Bob:

As we steamed northwards along the eastern coast of Spain toward Barcelona, we had one final day on board. After breakfast and Walk-A-Mile, we attended the last of Dr. Ryan's lectures on the Mayan culture of Central America. He rambled around historical points in his usual avuncular fashion and gave us a potpourri of intriguing facts about the Maya. Some things like the near-simultaneous disappearance of the Maya from many of their city-states I knew, but I didn't know that they had essentially migrated to the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico where they were ultimately defeated by the Toltecs. I also did not know that they sacrificed a young male or female victim six times a day in each of their major cities, but that did fit the bloodthirsty nature of some of the cultural evidence I had previously seen in exhibits at the Smithsonian Institution.

The Casino opened at 10:00 a.m., so we stopped by there to gamble on our way back to the cabin. I don't usually gamble, but we needed cash to enhance the tip packets for our room steward, waitress, assistant waiter, and head waiter who had efficiently served us over the last two weeks. I had checked the shipboard ATM, but they wanted $6 for a $100 withdrawal, and that seemed to be a bit steep. So instead I brought our $5 matching coupons with and Monika and I bet a few times at roulette to gain some money. She would bet on black and I would bet on red, or she would bet on odd and I would bet on even, or she would bet on 1-18 and I would bet on 19-36. We were both using the free $5 match coupons on every bet, and by doing it that way one of us was almost certain to win $10 while the loser lost only $5, so the net gain per betting cycle was $5. Well, after doing that 4 times we were up by $20 (fortunately for us the 0 and 00 house numbers never came up like they did for George and Don!).

Then Monika used the last of the free $2 coupons for the slot machines. The catch with those coupons was that they gave you two $1 tokens that could only be used in the $1 slot machines, where you can lose money rather quickly. But these were "free" tokens, so Monika was effectively making another no-lose gamble. She lost every $1 token until the very last one, when three "7"s suddenly aligned themselves on the screen and she gained $25! NOW we were cookin'! We cashed out my roulette chips and Monika's slot machine tokens, and went back to the cabin to add that to the cash we already had and make up the tip packets. Of course, I never told any of those nice folks where their tips had actually come from! Helen mentioned that RCI pays their serving staff rather poorly, and if so I think it is only poetic justice that part of their tips for this cruise were coming from the ship's casino.

Monika:

Bob:

At lunch we met Helen and she came with to the art auction, where Jeff joined us. During the preliminary "inspect the paintings" we all chatted while Monika and Jeff had some of the free champagne. Helen and I became involved in jointly solving an acrostic puzzle that had "cryptic" clues, which I have never been able to even start, much less solve. It turned out that for many years Helen had done cryptic-clue crossword puzzles and could easily engage in the tortured logic and odd anagrams that those clues required. I couldn't do that, but once we got some of the letters entered into the quote I could guess at intervening letters and put those into the answers, which helped Helen solve the next set of words and phrases. A partnership evolved where she worked on the clue-and-phrase side while I worked over on the quote side, each one calling out letters to the other, such as "B-165-D". With both of us batting those letter-and-number combinations back and forth, it sounded like bingo being played as table tennis, but the system really worked well for us.

We were making amazingly fast progress on what at first glance was an impossible puzzle when, would you believe it, the auctioneer started to conduct the art auction. Realizing we couldn't continue to play "crostic bingo" while the auctioneer was selling things like Rembrandt's etchings, we took our puzzle outside to the Champagne Bar. There we found an empty table and managed to finish the puzzle in time for Helen to rejoin Jeff at the trivia contest at 2:30. I returned to the art auction just to watch, but the action was just as spotty as at the previous auction.

After the auction, Monika and I exchanged our Vitality Points for another backpack and two T-shirts. While we where up on the sports deck, we played a round of mini golf just for fun and then returned to our cabin to pack, which is always an arduous and rather depressing process. We had accumulated photographs, art prints, the cookbook, and even an $0.88 package of snacks that Monika thought would be good for the drive the next day. But somehow or other we crammed it all in before it was time for one last great dinner (and gabfest) with the gang.

After dinner we paid our shipboard tab for our cruise, which due to the refunds from RCI for skipping Cadiz and Malaga turned out to be just $0.47! After giving the purser two quarters we gravely accepted our 3 cents change and went back out on deck to watch our ship slowly work its way into Barcelona harbor as the sun set in the hills to the west of the city. Then we put our bags out for the porters, finished "The Babe Magnet", and turned in for the night.

Monika: