It's Over

The cruise is over.  It’s late Saturday night and we’re in our cabin.  We won $200 on the slot machines, but bailed on going to any parties.  We just came back to our cabin, had naked sex on the balcony, then watched the movie “Definitely Maybe”.  And we had a long talk about swinging.  We won’t be doing another swinger cruise.  It exposed my faults as a  swinger and showed me that there are many ways to swing, and my way of doing it does not work well on a cruise.  We’ve become accustomed to the artifice, to the construct that we build prior to meeting a couple.  We mince behind the cloak of the internet and paint a picture and build anticipation of the show.  Because we married young, we never got good at flirting and picking up on people.  Yes, we are witty and thoughtful and I’m a bit self-depricating, but these are subtle and sublime and don’t work well when you’re competing against the peacocks and the glitz of a swinger ship.  This afternoon, we were in a quiet bar (a rarity) with five older and more overweigh couples.  They all enjoyed the cruise.  One of the men said that it works best when one just takes the moments as they come— you need to be prepared to have sex on the spot.  Planning to meet someone doesn’t work.  Don’t plan.  Just do.  And that’s not me.  And that’s why we didn’t have much sex on the cruise.  Does that make me sad?  Yes, a little.  We saved and thought about this for a year.  We had high hopes.  It’s like going to Disneyland and discovering that you didn’t like it.  Something must be wrong with you.  We really wanted to like it.  And we feel bad saying that we didn’t.  If we could give advice to the people in charge, what would we tell them?  Don’t change a thing.  What you do works well for all these other people.  We are the ones with the problem.  Don’t change anything for our sake.  I think we could have had a better time on this cruise if we weren’t swingers— just if we were looking for a sexually charged atmosphere.  We went on a family cruise about a year ago and loved it.  I’m sure that we’ll take a cruise within the next year with our kids, and I’m sure we’ll have a great time.  But we just weren’t able to mesh our swinging style with the environment of a cruise.  I’m trying to decide what that means for our future.  It saddens me a little bit— makes me feel snobbish, elitist, and picky.  And I feel bad because swingers are supposed to be very giving and generous people.  Can I live with myself knowing this is how I feel?  Maybe we should give up swinging or we should relabel what we do as something else.  I think if I could come up with a name for what it is that we do, I’d feel better about continuing.  

Trying to Decide...

It’s Saturday.  We get back to Florida tomorrow morning.  This is just a sea day, cruising along.  I’ve really wanted to like the cruise, and I’m bummed that it hasn’t met my expectations.  Maybe I could convince myself that it’s OK, because I’d like to be in a sexy environment with a lot of people, many of whom would like to have sex with us.  But It’s just so fatiguing. Seven days of having to be “on” is just too much for us.  I hate having to admit that, but I think it’s true.  And everyone has so much ADD.  And I really don’t like the pool or getting wet or getting sand on me or not having control of the environment.  I sure am being negative.  I’m just not sure if we fit the swinger mold.  Maybe we’re too picky, which is a bad thing if you’re not really hot, and we’re not really hot.  We don’t know how to flirt.  The people we meet have often assumed that we’re not swingers because we seem so “proper and classic”.  We’re not into bikes or drinking or wild parties.  We enjoy talking and having sex.  In this environment, if you want to have sex, you have to reach out and grab someone and reel them in, and risk getting dumped in the process.  We’re too sensitive for that.  We keep our guard up too much and hide in our cabin too much.  This place requires you to be good at on-the-spot pick-up lines and we are certainly not.  And even if a reasonably attractive couple reached out to us on the spot, my wife and I would want to confer in private to ensure that we’re both content, and you don’t have that option here.  If you try to do that, you’ll lose the couple.  You’ve got to grab it while you can.  This is the first time in a long time (maybe since we started swinging) that I’m seriously starting to wonder if swinging is still right for us.  And it’s only going to get worse as the years, wrinkles, and pounds go up.

