united states of errol part two: PARTY PARTY PARTY!

About a year ago, Kiki and Lozzy read that Hanson would be performing on a cruise ship. We mocked this accordingly, then decided to, you know, pay hundreds of dollars and go on it. Yeah, we’re now Official Rock Boaters. We hate ourselves too.

But let’s not get too caught up in the past. The real story starts in Miami … party in the city where the heat is on, all night on the beach till the break of dawn.

Let it be known that Miami is A SHITHOLE. Will Smith may have led you to believe ‘This the type of town I could spend a few days in, Miami the city that keeps the roof blazin’. Will, why do you lie?

We spent two days there and almost lost our damn minds. We thought everybody would be wearing Hawaiian shirts and straw fedoras and grooving down the street to festive Latin music.  Instead it’s like the Gold Coast, if you ripped out the small amount of soul the Goldy has and replaced it with 85 different Ed Hardy stores. No wonder Dexter murders people.  We would too if we lived in a city where people wore embroidered Ed Hardy ugg boots.

Granted our time there was spent almost entirely at  the truly horrendous Miami airport (aka where souls go to die), and in our room watching Confessions of a Teen Idol (ok that part was awesome. Have you guys seen how terrifying Jeremy Jackson is these days? They should put his photo up in schools to deter kids from … well, everything. And Christopher Atkins – still hot.)

Miami is also a city filled with cultural landmines.  The following is an edited transcript of ‘Sassy trying to buy a coffee’.

Sassy: Can I have a cafe latte to take away please?

Waitress: … Cafe?

Sassy: Yes please, cafe latte.

Waitress: Cafe con leche?

Sassy: ….. *tick tock*

Sassy: Cafe … latte?

Waitress: Cafe con leche?

Sassy: ….

Waitress: ….

Sassy: …. I’M FOREIGN.

Waitress: Cafe con leche.

From there we made it through the gauntlet of bag handlers (including the guy who said “… you know you can tip me if you want”. SERIOUSLY. LOOK INTO GETTING BADGES. HOW ELSE ARE WE MEANT TO KNOW WHO TO TIP?) and boarded the Rock Boat from the port side, avast ye mateys.

As far as we can tell, after releasing two (moderately) successful songs in the nineties, Sister Hazel invented The Rock Boat so they could:

a) have a captive audience to play to;

b) get to see the Bahamas;

c) have somewhere to live for at least 5 days a year; or

d) all of the above.

We guess (d). And fair enough!  Not everyone can live off song royalties like Hugh Grant in About a Boy.  They also take care of all the loudspeaker announcements, so as we settled into our state room we were greeted with:

HEY THERE ROCKERS!  WELCOME TO THE ROCK BOAT NINERRRR! I’M DREW COPELAND FROM SISTER HAZEL … ARE YOU READY TO PARTY PARTY PARTY?

Seriously that’s what he said word for word. We couldn’t believe it either. We all looked at each other in disbelief  then rolled off the beds in hysterics.

We thought nothing could top this. Then, later that night, we hear the singer of some band we don’t know yell the following -

OOOOOOH YEAH! The boat has officially left port and DADDY’S DRIVING NOW!  Daddy’s in controllll.  Oh wow who ordered all those shots? OH IT WAS ME. WOOOOOO.  We’re not in port anymore so LET’S GET FUCKED UP!

Can I get a helllllllll yeaaaaaah?

The crowd all yelled HELL YEAH in unison then all wooooooooed the way only Yanks can for a good 10 minutes.

Oh, Americans.

To our delight/horror it only got more American as we went on.  The boat has not one, not two, but three hot tubs, all filled with pasty Americans in tiny sunglasses (why do they all wear such small sunglasses?), horrible bikinis and too-high boardshorts. Smashing Miller Lites and making the rock handsign. If there’s one thing Americans love more than that weird orange cheese they eat, it’s a hot tub.

pic: sixthman.net

The most disturbing thing about the hot tub obsession was their willingness to get their kit off in Not Very Warm Weather. It really wasn’t hot enough for frolicking poolside in swimwear. Especially when the majority of them were the colour of pale pale milk. It was like cruising with 1200 Ben Hornbys (btw he totally had a baby in the off season. A baby NOT popped out by us. We are tres upset by this development.)

Now this cruise included a day in Half Moon Cay, and a day in Nassau.  Because the weather was miserable, we couldn’t dock at Half Moon Cay (we hear it’s lovely).  And because we were drunkenly passed out in semi-comas …. we slept through Nassau. Seriously, we woke up and were all “ooh we can’t feel the boat moving anymore, hurrah! Sea legs!”, then Lozzy opened the curtain to see that a) we couldn’t feel the boat moving because we were in port, and b) everyone was walking BACK to the boat – not only had we missed a port, but it was 5pm and we’d lost an entire day.

Suffice to say, we saw a lot of the cruise ship, and not much else.  To our surprise, it’s kind of awesome.  We had our very own little Cruise Steward, Mario, just to look after us and our room.

Note: May or may not be the actual Mario

He would wait outside our room in the afternoons until we woke up to make sure that we were alive.  Then while we struggled up to the 24-hour pizza buffet, he would sneak into our room and make us adorable little towel animals to make our hearts smile.  A different one every day!

Towel elephant never forgets towel facts.

Can’t figure out how to use the tv?  Mario knows!  Can’t find your room because you’re drunk?  Mario knows!  Broken the toilet? Mario will say ‘Oops!’ and call a plumber! A REALLY REALLY SCARY PLUMBER who accused us of putting a towel in our toilet. Coz that’s what people do on cruises, you know.

