Cruisin'

Okay, here is a mammoth post about our cruise last month. We had SO much fun. My mom flew out from Connecticut to stay with the kids (I know, she's a saint, right?). I missed the kids, but I have to say it was really nice to just spend time with my awesome husband for a week and a half.  For eleven whole days, I didn't cook a single meal, clean anything (except with sanitizing wipes, haha), or change a poopy diaper. Ahh.


Note: These are the same pictures that are on Facebook (plus some more), but with more description. A lot more. Seriously, this post is a NOVEL. That's because I want to remember what happened on the trip, so this post is only partly to tell you about our trip, but mostly for me to remember it when I look back, so no hard feelings if you don't have the time or inclination to read all this. :)

 My mom flew in two days before we left, so she and the kids would have time to acclimate to each other. Since she lives far away, we don't see her more than once or twice a year, but Rachel warmed right up to her (she's like that). Reed was a little more cautious, but was jumping around with her on the air mattress before she even got her bags unpacked. I hear the kids had a lot of fun with Meme while we were gone. They took a trip to the aquarium one day, to bridal veil falls another, and on walks almost every day (according to my neighbors, who say she was really cute with the kids). She also brought with her a bunch of dollar store presents - enough for one for each of the kids for each day we were gone. She put them in paper bags and let them pick a "treasure" every day. Now, I'm with the kids all day every day, and even with being used to it- it's hard sometimes! So I'm pretty sure eleven days alone with the kids was a little harder than my mom let on, but she's so awesome, and one of the few people I would be willing to leave my kids with for that long with so little communication. We were able to call every day while in Florida, but once on the ship, the calls are really expensive, so I only called for literally one minute every couple of days. But all went well, and the kids still ask where Meme is every once in a while.

Day 1
We convinced Mike's brother Conner to sleep over the night before we left and drive us to the airport at 4:30 in the morning. Thanks Conner. :)  As we were driving, the airline called us to tell us our flight was delayed 4 hours (not sure why they called us, but we're glad they did!). Not good. They wanted to put us on a flight leaving 2 hours later that had two layovers and wouldn't get us into Florida until 9:00 at night. No thanks. The second option was going on a different airline, with just one layover, leaving and getting in at the same time our original flight was supposed to. Yes, please. Fortunately, we got seats on that flight and all went smoothly, except that we didn't get to sit anywhere near each other. But at least we got in at a reasonable time. We got our rental car and drove the half an hour from Fort Lauderdale airport to our hotel in Boca Raton.

Mike's company has an office in Boca Raton, which he has traveled to before on business, and we flew in 2 days early so Mike could work for a couple days down there before we left on the cruise. So Mike's airfare, the hotel, rental car, and his meals were paid for by his work. Awesome.

The view from our hotel room balcony.

 We checked in at the hotel and went to find some dinner. This is where smart phones, Yelp and TripAdvisor come in really handy. We ended up at this little fire-grilled pizza place, which was really yummy. And then went to bed early.

Day 2
We made sure to rent the car from a place that allowed two drivers, so for Thursday and Friday I could just drop Mike off at work and go be a tourist. 

To get to Mike's work, you have to turn onto T-Rex Ave. I think it's awesome.

 On Thursday I drove back over to Fort Lauderdale to ride on the water taxi. I did my research beforehand on what I wanted to do, and this is something that's pretty highly rated for the price you pay. It's a boat taxi service that goes through Fort Lauderdale's inter-coastal waterway, going by big mansions and yachts, and making stops all along the way by beaches, shopping, etc. For $20 you have a day pass that lets you get on and off anywhere you want, there are over a dozen stops and a boat comes by every half hour or so. Also, the boat operators give commentary on the sights as you go by. It was really fun and I'm glad I did it. And though it would have been even more fun with Mike there, I didn't mind being alone at all! I did whatever I wanted. And I LOVE talking to strangers. Seriously, I struck up conversations with all sorts of interesting people. I just love people. :)

Waiting for the taxi at the first stop. I forgot to take pictures of the actual taxi. Oops.

This is Steven Speilberg's personal yacht. Look at the normal size fishing boat alongside it. This is a huge, 200 million dollar yacht. Craziness.

One of the many fabulous (and crazy expensive) homes along the waterfront. Most of them are owned by people who started huge international companies.

Beach off one of the stops.

I drove back and picked Mike up from work. He had to meet with his boss at like 6:30, so we just went to a place by his work for dinner, which included an "appetizer" with the hugest plate of nachos I have ever seen in my life. It could have easily fed 4 people as a whole dinner. Seriously.

