Friday 31 August 2007. We emerge from the caves at San Jose and into the sunshine and heat of Spain. The coach takes us back to the Island Star where we get a bite to eat and then join Cissie and Ada as usual on the Pool Deck.
They have a final gem to tell us. First of all let me explain something about the ship's toilet system... Ships have a different flushing system that works on a vacuum rather than just a simple flush of water. Connecting toilets to an outlet to the open sea can have disastrous siphoning effects where the toilets can turn instead into fountains of spectacular proportions. The vacuum makes a wierd and quite noisy PHHHHT-POOOOOSH! sound. Having a vacuum system means it's safer to get off the toilet before flushing of course as otherwise you can find yourself slightly shorter... Hence the old joke about the lady who gets stuck and her husband has to call for help. "But they'll see me with my pants down!" cries the lady.
Her husband chivalrously places his cap over his wife's lap and the ship's engineer comes to deliver his verdict. "Well, we can get your wife up without any problem, but that chap's a goner...!" Got the idea? So, the vacuum system is prone to blockages because the pipes are smaller than usual and during the week both we and the ladies had experienced a couple of problems when the system became blocked somewhere along our corridor and the ship had cleared it without problem once it was reported. Cissie and Ada though seemed to have a wierd problem with the flush operating after some delay once the knob was pushed.
And so to today's tale of woe and hilarity... "Eeh, I just fancied some crackers!" says Cissie. "It was about half past one and I'd just been to the loo but it wouldn't flush. Anyway, I didn't want to get crumbs in my bed so I took my crackers and went and sat on the loo to eat them." Yes I know... it's not what you were expecting is it...? "Well I was sitting there in my nightie on the loo, enjoying my crackers when all of a sudden: PHHHHT-POOOOOSH! I jumped out of my skin and got crumbs all over me!"
One of our favourite spots overlooking the pool deck.
This is our usual afternoon view from where we sat with Cissie and Ada. We enjoyed it so much that Fran decided in a moment of madness we should book another for next year and -eek- we're going to take my mother along! So tune in this time next year as we take our very own equivalent of Cissie and Ada along! We booked with a nice young lady who spent the rest of the week saying "Hello" to me every time we passed and therefore getting me in a great deal of trouble... Although not as potentially disastrous as the day a young lady had walked past our table in a very (and I mean very small bikini). I pulled my best leering face once she had safely passed only for Cissie to boom out at the top of her voice; "Oh! Liked her did you?!?" I didn't look round to see if she'd heard...
As we leave Valencia to head back to Majorca, we book a table in the Steak Restaurant and enjoy a sumptious silver service meal. The excellent starter is followed by a salad course and then the main meat course. The knives they brought could have done serious damage - I think they get them from the same source as the lumberjacks... Fran opts for slivers of lamb, I go for the filet mignon and we have a superb meal, helped along by an easy going conversation with our waiters and a bottle of wine, drunk from some generously-sized glasses! Fran lets me have the lion's share, luckily the lion doesn't mind and soon I am beyond caring that we have to go home on the following day!
And so Saturday 1st September dawns and we find ourselves back in Palma, Majorca where we had set off on our cruise one week before. We have breakfast with the two ladies we had had so much fun with. "Tell him what you did last night!" urged Ada.
"I went to the loo and forgot to pull my nightie up," Cissie confided. "I only noticed when I stood up..." Our flight is called. We say goodbye to the ladies, who have another week left on the ship, and they wave us off from the Pool Deck as we collect our luggage and get on the coach to the airport.
I was to get a letter from Cissie on the 26th of September. She wanted to know whether she was Cissie or Ada - it should really have been obvious flower! And said: "I'm glad you had a great time on holiday. We had a lovely week after you had gone. (Take it the right way) I don't mean because you'd gone. I mean we did. Nothing happened. I mean...oh never mind!"
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