We're not THAT generous

It’s Friday.  We’re docked in Cozumel Mexico.  We decided to cancel our excursion for today.  We decided to just sleep in and be home-bodies in our cabin.  Prior to the cruse, I was hoping/fantasizing that we’d have sex with 10 couples and have sex all the time.  We usually only swing every few months, so we don’t need to do it every weekend.  So, after we had sex with that nice couple on Wednesday night, we were in the refractory phase and we’re still feeling refractory (not physically, but mentally/emotionally).  If another couple were to seduce us, we’d probably have sex again, but we currently don’t feel the need to race around the ship trying to find someone else to have sex with.  Yesterday morning we went to couples speed dating.  Neither of us had ever done speed dating before, so this was something new.  We were seated at a small table with another couple.  We had 90 seconds with them, then the hosts would call “time” and the couples would move to the next table.  Of all the couples we met, none were younger than us.  There were only one or two couples who Christy thought were acceptable.  I wasn’t really interested in any of them.  The last couple we met was the saddest/worst couple.  She may have been 30 or 50 and she was mentally disabled and looked like she’d lived in the woods, sorry but she looked like a street person.  That’s no stretch.  He was 65-ish and was missing an eye that looked like it was infected.  They both had facial hair.  They both smelled.  We were as polite as possible.  I asked her a question, but I couldn’t understand her response due to a speech impediment.  He put his hand on Christy’s knee then he said, “I hope this is OK.”  Christy was so shocked—she grabbed my hand and squeezed it.  Knowing that we had only about 30 seconds left, she just put up with it and hoped that he wouldn’t walk his fingers up her crotch.

First Swinger Sex on the Cruise

Nudists

We went to the nudist beach yesterday.  Ugggg.  It was the most popular excursion and the one officially sponsored as the charter’s main excursion, so we went.  It was a 45 minute bus ride from the pier.  The resort Hedo II shipped people in also.  It was 500 lounge chairs side-by-side.  The average age there was 55.  And the average body shape was average.  This means that there were a LOT of elderly overweight people.  This was NOT a sexual experience in the least.  And it was hot and noisy.  The DJs were Jamaican and they were good, but it felt like a frat party for grandparents.  Christy got topless and we walked out into the crystal clear water with the other 100’s of naked people.  (we keep our bottoms on).  Eventually she took hers off for a while.  After begin there for a couple of hours, we’d got ADHD because there was nothing to do, so we shared a cab with two other couples who were headed back to the ship.  That’s when we decided to cancel our excursion for Cozumel on Friday.  It was going to be walking around ruins.  We would rather just wander around the port and come and go on the ship.  Time is racing by too quickly.