Day 3
Dropped Mike off at work again. My plans for today were a little less set in stone. I went to this place called "Butterfly World", which was kind of cool, but overpriced, since it only took an hour or so to go through. But I got some cool pictures of flowers and butterflies. 

In the main room, the air was thick with butterflies, which, I found out, I'm apparently a little scared of in those numbers and that close to me, because I was really jumpy. Haha.

Cool flower.

After that I headed over to this nature park with a boardwalk through the forest, which was kind of cool. The beach was right across the street, so I walked along the beach for a while too. 

Beach in Boca.

Boardwalk

 It was still early, but I didn't really want to go anywhere else, so I just headed back to the hotel, ate lunch there and read by the pool until it was time to pick up Mike. We ate dinner at PF Chang's, and while we were eating, it started to pour. We're talking torrential downpour here, and it lasted all night.


Day 4
The actual cruise starts. If you've actually read this far, congratulations. We're now starting the actual vacation. Maybe you should get a snack or beverage.

It was still rainy on this day, when we were leaving on the cruise, but we didn't really care, especially since it wasn't pouring, just sprinkling.

This is obviously not what the ship looked like in Florida, but I wanted to put up a picture of it here at the beginning. This was in Cozumel.

 The embarkation process was pretty long, a couple hours. But whatever, we're about to get on a cruise ship, what do I care if I have to wait a little bit? I just chatted with a nice couple on their honeymoon from England.

Right as we were about to get on board, I told Mike to show me his excited face, and this is what he gave me:

Fail. That is SO not an excited face. I had to show him what a real excited face looks like. Which is this:

So we got on board, hit the buffet, dropped our backpacks off, and went off to explore the ship.

It was raining as we walked around, but not hard, so we still checked out the deck and everything.

"Adios Miami, hello fun!" Love it.

:)

Woohoo!

As the ship pulled out of Miami, the rain let up and we stood on the deck watching the ship move out, then went to check out the inside of the ship.

While walking through the casino, we noticed that while it wasn't open yet, a lot of the tables were in demo mode, so we sat down to play some rounds of Texas Hold 'Em. We don't gamble, so this is the only time we were in the casino, but it was fun.

Most of the rest of these pictures aren't from embarkation day, but they're all lumped together in the "on the ship" category of pictures.

Atrium where the main elevators are.

Dining room. We actually ate at the dining room more than we thought we would. It's nice to be served, and also nice that there are no prices on the menu. :) 

Our cabin. We booked an inside guarantee - the cheapest cabin category you can book - and feel like we lucked out on location. We were one deck below lido, right by the buffet, pool deck, etc. We thought the room decor was pretty ugly though. Whoever decided that peach and teal (in the bathroom) are good choices should be tested for color blindness. (And it's not like the ship was built in the 80's or anything).

Other side of the room. Complete with towel monkey.

Mike convinced me to sing some karaoke with him (I refused to go up by myself). It was actually pretty fun. It looks like there's no one there, but there were probably 30 people or so in the lounge.

I love towel animals. :)

In the middle of the week, there was a deck party at night. Mike and I shook our booties. It's hard to tell from the crappy picture, but there were a lot of people there. We were even in a conga line 305 people long. They counted.

Sunset at sea. I only caught one sunset, most of the time we were eating or at shows, but I'm glad I at least saw one.

Every day we would highlight things on the day's schedule that we wanted to go to - like shows, a basketball shooting contest, cooking demonstration, trivia, etc. We went to most of the theater shows and "family friendly" comedy acts, too. Most of the shows were not so impressive, but there was one night where there was this comedian/juggler guy who was hilarious! 

So, anyone who's been on a cruise knows that they always do a "Love and Marriage" type show, where they get the most recently married couple, the longest married couple, and a couple in the middle to get up on stage and answer relationship questions and see if they match each others' answers. Mike volunteered us to be the middle couple. But there were half a dozen other couples also trying to get on, so we had to do a passionate kiss to determine who would get up on stage. Our kiss involved a dip and leg pop, but the applause was about equal, so we had to choose numbers. We got closest!  So this is us on stage in front of a packed theater answering questions about our first kiss, where we met, etc. 

This is after revealing the answer to a particularly intimate question. I think our facial expressions say it all. This was on the last day of the cruise, but for the rest of the day and even disembarking the next day, people kept smiling at us or making a reference to this answer. And no, I will not share what it was on here. :)

And we won! We got a "Ship on a stick" (a plastic Carnival trophy) and a bottle of french champagne. We opened it in the bathroom, waved it around a bit for effect, and then poured it down the drain.

Day 6 - Cozumel
If you're paying close attention, you'll see I skipped Day 5. It was a sea day, so we just kind of explored the ship and hung around. Our cruise was a 7 night, the first and last being sea days with four port days in the middle. The first port day was in Cozumel, Mexico.

