun! After lunch we returned to the cabin to pack, which after six weeks of accumulating miscellaneous stuff was a truly daunting, not to say depressing, experience. Undeterred by our luggage bursting at the seams, after a final Walk-A-Mile we redeemed all of our ShipShape dollars for two T-shirts, two towels, two water bottles, and five caribiners with "Royal Caribbean" on them. Then, of course, we had to cram all that into our already over-stuffed luggage. We had a nice final meal with Pam, Anne, Audry, and Dawn, put our luggage out to be taken ashore when we arrived in Ft. Lauderdale, and then dragged ourselves to the second major production by the ship's song-and-dance company.

That routine, called "City of Dreams", had a coherent story line about two young lovers from the lost continent of Altantis who travel all over the world looking for each other. As tenuous as that is, the story line gave the production a coherence that some of the other cruise ship productions I have seen have lacked. The producers had also cleverly embedded several familiar popular music numbers, but always in such a way that it either furthered the story line or at least did not break the flow of it. Some of the scenes in the production were really small acts in and of themselves, and they varied a great deal. Besides the typical song-and-dance numbers they had acrobatic numbers with some cast members being flown on wires across the stage, and yet other scenes involved a very classic ballet pas de deux. Monika and I both liked that production very much.