Don't Tell the Eight-Year-Old

It appears the eight-year-old is sensitive to visual stimuli. This is to say, he apparently elected a northbound cruise over a southbound due to his experience seeing the trailer for The Shallows, a forthcoming movie in which a surfer girl gets trapped on a buoy by a killer shark. 

The northbound cruise meant no beaches. No beaches, no sharks.

Similarly, at a recent family video night, his dad apparently started to queue up The Finest Hours, the recent Chris Pine movie wherein Mr. Pine leads a Coast Guard rescue of a couple of sinking oil tankers, only to have that choice rapidly shot down.

Well, here's hopin' the eight-year-old has never seen Titanic. Today* I received a message from the Disney Cruise people reminding me to complete my online check-in. Good thing they did, because I wasn't aware I had to do an online check-in. 

Mostly they just wanted my credit card number -- and my agreement that I would be responsible for covering the bills for anything anyone in my party purchased -- but you also had to give them the specific time of day, choosing from eight or ten different thirty minute windows, when you would show up at the boat. Apparently, they don't want to deal with however many thousands of passengers arriving all at once. 

Fair enough.

But getting back to Titanic, I also learned the important lesson that when you buy passage on a cruise off the last minute clearance rack, and don't spring for any upgrades, you wind up, well, in steerage. Thus, my little party will be in the Leonardo di Caprio section of the boat, not the Kate Winslet section, and about the only thing between us and the water will be the engines and the bilge rats, if that.**

But I'm thinking I'll be a little less than completely transparent with the rest of my party on that part of the cruise, at least until the fact that we're taking the elevator to the bottom makes it obvious. 

We leave in a week. I wish I could say I was ready. 

* Well, actually, I received the message weeks ago, but I only read it today. I've been busy. 

** Disney's boat maps are fairly sketchy about the parts of the boat the passengers don't see.