Dating

As of last night (Wednesday) we still hadn’t played with anyone.  We were finding it almost frustrating to hook up with couples.  We all leave messages on each other’s door: “Call me”, “We’d like to meet for dinner”, “Hey hotties..”.  Then they leave something similar on our door, but these aren’t specific enough and no one is sure if the other is just being polite or friendly.  With the cruise half-way over, it’s time to start saying, “We want to have sex with you.  Let’s meet at the piano bar at 9:30 pm and then go to the play room.  Call us.”  Then if they don’t call us, we know that we can remove them from our list.  As of 6:30 last night, we had three couples on our priority list.  We actually have about 10-20, but there were 3 that we felt were in the pole position.  The young couple down the hall, the couple from Mexico, and the couple from New Orleans.  We had dinner plans with the couple from Mexico.  He doesn’t speak English, but Christy said that’s OK.  He’s tall, dark, and quiet.  She’s super hot.  They called at 5:30 to say that they forgot they have spa reservations at 6 pm, so they asked if we could move our dinner date to the next day.  OK.  It may be challenging to engage in dinner conversation if he doesn’t speak English.  We’ll see.  The playrooms don’t open until 10 pm so we’d have to have a break until then, or play in our cabin or their cabin.  Christy doesn’t like having couples be in our cabin/hotel room because there’s no escape for us if things get awkward.  I can respect that.  We then left a note on the door of the young couple down the hall saying that we’d like to meet for dinner and we left a voice message on their phone.  He came by in a robe to say that they got the message and that they’d see us “later".  They are VERY friendly, and hot.  They’re also on their honeymoon (very weird).  We waited until 7:15, but they didn’t come by our cabin or call. Not sure what that means.  So Christy and I went to dinner alone.  On the way there, we ran into the couple from New Orleans.  He is very funny and they are both very outgoing.  They are only a couple of years younger than us and they been married as long as we have.  They have been sexually open in their relationship for years, but have only started formally swinging a few months ago.  We went to dinner with them and then got seated at a table with two older couples.  Dinner was fine.  Christy and I then went back to our room to change into our 1920’s outfits for the evening’s theme and we met them back at the Crypt (a night club bar).  We talked for about 45 minutes very openly about sex and our experiences.  We then walked to the main playroom (Pharaoh’s Lounge) when we found an unoccupied mattress, got naked, and then had full-swap sex.  Most guys (80%) aren’t able to ejaculate when swapping with another woman.  I’m not one of those.  I’ve only not been able to orgasm with one woman (who was VERY hot, but she keep chatting with my wife who was laying next to her while I was having sex with her).  The woman last night (Tina) said that it’s difficult for her to orgasm, but that when she does, it’s good.  Christy orgasms easily and often, which is a huge turn-on for men.  Christy and Jay just started going for it and she came over and over and constantly.  I think at some point she was giving him a blow-job, but I wasn’t paying too much attention.  Tina told me that she likes to be touched and bitten lightly, so I did.  Because I do cum easily with penetration, I prefer to do a lot of fingering.  Because I don’t know how much a woman likes that, I do ask.  I DO NOT want a woman to fake with me and I want her to tell me if I’m doing something wrong.  So I did double and triple fingering, alternating hands and using the other hand on her clit and nipples.  It took 10 minutes, but eventually she orgasmed.  She gave me a blow-job, then I put a condom on and we had sex.  I came quickly as expected.  She seemed to like that.  Jay had been having sex with Christy and she was having one long orgasm.  Jay wasn’t able to get done, but that didn’t seem to come as a surprise to him.  He didn’t seem bothered by it.  Christy has learned that it’s not her fault if the guy doesn’t get done.  Then we all starting talking again while laying there naked.  After a few minutes, one of the playroom hosts came by and asked if we were done—others were waiting for a bed.  They don’t want couples just socializing in the playroom.  There’s a whole ship for that.  The playroom is for sex.  We gave them a hug goodnight and then came back to our room and fell asleep.  It’s now the next morning (Thursday), and I’m sitting on our cabin’s balcony looking off into the blue expanse—no land in sight.

On the Swinger Cruise!!

We’re really into the swing of things here on the cruise.  We weren’t surprised at how old some of the people were, we were just hoping that there would be more young people.  The average here appears to be late 40’s, blue-collar business owner.  We did a little window shopping along the promenade and went to dinner.  We were sat at a table with two other couples and we chatted about cruises, squirting, and our children.  This was not their first swinger cruise.  Toward the end of dinner, I was feeling queasy, so I excused myself and came back to the room to take some motion sickness meds and lie down.After a nap, we went around to the doors of people we have met online and left little gifts on their door, then we went to the Pharaoh’s lounge.  It was a beautifully decorated room that was filled with people having sex.  I’d never seen an orgy like that. 

It’s now Monday, day two.  This is a sea day, meaning that we’re just traveling.  We arrive in Haiti tomorrow morning.  We slept in to noon since we stayed up until 2 am last night watching movies (nothing dirty) in our cabin.  There was a class that Christy wanted to attend today, so we put on some clothes and went to it.

At dinner yesterday, one of the couples is nudists and they also go on nudist cruise.

Today we have spa treatments at 5:30, then we’re hoping to meet some people for dinner.  It’s quite a challenge to meet up with people here.  They have couples speed dating (which we missed at 11 am).  We should have attended that because it’s hard to go from 0 to 60 in a short elevator ride.  To meet people for dinner, we picked 5 couples who we thought were hot (based on their profiles on Kasidie, Facebook, or their card left on our door).  Christy had me take invitations to the cabins of 6 hot couples, inviting them to join us for dinner at 7:30 pm.  So, whoever shows up, we’ll eat with them and then maybe have sex with them.  We’ll see.