We got in pretty early in the morning.

So excited to start our fun day!

We like to do fun, adventurous excursions, and all our excursions ended up being through Carnival, which usually I would try to avoid, but either the sites were too far away to risk independent tours, or the specific tour we wanted was only offered by the cruise line.

Our first excursion was called the "Amazing Secret River". We took a ferry over to the mainland followed by a bumpy bus ride on a dirt road to the site of the cave. It was only discovered in 2006 and is a huge cave system. You know you're about to go on a fun tour when you have to sign a very long, scary-sounding release form, haha! We had release forms for 3 out of the four tours we were on. They fit us with wetsuits, life jackets, helmets and headlamps and sent us off in groups of 8 with a tour guide and photographer. For the vast majority of the tour, the only light came from our headlamps, and we walked/swam through the cave system. It really was amazing!

This is not a picture of us. They didn't allow cameras, and wanted a lot of money for the picture cd, so we didn't buy it. These are just some pictures of the caves I found online.

The water was so neat looking! At one point, when we were swimming through (not able to touch bottom), they had everyone turn off their lights and just be quiet for a few minutes. It was so dark that we couldn't even see our hands right in front of our faces and so still and quiet. Really cool.

After getting our stuff off, we relaxed on these hammocks waiting for the bus to come back for us. They also served an amazing authentic lunch. Mike lived in Mexico for two years, so he knows good, real Mexican food, and he was impressed.

We had about an hour of free time on the beach before the ferry came back to take us over to Cozumel. We walked on the beach and rented a jetski for half an hour. It was so fun to jetski around on the beautiful Caribbean water, and Mike even convinced me to try driving, which I had never done before. It was a blast and I didn't want to give the driver's seat back to Mike after that!

Most evenings on the ship were about the same- get back from excursion, shower and change, eat dinner, go to the shows or activities, and then crash into bed exhausted. We actually had to get up around 6:30-7:00 most mornings to have time to get ready and meet up for excursions.

Day 7 - Belize
 Belize was a country I had never even heard of before we booked this cruise. It actually only became a country about 30 years ago. Everything that I had read said to book an organized tour, since Belize city itself is not very tourist friendly (and obviously, we like to do touristy things). So we booked a Mayan Ruins tour. The site was a 2 hour bus ride each way from the port, but the time went by quickly with the tour guides telling us all about the country and the Mayans. Belize is a third world country, which was very obvious to us as we passed through town, and then through the countryside with homes that looked like nothing more than shacks. But Belize has some very good things going for it - medical care is practically free, education is very much mandatory, and the reason most people live in very modest dwellings is because people don't take out loans to buy houses. They save up, buying a few building materials each week when they can afford it and slowly building their own houses. If you live in Belize, the government gives you land, and you have to build on it or you lose it. One last fun fact. The country has a grand total of 7 stoplights. And one's broken.

The countryside.

The city.

This was a little hand-cranked ferry that took us across a river to the Mayan ruin site.

And then we finally got to the ruins - called Xunatunich (which, after some practice, I can now pronounce correctly). There were a lot of buildings (and the site isn't even fully excavated), but this is the main temple. We got to climb all the way to the top of it! That is quite a feat in the Belize heat and humidity. We learned a lot about the Mayans and it was a really neat tour.

View from the top.

We got a GoPro camera before the trip and had a lot of fun with it. Mike wore it on his head here and at part of the dolphin swim later on, and we also used it under water in Grand Cayman.

After the ruins, we stopped at a local place for lunch. The lunch was really good and filling after all that walking around in the heat! And the bottled soda is made in Belize too, using cane sugar instead of the processed stuff we have in soda here, so it gave it a really interesting flavor. And Mike bought a small wood carving of his birth month in the Mayan calendar, the name of which is "Tree of Life". Interesting.

Day 8 - Mahogany Bay, Roatan  (Honduras)
Roatan had a lot of cool looking excursions, and it took us a while to pick one. We finally settled on "Dolphin Swim and Snorkel". Mostly because it's one of those once in a lifetime things that you wouldn't do normally. Mike thought that swimming with dolphins sounded kinda girly at first, but he came around. :)

This is a stock photo of the resort (Anthony's Key) where the dolphin swim took place. It was really pretty and natural.

After a quick boat ride across the lagoon, we hopped in the water and they divided us up into smaller groups of about 8 with a dolphin and trainer. The dolphin we interacted with was named Mickey, and he was pretty young, but anxious to show off his mad skills. :)

Petting Mickey. Both Mike and I were impressed with how solid and strong dolphins feel. You can tell they're powerful animals. I was grinning like an idiot the whole time. Haha!

