A BIRTHDAY TO REMEMBER

This year’s birthday was certainly one for the books! There was a perfect mix of fun, discovery, friendship, dancing and delicious food involved so it was hard to get anything wrong. It helped that I had my girls Molly and Lindsay to help make the day super-girly-fantastic! From midnight Tuesday night until 3 AM Thursday morning there was a perpetual party! Let me tell give you the rundown:

11:59 pm Tuesday night – Our lovely cruise director, Sue, buys a drink for me at the Looking Glass (the ship’s nightclub). I get one of the sweetest toasts ever and manage to keep my age to myself! We dance to some hot tunes, work up a nice buzz and then go to the crew bar!

1AM Wednesday morning it is officially my birthday and we go dancing to thump and bump house music in the crew bar. The spa girls sing happy birthday and I get a bourbon and ginger. We shake our thing until the crew bar closes at 2AM. Then Molly sings HAPPY BIRTHDAY all over again!

8AM I wake up and take a peek at my email inbox. There are 35 new messages! I LOVE my friends! They have all wished me Happy birthday on Facebook! I am laughing in my bed early in the morning at all my messages and I am thinking, “This is a great way to start my birthday!” I hop in and out of the shower and hear a little knock at the door. It’s Molly and Lindsay and they are singing HAPPY BIRTHDAY to me through the door. I feel so bad that I am running late for breakfast with them so I frantically swing a towel over me so I can open the door and tell the ladies I will be late. I opened the door to find they had taped balloons all over the front of it!! I am ecstatic and half nekked! We are all laughing so hard because I am thanking them and telling them I am running super late and apologizing and promise to look more decent in a few minutes! I am truly over the moon!

9:45AM I arrive at Windows, our ship’s buffet restaurant and every guest and server I see wishes me a Happy Birthday! Everyone knows about it because I told them in the show the night before. I feel like a total movie star! I slide over to a table to have breakfast with Molly, Lindsay and Karen Granger. We dish girl talk until our cute environmental officer, George, stops by to wish me happy birthday! Fun, friends, celebrity and eye candy in the morning! What more can a girl ask for?

10:30 Off into Split, Slovenia where I’ve never been! It’s a cute little town with loads of shopping and we girls LOVE to get our shop on! Billy tagged along with us but, being a guy, could not keep up with the shopping! By the time we got to ZARA (one of our favorites), he was ready to go! Poor guy! Amidst the shoes, the silky tops, the swingin’ coats and casual dresses I found a fantastic, basic black dress to wear for the evening. Full throttle into our shopping ventures, we parted ways with Billy and continued on until our bellies started grumbling. That’s when we found this little local bar set on the second floor of a building in the café area. What a cool little place this was! We sat at the bar overlooking the street, cafes and people walking by. It was a cute little getaway with an even cuter waiter! And what did we devour for birthday lunch? Local beer and fries! Yes, ya’ll! I had beer and fries for lunch! Talk about a renegade birthday meal! Afterwards we skipped over to the local gelato stand for some yummy deliciousness and then headed back to the ship. There we had a proper lunch and went to our cabins for a little down time.

4PM Nap Time! Isn’t it lovely to have a nap in the middle of the day? It makes you miss preschool and kindergarten!


8PM – Running late again! I put the finishing touches on my make-up, threw on my fabulous new black dress and ran up to the Cabaret Theatre with Molly and Lindsay to see Karen Granger’s show. She was fantastic, as usual, and she even used me as one of her audience victims! Well we all had a laugh and the night was just getting started!

9PM – Dinner at Prime C with Molly and Lindsay. Anyone who has experienced fine dining on a ship knows that the food and the service are unbeatable but the experience I had at Prime C was pure magic! Our waiter Brian and assistant waiter Jose were so sweet! They told us about everything on the menu and told us if we wanted to have one of everything we could have it!! We were tempted to take them up on the offer but knew that we could not manage to eat it all so we settled into our choices. Karen G. stopped by to have some wine and soup (which we tasted and it was tha bomb!). Our cruise director Sue stopped by to check in to see if everything was going all right (how sweet is that?). Then the cutest chef in the world came out to chat with us: Chef Kyle!! What a complete HOTTIE! I guess they sent him out to keep me preoccupied because I didn’t see the birthday cake coming from a mile away! The waiters sang HAPPY BIRTHDAY and I almost started to cry! I was so happy!

11PM – Drinks and dancing at the Looking Glass where my good friend Earl has ordered champagne with strawberries! Oy! To add to the fun the musicians in the orchestra are hanging out too! We chat it up until DJ Ron starts playing Motown and you know what happened next: DANCING!!! I can’t believe Ron even played James Brown’s SEX MACHINE! So you know I got a chance to “shake my money maker!” Oh but the night didn’t end there! By 1AM Molly, Lindsay, Gary and I were down in the crew bar for a raucous night of craziness! Mind you I’ve had about two Jack Daniels and some champagne too so I am on a buzz FOR REAL! Plus, to make the night a little interesting, I took about twenty single dollar bills to the crew bar to see how scandalous the folks could get. Well they showed me a thing or two (to say the least) and I have to tell you that I will never, ever, ever, ever, EVER be able to run for public office for the rest of my life!!! Or I will just have to pull an R. Kelly and deny it all: “It wasn’t me! I swear it wasn’t me!”

2AM – Birthday Cake at the staff mess! Remember that birthday cake they brought out for me in Prime C? Well they saved it for me so that I could have it for later and have it we did! At the end of the night that cake was devoured in our drunken silliness! I haven’t had such a good time since my 29th birthday party. Needless to say the next morning I woke up with a teeny weeny little hangover. But it was all worth it!

Thank you to everyone who made that day ever so special. It will go down in the history of birthdays as one of the best!

Signing off! Marsha