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Gretchen's phone spontaneously unbricks
Saturday, February 28 2026
location: Cabin 300, the Star Clipper docked in the old harbor, St. George's, Grenada, the Caribbean Sea
At breakfast this morning with Kelly and Brian, I ate a big meal of my usual breakfast items: vegan sausage, vegan bacon, buns, slices of tomato, slices of cucumber, and lettuce all worked into little sandwiches. We were joined late in our meal by Tara and her daughter Angel, and they discussed the ongoing scandal alluded to in yesterday's entry. Tara was placing most of the blame on the ranking crewmember doing the propositioning. Apparently he'd also been propositioning Angel (who is probaby a third of his age). Gretchen, though, was pretty sure the non-Angel woman being propositioned was also somewhat responsible for what was going on and decided she must be "crazy."
Soon after breakfast, Gretchen had figured out how we would be spending the day and getting to the airport. Dirk was offering an excursion to a resort called the True Blue Bay Resort very close to the Grenada airport, but the price for that was 60 euros each. The plan for us was to not go on that excursion but to essentially do the same thing by catching our own cab and then hanging out at that resort for however many hours we needed to kill and then catching a cab to the airport. Gretchen soon lined up enough people to make the cab ride affordable: us, Tara, Angel, and a nice youngish American couple whom it would've been nice to have known earlier on the cruise. We got to True Blue Bay and piled our stuff with all the stuff from the people who had paid for the excursion and then went to hang out in the shade and take advantage of the endless unmetered internet, which felt like a luxury after all the bandwidth nickel-and-diming that had happened on the Star Clipper. Unfortunately, due to all the people from our entourage, I never actually found a comfortable place in the shade to sit. I ended up lying on my back in the shade on a wooden floor in a semi-outdoor area, mostly playing Spelling Bee on my phone.
At some point Simon could be heard using Cockney rhyming slang, saying Cathy had gone to the "rub-a-dub." I was familiar with that term, as my old English-via-Charlottesville friend (and illegal immigrant) Rory had used it in the name of his blog circa 1998. But I couldn't remember what it meant. No problem; Simon was quick to explain that it meant "pub." I then came up with my old rhyming slang term: "Comic Sans" meaning "restaurant" (it's normal in rhyming slang to elide the part that actually rhymes with the thing being referred to, and I'd elided "font").
At some point a fairly strong rain began to fall, forcing the people in their various disparate places around the several pools and beaches to converge on the Dodgy Dock Restaurant, the resort's eatery. There Dirk had arranged a food option that was available to those in the excursion, though I didn't know that, so I helped myself to the spicy tomato soup and greasy corn chips just before the supplies for that particular course of food ran out. Soon thereafter, a group of us comprised of our six-person click, Tara, Angel, and that new youngish couple from the taxi ride formed a table and we all ordered food off the menu. There were some good vegan options, including a vegetable roti. Gretchen didn't have a sense of how big that would be, so she ordered that with potato croquettes and french fries. But a single roti turned out to be plenty, stuffed as it was mostly with carrots and some sort delicious Indian curry sauce. I'm not a big fan of cooked carrots, but this was something I could eat. Some of us also ordered beer, and the obvious choice here was Carib.
Meanwhile another scandal had emerged from the recent cruise: that "coffee icecream" served at the final dinner had not been vegan. And there was now a rumor that the vegan chef had never been allowed into the passenger galley. Dirk later confirmed that the icecream rumor was true but vehemently denied the one about the excluded vegan chef.
At around 2:00pm, it was time to catch our cab back to the airport. Tara and Angel would be on a later flight, so Gretchen had replaced them on the final cab ride to the airport with another fun youngish American couple we'd wished we'd met earlier on the cruise. It took only a few minutes to get to the airport, and then we spent a fairly long time in various queues waiting to see a Grenada immigration official and then to go through airport security. As we did so, the ship passenger whom Gretchen thought was partly to blame for the attempted seduction by a ranking member of the crew was in line ahead of us, and, though we'd been friendly for most of the cruise, now we couldn't look her in the eye. Gretchen didn't want to have anything to do with her, so when we talked, it was mostly me doing the talking and the content was entirely trivial.
Once we'd gone through security, it didn't take long before our plane was boarding. We'd been told it was a full flight, but we ended up having an unexpectedly empty seat in our three-seat cluster. We both took ambien and slept for much of the four and a half hour flight.
Just before we landed in Charlotte, I tried using Gretchen's cellphone, and for a moment it sputtered to life. But then the lock screen, the one bitching about the SIM card, returned. I thought it might really necessitate Cricket ticket support. But once we were fully landed, I tried again and damned if it wasn't completely functional again. Gretchen could once more check her text messages, the one missing piece of her communication infrastructure. Evidently the phone had been deliberately bricked while outside of the United States. I had never heard of such a thing.
In the Charlotte airport, US immigration was relative painless and we didn't even get any shit for the message on Gretchen's tee shirt, which read, "LOS INMIGRANTES NO SON CRIMINALES PERO EL PRESIDENTE SI," though this was only possible because of Orwellian facial recognition technology.
We had a fourteen hour layover in Charlotte before our flight to Albany, so Gretchen had reserved us a room in a Hilton airport hotel. The room came with a convenient shuttle service, and was spacious and clean. Gretchen immediately took a shower and then tried to find a nearby vegan Chinese restaurant that would do delivery. But nothing she tried worked and she eventually gave up, so we dined on various snacks we'd accumulated instead while watching a couple episode of the second season of It's Florida, Man on the room's teevee.
Gretchen on our cabin's phone this morning. In the absence of always-on internet, this was a surprisingly useful communication device, usually used to call Kelly & Brian's cabin. Click to enlarge.
The bathroom and bed in our cabin. Click to enlarge.
Not a great picture of our friends as we were leaving the Dodgy Dock Restaurant for the Grenada airport. From left: Angel (by herself), Brian, Kelly, Cathy, and Tara. In the way back there is Simon. Click to enlarge.
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