Today’s BearCruise group’s schedule of activities
Wednesday, October 1 – Bar Harbor, Maine
Happy Birthday to Rich D’Amico!!!
7 am – 4 pm – In Port. Bar Harbor is a tender port. If you are on a shore excursion, you must ensure you get onto an early tender to get to the meeting point on shore by 9 am.
9:30 am – 12:30 pm – BearCruise NE – Puffin & Lighthouse Cruise. Follow the meeting instructions on your voucher from Compass Tours.
10:30 am – Noon – BearCruise NE – Lobster Fishing and Seal Watching. Follow the meeting instructions on your voucher from Compass Tours.
4 pm – Pool / Hot Tub Takeover. If you are back on board, join other BearCruisers on Deck 15 midship at one of the pools or hot tubs.
6:00 pm – Cocktail Hour, Mixx, Deck 6, aft. It is also BearCruise Hawaiian Shirt Night! Wear your favorite Hawaiian Shirt to cocktail hour and dinner.
Dinner – Taste and Savor on Deck 6 aft and The Manhattan Room on Deck 7 aft.
After Dinner – Ship shows and activities – see today’s NCL’s daily program, the Freestyle Daily, below.
Today’s NCL cruise’s schedule of activities
We didn’t do any of the excursions offered in this port. We just walked around the cute little seaside town.
At the end of the exit ramp from the ship, there was this huge totally unrealistic, big black plastic whale the screamed “photograph me.”
Some very festive store fronts:
I’m always happy to see bookstores wherever I travel and this one, hailed as “Maine’s Oldest Bookstore,” drew me in.
To complement that whacky whale was this lobster holding an ice cream cone.
The town’s Village Green:
And the town’s protection:
We passed a store that had a lot of dogs outside of it, and it was a minute before I noticed the name of the store there — Bar Harbor’s own:
While walking around, I was on the lookout for a coffee-shop with free wi-fi and without success, I stopped into the Visitor’s Center and asked the lady there about one, and she said, “The only one I know of is Choco-Latte, which is (pointing) up the road a couple of blocks on the left.
It was a great coffee shop, and I bought a cup of regular drip coffee just to make a purchase for using their wi-fi. While I caught up my blog there, several beautiful men walked in and out of there. We also saw a flannel of lesbians in this town, many of whom apparently drink coffee.
It was our group’s Hawaiian Shirt Night, and we all looked pretty festive at today’s 6:00 happy hour in the Mixx.
Bob and I bookending some of the Raleigh guys in our Hawaiian shirts:
Other bears in the Hawaiian shirts:
The bar service was super tonight, because as is not uncommon, when the cruise line finally “gets” that a group of our size is going to descend on the same bar at the same time (in this case Mixx bar at 6 p.m.) they upped the number of bartenders from 2 earlier in the week to 8 tonight.
Bob and I didn’t join the bears for dinner at Taste, Savor, or The Manhattan Room, because we had the first of our two included evenings to eat free in one of the specialty dining rooms — regularly costing $60.
Teppanyaki
Sit at a lively shared table as a skillful chef perfectly prepares shrimp, steak, chicken and fried rice on a large steel grill. And you’ve got a front row seat to all the sizzles and surprises in our Japanese restaurant.
Menu
Waiting to be seated, we met three sisters cruising together who were behind us in the line.
Bob got the Asuka (New York strip & jumbo shrimp) and I got the Edo (sea scallops & jumbo shrimp). All of the meals came with the Miso Soup (mushrooms, dashi, tofu, & wakame — not to be confused with Whac-A-Mole at the state fair) and the Seaweed Salad with ginger dressing. For dessert, I chose the Green Tea Cake (which came with a scoop of vanilla ice cream) and Bob chose the Fresh Fruit Sashimi of sliced exotic fruits.
Our chef was adorable and funny and made us laugh mostly by the cute way he laughed at his own jokes, which he told while cooking at our table. We watched him flip, twirl, and pass utensils behind his back, and we sang a lot of songs.
He made several egg-related punny jokes while frying the eggs, creating a floral design with the slow-dripping egg whites from a slit he made in a couple of eggs,
and culminating in asking something to the effect of where the eggs came from and proceeded to pull a rubber chicken out of his hat throwing it on the side of the grill.
We ate our grilled vegetables while he cooked the meat and fish.
My scallops and shrimp and my Green Tea Cake dessert.
If you’ve eaten at these type of places, ours in Raleigh is called Kanki, you know you’re seated with other people (usually 8 people to a table), and we sat next to Kathie & Debi, who are friends that live in Southern California, and we had a lot of laughs throughout dinner.
At one point, we were talking about getting older and Kathie made a comment about her breasts hanging down to her waist adding, “I guess you can’t relate to that,” to which I said, “Oh, I think it’s not dissimilar to our scrotums now hanging down to our knees.” 😂 😂 😂
Toward the end of dinner, the lady of the couple (Gwen & Brian; that’s them at the top of the picture above of the rubber chicken on the grill) on the opposite end of the table asked about our Hawaiian shirts and when we told her about our group, she said, “I didn’t get the memo to wear a Hawaiian shirt. I want to get on the text list!” We told her it was a private list, only for people who are traveling with the group, but she and her husband were welcome to be at the Mixx bar at the same time we have our happy hours every day.
In telling everyone about our private excursions, which I said that we have so that we don’t get harassed like we might on the general cruise line excursions if we show any kind of affection for each other while on them, Kathie asked how we arranged those as she’s going on a future cruise with a bunch of ladies in which it might be nice to have excursions of their own.
Tonight’s 10 p.m. ship activity in the Bliss Bar was Music of the 80s, but we were tired and not feeling it, so we stayed long enough to have one drink, and I actually had a Shirley Temple, because I’d reached my saturation point of free cocktails.
And yes, that’s Boy George of Culture Club singing Karma Chameleon in the video.
Thanks for mentioning Kanki. I was trying to think of the name of that restaurant while having breakfast on my sassy front porch. Neal and I have lots of Bar Harbor memories. Like kayaking from the bar as the tide came in and raised our kayaks and the tour company’s jeeps quickly drove off the Bar before they were engulfed with water. Thanks for bearing with me ❤️
Thanks for reading and sharing your stories, Sam! ❤️