Amy Lu's View

Like many people, eating is a big part of my vacation experience. (Yes, eating is also a big part of my routine normal life experience, but the context is different). Eating new food and eating in new places, as well as eating familiar food in new places, is part of the fun of vacation. 

The flip side of that is deciding what and where to eat without going wild on calorie intake when presented with so many new choices can be pretty overwhelming. For me, the pressure to make THE best choice can make me grumpy and agitated, and I have to stop and remind myself “Hey, you are supposed to be ENJOYING yourself here!” 

Not only is having to make new decisions about eating hard for me, but feeling like I’m not totally in control of when and where and what I eat makes me twitchy. 

With all these ingredients in my head just waiting to be transformed into an agita souffle (see what I did there with the food references…), I’m grateful that I had good to awesome partaking experiences while on vacation. 

I especially appreciated the dining on the boat while un-cruising. All the meals and snacks were yummy, and there was always a vegetarian and fish option (I usually choose vegetarian but gave in to the siren call of seafood sometimes). Every morning at breakfast (there was a daily breakfast special but we could also have basically whatever we wanted) we got to “order” our meals for the rest of the day. Having my food choices all mapped out for me for the rest of the day was a great comfort to my over-planning (especially when it comes to food) soul. 

We even had our own unofficial special dining spot on the boat. Most meals, we ate at a breakfast bar in the lounge rather than in the dining room with everyone else. Yes, this habit did start from us being anti-social and not up to making conversation, but soon it became known as our spot. Maybe nobody else wanted to sit there but we especially liked it because it was close to the coffee. Most appealing, it was much quieter than the dining room so we could really appreciate that we weren’t chatting with each other. Okay, I may be playing up our standoffishness a bit–there was another table in the lounge and we did have other folks join us there occasionally, and we did sometimes sit with groups in the loungd, and we were quite friendly and charming. Really.

I even, more or less, successfully lived in the world without constantly snacking while on the boat. It felt a bit like chip rehab. Disappointingly, I have not been able to transfer this sensible approach to snacks (mostly chips and crackers) to life on the land. The other profound lesson I learned about eating while on the boat that I haven’t implemented in my daily life is that I can be very happy with eating smallish portions of real food (as opposed to large portions of “low calorie” food).  

We embraced the real, whole bread so enthusiastically that the ship’s pastry chef admiringly said that the two of us were in the top consumers of bread in the ship’s history. 

I ate dessert at every lunch and dinner. (That sounds like that could be on a plaque that Dr. Rick would make a Millenial throw away in a Progressive ad). 

In contrast to all my apprehension about vacation eating, I was confident that I could happily drink and I was not disappointed. The boat bar was small but well appointed. Every day at Happy Hour there was a new featured drink that I usually tried, in addition to any classic beverage I could hope for. They even had one of Chad’s favorite Scotches, Coal Ila.

There’s not too much more I can reasonably or effectively say about my intake of food and beverage while on vacation, so see the photo gallery above for some haphazardly shared and poorly captioned photos. I’m not an adept food photographer so some photos may look unappealing but I found all the dishes and drinks delicious. 

And I need to wrap this up to get some snacks.