The Bush family's most visible day was Saturday, after the ship moored at Castaway Cay, Disney's private island in the Bahamas.
The Bush family, like many others, chose to lounge around at Castaway Family Beach, a favorite for families with children. The Bushes didn't exactly plop in chaises among the hoi polloi. Instead, they occupied a little jutting point on the beach, roped off with decorative-looking nautical cargo net and watched over by agents who stood in the shade by the snorkel rental shed.
The arrangement created a viewable but private stage right there among the other beachgoers.
George Bush Sr. was reading The Eleventh Hour, an FBI thriller by Catherine Coulter, and Columba was sitting next to Jeb, who was reading Theodore Rex, Edmund Morris' biography of President Theodore Roosevelt. Barbara Bush wore a ballcap and snapped a couple of photos of her granddaughter and daughter, Dorothy, as they went into the water nearby.
The former president left the beach by golf cart and took a brief excursion out to a Coast Guard cutter that had followed the ship to Castaway Cay and was visible off the beach.
"I heard we are being followed by two warships and a submarine," Japanese-born London doctor Tetsujiru Ihara said. "So we are safe."
Unverifiable stories about exceptional security abounded, making some passengers feel safer and others feel more like a target.
Before the ship left port Thursday, divers swam under the ship's hull, checking for explosives. Dogs were clearly visible on the pier sniffing luggage.
While tied up in Nassau, a boat drove up and down the seaward length of the ship, making sure no one was trying to board it, and the ship, unlike other cruise ships, was operating its surface search radar while in port.
