Letter from Bermuda -- part IV

"Think I'll sit here," said the guy who slid into the captain's chair up front.  We were taking the ferry from Southampton to Hamilton and the ferry is the best way to go.  "Doesn't the captain sit there?" I said.  But as we started to move, I saw that it was all being done with mirrors from below by the real captain.

His wife sat with us.  Their names were......wait for it.........Ken and Barbie.  You could not make that up.  Guess what?  They were the perfect couple.  Both in their mid-to-late-forties, each was in incredible shape.  Barbie was maybe a tad too thin, but Ken was picture perfect.  "You two must work out pretty seriously," I stupidly asked rhetorically.  They did.  Turns out he was one of the sponsors of the American Family Law conference underway at our hotel; she was a stay-at-home (non) Mom -- both her kids now off to college.  But her job had obviously been to stay in perfect shape because that's what Ken pays her for.  Unlike many stay-at-homes who turn to fat and glob, Barbie was hanging in there and she sported the jewellery to prove it!  I mean, if you're going to sit on your a--, you better justify it.  Otherwise, I guarantee your husband will be fooling around. 

I liked them both and we saw more of them in the days that followed.  Living in Seattle, Ken was a keen Vancouver Canucks fan and told me a riotous story:  "I was staying in a Vancouver hotel a couple of years ago," he said, "and the Canucks were playing badly.  Got on the elevator with three other guys and started railing about Luongo and how badly he was playing.  I mean, the guy's a sieve, I told them.  I also said he was too old, past it, too hot and mostly cold....I really went to town on the guy. 

"No one said a word to my rant, but when the elevator door opened, there was the entire team in the lobby.  Guess who I was on the elevator with?  Luongo and the Sedin brothers!"  Man, something else you could not make up.  The other story he told me was about Australia: 

"I was in Sydney, giving the keynote address at a conference, and tried to make a joke about all the guests from a cruise ship wandering around with their blue-rinse hair and fanny packs.  When I said 'fanny pack' the room went deadly quiet.  I thought, that's weird?  Anyway, finished the speech and some guy kindly told me that in Australia, 'fanny' is the word for the front of a woman's a-hem.  So basically, I had just talked about women walking around the hotel with their a-hems in packs."

Yep, Bermuda was fun.