Poor Kiki, being the only one of us who could get out of bed and/or was wearing pants, had to deal with Scary Toilet Man. (For the full lolz please put on a sub continental accent in your brain. Trust us, its funnier.)

STM: (said accusingly) Did you put a towel in this toilet?

K: Errr….no. Why would I put a towel in the toilet?

STM: I don’t believe you. I’ll check now.

*Kiki returns to bed to hide under the covers from the scary man. STM fiddles with the pipes for a while*

*Kiki feels oddly guilty and goes to check on STM*

STM: (looks up with pure hate in his eyes) YOU PUT A TOWEL IN THIS TOILET. WHY DO YOU LIE?

K: What! No! I SWEAR mate! I didn’t do it.

STM: I show you!

K: No I believe you, I’m just saying I didn’t put it in there.

STM-  *pulls a soaking wet towel from the pipes* THIS. THIS IS A TOWEL. YOU SEE?

K: …………………

STM: SEE! TOWEL!  *slams door*

May we just say at this point that yes, we probably were drunk enough that night to pee and mistake a towel as toilet paper, but that was NOT the reason we needed emergency plumbing. We ran into the bathroom and realised THE TOWEL RACK IS OVER THE LOO. Seriously Carnival, that is some of the poorest interior design we have ever seen.

Back to Mario – we would like him in our everyday life, please. When he came in on the last day and made a sooky face to say ‘You’re leaving meeee!‘ we almost went for the hug. Sure he makes towel animals for everyone, but he totally loved us best.

But for all the good stuff, like getting to hang out with the bands in the Casino bar and never having to worry about finding a taxi home, come the bad parts … like knowing that whatever you did last night might have been captured by the cruise photographer, or seeing the shaggy-haired rocker you pashed the night before sporting full rock star regalia while serving up pasta salad at the Sun & Sea lunch buffet.

We decided to latch onto a new married couple of BFFs that we met in the super-classy Cheers bar (hi Jay and Suellen!) and discovered another great thing about cruising: people can’t get away.

On the fourth night we cruise-ship-telephoned them up and took them to the fancypants Galaxy dining room (you have to wear SHOES there and everything) for a lobster and champagne dinner. You know, just the five of us. On a group date. We are so creepy. Totally worth it though to see the Galaxy waiters jump the tables to dirty dance and have a group singalong. We heart cruising.

pic by suellen

If you happen to be curious about what the Hanson boyz got up to while all this was going on, you can read all about it in this hilarious and detailed email that we sent to Ivey and London over at The New Way. It was pretty much the first thing we did once we returned to dry land – in bed together, while eating 100 bucks worth of Jerry’s Deli and cracking ourselves up – and was also the best time we had in our whole stay in Miami.

Taylor* still dresses like a lesbian and wore capri pants – yes, manpris – to Nassau. Zac is such a douchebag that he has been renamed Alan, who we took to booing constantly (seriously, we’re still saying ‘booo alan!’ to express distaste for anything in general life. It’s just so catchy!). Isaac was outraged at not being able to get a freakin Mojito due to lack of mint.  WE HEAR YOU IKE!  And both their shows were AMAZING.

But our favourite night by far was their second gig in the cavernous indoor theatre known as The Palladium. Because 99.9% of all Hanson fans lack lives, they all started lining up for seats at 11am. The show didn’t start until 12 hours later.

That was their method. Ours was to drunkenly wander in at 10:55pm, skip down towards the front, inexplicably find 2 cute boys, flirt with them, drink their beer and then park ourselves next to them for the entire show. Note we were in prime position RIGHT in front of Taylor and his piano. Considering the rabid Hanson fans didn’t gouge our eyes out, we decided they must have thought they were our mans minding seats for us. Sweet.

[Note - I am a fetching shade of orange due to the cruise gift shop fake tan I had to resort to buying. I am usually less carrot like - K]

[Note 2 - I am not featured in this pic because either a) It was an Alan song so I had gone off to pee, or b) I'm actually there on the left of Sassy, but too short to see. Sadface. - L]

[Note 3 - I have my hair tied back and am wearing neutral browns because after my shameful behaviour on the two previous nights I was trying to be ~*incognito*~. It didn't work. - S]

If you’re wondering about the ‘bitches’ label, these are the two girls who dampened Lozzy’s Hanson experience by sitting down the entire time and rolling their eyes every time she busted out a dance move behind them. To rectify this, Lozzy thought it would be appropriate to tell them “Look, if you’re at a Hanson show you don’t fucking sit down”. They didn’t reply, either because they’re bitches or they couldn’t understand the Aussie accent. Probs a little from column A, a little from column B.

Then at the end Lozzy used her grade-A biting wit to tell them ‘YOU SUCK’, realised that in the light they were both absolute battleaxes and had clearly been in a number of fights in their time, and Sassy had to step in to break it all up. Good times.

Miss Kiki and the boy in the captain’s hat got along famously. And by that we mean she grabbed his ass, told him he was cute then went the pash. In her defence, he certainly didn’t seem to mind. She also grabbed him and whispered I’M MAKING OUT WITH A BOY DURING A HANSON SHOW…IS THIS HEAVEN?

And honestly, that’s not even half of it. We could easily spring a trilogy of Rock Boat posts on you, but we have the rest of the trip to cover.

[*We feel like we should address the pic floating around the internets of our beloved TayTay, to be frank, licking a dick (not safe for work. But shit, if you're gunna get fired for something, don't you kind of want it to be for getting caught looking at Taylor Hanson with a dick in his mouth?). Unfortunately, it's fake. This is most obvious from the palm tree t-shirt the subject is wearing. TayHan would NEVER wear something that ugly and chest-hair covering.

The best part is it's been dubbed MmmCock. Awesome. - Lozzy]