These are our posed photos with Mickey. There were only a couple of poses per couple though, which I was glad about, because I didn't want to spend the whole time doing a photo op - there was a lot of time where we just got to watch Mickey and his trainer do their thing. I learned a fair amount about dolphins and really got the sense that the dolphins and trainers both really enjoy what they do.

Mickey doing a tail walk.

The best part about this excursion was the part I have no pictures of - which came after the dolphin encounter. For the second half hour, we were given snorkel gear and allowed to free swim with all the dolphins in the lagoon - at least a dozen of them. This was seriously SO COOL. Mike and I didn't even stay together - I just swam around following the sound of the dolphins under the water, seeing them swim by, occasionally getting to pet one as it swam by or coaxing it to play with a piece of sea grass. A couple times I even laughed under water out of pure joy. Especially when I would turn around under water and suddenly see a couple of dolphins right next to me and reach out to touch them. Ah-mazing. It was the highlight of the entire cruise for me.

After we got back from the excursion, we had a couple hours before we had to be back on the ship, so we walked over to the beach and swam.

See where the land juts out across the beach? Connected to that is a pier. We walked to the end of the pier and swam back, just enjoying the wonderful Caribbean water together. Thanks Mike, for making me do that. It was so fun.

I just like this because of the ship in the background. Sorry for our extreme white-ness. :)

Day 9 - Grand Cayman
 The last port day. :( At least we got to sleep in a little this day, since we didn't get into Cayman until 10:00. We had an excursion booked, but it wasn't until 2:30, so we decided to just head over to the public beach and play. We found a nice secluded spot right here:

You can see our ship waaaaay in the distance out there too.

 The water was not exactly warm, but Mike convinced me to get in, and we had a blast running in and out of the water, looking for seashells, sitting on the beach playing in the sand, and goofing around with the GoPro. Mike decided he likes swimming in ocean water. I just love being with him. It was so fun not having any responsibilities and just playing together and being silly.

When it was time to go back, we hiked up the beach a bit and caught a city "bus", which are really just vans that drive around and you flag one down and tell them where you want to go. Like a taxi, but it only cost us 5 bucks to get back to the pier.

Our last excursion was Snuba. Snuba is like a combination of snorkel and scuba diving. They give you a mask and fins, and then you have a regulator attached to a 30 foot hose. The hose connects to an air tank on the surface, in a little raft.

Getting ready to snuba.

It was neat to have the GoPro for this, so we could get some video of it. We were under water for about 45 minutes. It took me about 20 minutes just to get used to the whole regulator, being 30 feet under water, popping my ears thing, but once I did, I had such a great time! There was a ship wreck that we swam by, and lots of colorful fish. Our guide showed us a really neat shrimp looking critter too, and had it walk up our arms.

Snuba Mary.

Snuba Mike.

This experience has made me want to get Scuba certified, which I am currently planning on doing with Mike's brother Conner in about a month (Mike would rather spend his money on other things). There aren't too many places to scuba dive in Utah, but there are a few, and I just think it would be really fun.

Day 10- Sea Day

Last day of the cruise! I told Mike that my planned excursion on this day was "Eating". We spent so much time doing fun things that I didn't feel like I had yet gotten the true eat-until-you-burst cruise experience. So I had a big breakfast, several rounds of lunch, the chocolate buffet at midday, and several items at each course during dinner. Oof. Good times, though. We mostly sat around reading (in between eating, that is), and just soaking up the last of vacation time. Then we had to pack, and I realized it really was almost over.  Sad.

On the other hand, Mike and I had really been missing the kids a ton the last couple of days, so we were actually looking forward to heading home and seeing their cute faces.

Day 11 - Goin' Home
 Our flight was at 1:30, and we got off the ship around 9:00, so we had a fair amount of waiting at the airport. The flights were thankfully uneventful though, and we got home around 6:30 and were met at the airport by two kids with the biggest grins I have ever seen on them! They just ran right into our arms - it was awesome. My mom had to fly out the next morning, so she just stayed in a hotel that night so we didn't have to drive back and forth. I wish we could have spent a little more time with her, but hopefully we'll all see each other again soon. We got home and fell right back into our usual routine, although I was bummed at having to cook my own breakfast the next morning.

All in all, it was a wonderful, relaxing, fun vacation. I'm so grateful to my mom for taking such good care of the kids while we were gone. We really love cruising, and although I have no idea when we'll be able to do it again, I'm sure this won't be the last time.

Because how can  you say no to this?

Oh, and if you actually read this whole post, drop me a comment and let me know! Because you're awesome! :)