Young Mommy & Wife

Wednesday, February 14, 2007 8:08 PM

Our Trip Current mood: exhausted Category: Travel and Places For anyone who would like to know how our trip went... it was absolutely perfect and absolutely amazing!!!! By far the best vacation either of us has ever been on! I highly recommend a cruise to anyone who is thinking about going. It's definitely the best experience for the best price! Our ride to the airport, our trip down to Miami and getting to and on the ship went great. Very easy (unlike our ride back). And when we saw the ship and got on it, we were absolutely AMAZED!! It's HUGE, way bigger than I even pictured it. It's 3 times BIGGER than the Titanic was! Lol, I was very impressed with that! It's like 17 or 18 stories tall and had everything on it you could imagine. There is even a tall "mall- like" area down the middle of the inside of the ship that is several stories tall that is just gigantic, you would never guess that a boat could have that much space! And there is a huge theatre that is 2 stories tall and has balcony seating too that probably holds about 2,000+ people. CRAZY!! And our room was so cool! Everyone makes fun of how small the rooms are, but we spent a little bit more for an ocean-view room which is just a window overlooking the ocean. BUT!!!!! We got upgraded to a balcony room so we had our own balcony overlooking the ocean, it was just absolutely AWESOME! We spent so much time out there. Oh, and the food was probably the highlight of the whole trip, lol, which is weird for me b/c I'm such a picky eater and I usually don't care that much about food. We both probably easily gained 10 pounds each, lol. There is free, all you can eat food, all the time!!! And there is such a huge variety and so many different places that you can go and it was unbelieveable too! There's buffets and snack places, 24 hour room service, and really nice, elegant, sit down dinners w/ menus with no prices, lol. We even had to get all dressed up for dinner every night, which I love. And the people who worked on the cruise were fantastic! They were so helpful ALL of the time. They were always laughing and singing and dancing while they were doing their jobs, we couldn't believe it! It was so fun on the ship too. Every night we saw a performace in the theatre- singing and dancing, comedians, a vantreliquist (he wasn't that great), acrobats, just anything you could think of and it was so good! We even saw a professional ice-skating show! Oh, and there was this live "Newlywed" game show where they took 3 couples out of the audience- one that was married for 3 1/2 months, one that was married for like 55 years, and then one in between and asked them questions like they do on the show and it was probably the funniest thing I've ever seen in my life!!! And there were live bands of all different kinds of music playing on the ship all over the place- out by the pool, in the bars and clubs, in the mall area, just everywhere. On the ship we also played in the Casino every night, lol, and had so much fun doing that! We came in the first night and only spent $10, and we played mostly nickel slots, and I kept winning like $15 every time we'd go and Jason would just lose all of the money! Then on the last night Jason won $75, and we ended up going home w/ about $45 more than when we started, so that was good! I only got sea-sick for a little bit the two days that we were entirely at sea, but they had free seasickness pills and those really helped. Okay, about the places we stopped at... SAN JUAN, PUERTO RICO- It was really cool from like a historical perspective. There were a lot of really cool, old forts around Old San Juan and the buildings had really nice architecture, a lot of Spanish influence. We took a tour around the city and went in the shops in town, but we didn't go to the beach or anything. It was really kind of run down and there was a lot of poverty and the streets were unbelievably narrow. ST. MAARTEN- was probably my favorite. It's really hilly and pretty. We took a cab to the beach and spent most of the day there and then we went into town and looked at the shops and stuff. The part we went to was owned by the Netherlands and the other half of the island is own by France. Again, there were parts that were really poor, and the roads are so skinny, you couldn't imagine ever driving on them, but it was cool. ST. THOMAS- was Jason's favorite. It was a lot like St. Maarten, but it is owned by the U.S. so it's more like commercialized. (Except for the fact that they drive on the wrong side of the road there). We did the same thing that we did at St. Maarten, too, we drove to the beach and spent most of the day swimming in the ocean and laying on the beach and then went shopping for a little bit. NASSAU, BAHAMAS- We actually went on an excursion on this one!! Royal Carribbean has a bunch of packages you can buy for tours, scuba diving, snorkeling, etc. We went on a boat tour of Nassau and Paradise Island (where all of the celebrities have houses), which was nice, Jason and a bunch of other people even saw a stingray jump out of the water! Then we went SNORKELING at a reef and it was the most amazing thing I've ever done! I can't swim, I'm afraid of water and fish and things, but I'm so glad I went! When you look down into the water it looks just like you're watching like an ocean special on t.v.! It was insane. We saw like long, skinny neon blue fish, huge dark blue fish, yellow, black, and white stripped fish, and so many that I know I've seen on t.v. and tons of different kinds of coral and things. And then we rode back on the boat and went to the shops and things in Nassau. The only difference is that Nassau was REALLY poor and scary. There were people trying to sell us things everywhere, one guy trying to sell us drugs, and it smelled so bad in the shops! It was gross! Then one guy asked me if I could stay in the Bahamas w/ him, lol! No thanks, it wasn't the nicest place. And the weather was so great at all of the islands, like 80's the whole time, but not too hot. Then we went to Miami for 2 days which kind of sucked. It was still like in the 70's, but it rained the whole time so we just stayed in our hotel room and watched movies and would occasionally walk somewhere in the rain, not very fun! Then our flight home got cancelled going into Chicago and it was really long before we finally got home! We kept getting delayed and then we finally switched to going into Milwaukee where the weather wasn't that bad. We ended up spending 12 hours in the airports that day and were so bored after spending two days inside our hotel room, lol. But, we made it home eventually only to find EVERYTHING going wrong w/ our house. Our pipes froze so none of our water was working in our bathroom, our door to our basement broke, water was leaking in everywhere in our living room and bedroom, our computer broke, lol, and I'm sick now! AND, on top of that, IT'S FREEZING here!! So, Jason spent all day today fixing everything and everything is good now. But, we definitely want to go on another cruise again and bring people with us, b/c it's SO fun! Probably next winter or something, so save up your money!!!! Hahaha, there's only a couple of people I can think of that would actually read this whole thing...sorry I went on forever. The crazy thing is there is so much I didn't write about, lol! It was so great, I wish we were back there!!!