The Schoolyear of Scott

Long Story Short: I’m going on a cruise over New Years and am trying to sneak on copious amounts of liquor. I have many ideas.

Short Story Long: Over the past couple of years, I have been adopted, I guess you can say, by my friend Mark’s family.  If they were Jewish, they would say that I am Mishbucha.  His grandparents invited me to Italy with them over Thanksgiving last year and earlier this year, for his dad  Mark Sr.’s, 50th birthday, I was invited to ride upon a Mardi Gras float with the family.  There was also a celebration in Atlanta with Mark Sr. during the SEC championship last year that I am not allowed to discuss in a public forum, but that is neither here nor there.  So this holiday season, I have once again been invited to travel with the family, this time on a Western Carribean cruise, on the NCL – Norwegian Spirit.

Our Ship

Now I’ve been on many cruises with my actual family, and while the Gold’s are known to do their fair share of drinking, my dad has always just been content with purchasing drinks on the ship and paying the rediculous mark-up that the cruises are want to do.  In fact, I never realized that there was a whole underground community on cruises who bring all of their booze on board.  Mark’s family is apparently a part of this community.

Now for a quick little bit of backstory, Mark’s family is from New Orleans.  They enjoy drinking.  I enjoy drinking.  Maybe that is why we get along so well.  When we took the trip to Italy, nearly every meal that we had over the course of seven days was All You Can Drink wine.  It made for a very interesting and entertaining vacation.  This cruise, was aiming to be a continuation of that trip as we were planning on bringing many cases of wine on board with us.

Purple teeth after another All You Can Drink Wine dinner

That was the plan, at least until this morning when we received word that you are allowed to bring wine on board the ship, except they will charge $15 per bottle as a corkage fee when you board the ship.  While we will probably end up legally bringing on board some wine, since $15 for a bottle is still cheaper than what the ship will charge, we are devising some creative ways to sneak wine and liquor on board.  They include:

1. Taping mini bottles of liquor to our sweatshirts and pants and just walk them through the security screening.
2. Purchasing a flacid flask and taping it to our bodies to walk through security.
3. Filling up empty bottles of white wine with rum and vodka and then sealing them with newly purchased plastic corks.  We would then “declare” these bottles and pay the $15 fee for them, but it would serve as a 750ml of liquor instead of wine.
4. Filling up a 1L bottle of water, which is the allowable amount of water one can bring on board, with vodka and gluing the cap shut.
5. Having each member of the traveling party, including minors, sneak two bottles of wine in their luggage and hope that at least half of us do not get caught, because, really, they can’t be checking each and every bag.
6. Purchasing a 3-1-1 kits, which is the FAA approved kit to bring liquids onto airplanes.  We would then fill these kits with various liquors.
7. Purchasing a large bottle of mouthwash, cleaning out the bottle, filling it with vodka and then placing some green food coloring in it. I found this cautioning tip today:

We bought 4 of the largest sizes of mouthwash that you could buy at the grocery store. We dumped their contents and washed them with soap and water. We then filled them up with clear liquor, such as vodka, tequila and rum. Add a dash of green food coloring and voila!, it looked exactly the same as the real thing. We stuffed them in our check-in and got them on the boat without a problem.

When we got to the room on the cruise ship we went to toast to our clever ways. We both took a generous shot of vodka. I immediately started salivating. We both agreed that the taste was off and that something was wrong. Turns out most mouthwash bands have chemicals in them that induce vomiting to prevent people from ingesting it and being poisoned by the isopropyl alcohol. Almost no amount of washing gets the residue out of the bottle. Yeah, the joke was really on us.

Apparently a Bad Idea

I am not sure exactly how we are going to proceed, but stay tuned as I will be sure to keep all of you abraised of the situation.

Tags: Drinking, Traveling

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 11th, 2008 at 7:26 pm and is filed under Drinking, Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.