It’s Tuesday.  We slept in until 11 am.  We’ll actually I got up an hour earlier and went running on the track on the top of the ship.  Then I came back and got Christy up and we walked off the ship at Labadee Haiti.  More about that in a moment.  At dinner last night, we met up with three couples.  We all were dressed very formal.  Tuxedos and gowns.  The dining room is magnificent and everyone was super sexy and dressed to the nines.  It looked like what I imagine the Titanic looked like.  After dinner, we came back to the room (just the two of us), with the plans to meet up with the others at midnight.  But Christy was tired and after taking a nap wasn’t able to pull herself out of bed.  We’ll have to find those couples today and apologize.  While Christy slept, I wandered down to Studio B.  It’s a night club which also serves as an ice-skating rink.  It was just like a Vegas club with the music and dancing and the women were topless—well, some of them were.  I left after a few minutes then went to the conference rooms which have been transformed into a porn room, a chocolate room, and a dungeon.  I just peaked in.  I wouldn’t do anything without my wife.  I also went to the ship’s library to read.  As you can imagine, it’s completely empty at midnight when everyone else is at a party or sleeping.

Back to today, we got off the boat in Haiti at noon and joined an excursion to see some local culture.  There were about 30 people on this tour.  We had to take a little boat around to a cove.  There are no roads on this part of the island.  The only way to get to these little villages is by boat.  The mountains are too steep and there is so much vegetation.  The little village had homes make from  little logs (they told us that 30% of people in Haiti — 3,000,000 people, live this way).  There is no running water, sewer, or electricity.  The beach was BEAUTIFUL!!  And we ate some of the local food and learned about the island.  There were maybe 10 homes in the area.  Everything they need has to be brought by boat.  And there’s no phone service.  It’s the most remote and pristine place I’ve ever been.  I highly recommend it.  It’s called the “Haitian Cultural Tour”.  I’m sure that if you want to do it, you’ll have to be on a Royal Caribbean cruise.

We’re back in the cabin now.  The ship is on it’s way to Jamaica.  Tonight we’ll be going to the Super Heroes and Villains party on the pool deck.  Maybe we’ll get lucky!!  

Swinger Cruise sets sail tomorrow.

Still Joe here.  We're in Cape Canaveral staying at a nice little hotel.  Tomorrow morning, we take the shuttle over to the port where we and 4,000 other people board the "Freedom of the Seas" swinger cruise.  We are nervous and excited.  We're going to take a nap now.  To know more about what we'll be up to, watch this video.

Couples Cruise tips

More Cruise Prep

This is the day that I get the things on the last-minute shopping list and stuff them into the suitcases that have been in the car since arriving in Denver a couple of days ago, then tomorrow Christy arrives from SLC and I meet her at the airport and we continue the journey to Orlando airport, then on to the swinger cruise!

Cruise Prep

This is Joe.  I'm going to be writing and updating this info as we go along for the next week.  I've taken this week off to get ready for the cruise and to fly out to Denver to visit family for a few days.  Christy still has to work a few more days, then she'll be joining me on Friday and we'll fly together to Orlando.  (We've told everyone that we're going to Disney World).  We get to Port Canaveral pretty late on Saturday and then we board the swinger cruise.  We have (and will have) more than enough "evidence" that we'll be at Walt Disney World for the week, to show people when we get home if they get nosy.

So, we're going on the Couples Cruise.  If you don't know what that is, it's a huge Royal Caribbean ship with up to 4,000 people (plus staff) on board.  We got tickets after hearing from people who went on it last year.  On the ship, they allow nudity and they have big play rooms in which couples can have sex with others.  We've been on a few cruises, but never one like this.  We're excited and nervous.  We're not super outgoing, and even if we were, we'd still be a bit anxious about being "trapped" with thousands of others who are interested in having sex with others.