Amazing Race

Thirteen years ago God gave us a precious gift; a sweet baby girl, Jessica Caitlin. Now we have a teenager in the house cabin! On December 30th we celebrated Jessica's thirteenth birthday, her first birthday on the ship. Being the visionary and overachiever that I am I decided to give Jessica an Amazing Race sleepover party. Above the party begins with dinner in the dining room with Jessica's friends L-R, Zodi (Ethiopia), Grace (USA), Josie (Ghana), Deborah (Liberia, USA) and Kylie (USA).

I ordered a set of Amazing Race printables online which was a big blessing as receiving mail is quite the drama for us in Guinea. The sleepover was held in the Queen's Lounge, still decorated for Christmas.

Colourful party bags that held, amongst other things, a globe keyring and globe inflatable beach ball. (Thanks Amazon!)

Challenges, road blocks, detours and clues ready to go. The girls split into two teams and raced around the ship following different clues which led to challenges in each destination.

The pack even contained chocolate bar wrappers with which Andrew dutifully wrapped eight crumbling and melted Crunch bars that had seen better days from the ship shop.

Team tags

Destination: Library. Challenges: Find a children's book and read the first five pages aloud to your team mates, find the Lonely Planet West Africa  book and see which country is listed on a certain page and count the number of sails on the Mayflower (model ship on display in library).

Destination: Deck 8. Challenges: Have your photo taken hugging the mannequin, slide down the slide in the playground, one member of the team ride a scooter around the funnel three times and all members of the team sing and act out Ring-a-Ring-a-Rosie three times.

Destination: Dining Room. Challenges: Locate a tag under a certain dining room chair, count the number of windows in the dining room, drink a cup full of a combo of all the flavours of drink in the drink mixers.

Jess gives the deck 8 mannequin a friendly hug.

Destination: Dock. Detour: The teams must perform the detour together. Choose between counting all the windows on the ship's starboard side (visible from the dock) or make up a haiku (short Japanese poem) about Guinea and recite it to the Gherka (ship security guard) on duty and also whilst walking up and down the dock three times. Grace, Zodi and Jessica decide to do the haiku.

Destination: Laundry Room. Challenges: Locate a particular shirt (one of Andrew's) on the drying racks and iron it (see Jessica above), find a pair of matching socks in the lost property basket and find out who has a particular laundry slot on a particular day and time.

Destination: Dining Room. Roadblock: One member of each team needs to be blindfold and has to find ten skittles in a bowl of jelly, with their hands. Then they have to eat the jelly with a fork. Unfortunately the skittles disolved in the hot jelly-oh dear! Above Jess finishes off the jelly for her team. Hey Jess-where is your blindfold!!

 
Final destination: Queens Lounge. Jess and I with the awesome tim tam cake that fellow Aussie, Leah made for us. It was amazing!! There were many other destinations and challenges but I think you get the drift! It was great fun and we had many curious onlookers. So much so that the ship decided to organise an Amazing Race Conakry which was held several weeks later on a much grander scale in and around Conakry. It was an awesome success. Jess helped to man one of the stations with another ship family. The station was located at the dental clinic site and involved the catching of two live chickens whilst wearing rubber gloves and a blown up rubber dental glove on their head to represent the chicken's comb.

Above an Amazing Race team member tries to catch a chicken. Below Jess guards the box containing the chickens.

 

 

Happy 13th birthday sweetheart! Jess was such a good sport about her gifts. The gift she has in her hands is the only one she received on her birthday. The rest of her birthday presents (and some of her Christmas presents) were in the Christmas container that didn't arrive until January.

There are many birthday traditions on the ship. One is ringing the large brass bell in the dining room over a meal and having the crew sing Happy Birthday, which we did! Also is it traditional to decorate the outside of the birthday boy/girl's cabin door or nearby walls.

Jessica's party was the night before her birthday so on her actual birthday (Sunday) we went to the Riviera hotel with friends. Jess had her favourite-margarita pizza and fries.

Happy birthday sweet baby girl. We are so proud of you!