My sister and I shared a bedroom while we were growing up, and had a crap relationship, so imagine my delight when we shared a smallish cabin and got along swimmingly.

Firstly, I want to thank my sister Nancy and all our Trivia buddies (Kevin, Roger, Rodger, and Richard) for enabling us to capture the Celebrity Gold Metal for progressive trivia. We did, however, tie with an English couple. A word about these two: They participated in enough activities to make a teenager on uppers exhausted. They knew everything. Their winning entry in the egg-drop contest was a marvel of engineering and aesthetics. It looked like the hot air balloon in "Around the World in Eighty Days," incorporated the nightly mints into its rigging, and was decorated with gold duckies. Celebrity, please don't let people like this on board. It makes the rest of us feel so inadequate!

Nancy commented on the independent tour we took, and said Thumbs UP. That was the name of the tour, not her evaluation. We were supposed to see monkeys and scarlet macaws. It ran thusly: "See that little monkey in the tree? No, not that tree, the one in back of it. See the little thing that looks like a hairball?" Well, no, I didn't. I had been to Costa Rica before, and the place was awash with monkeys. It's hard to believe that Thumbs Up didn't know where to find them. The scarlet macaws were sighted from so far away that they photographed as grey. I know that the point is to observe the animals in situ, but there's a big difference between in situ and invisible. We did see a fair amount of crocodiles, about which I'll continue to complain. They swim submerged, so mostly what you see is a snout in the water, followed by something that looks like a knobby branch. We were seated in the back of the boat, next to a noisy motor. As a result, we couldn't hear the narrative. Thumbs down! Read more