Our Amazing Vacation!

So after years of dreaming, browsing through "vacation deal" websites, reading through my "vacations to go" weekly email blasts longingly, and surfing through every cruise booking site periodically, we finally got to go on my dream vacation!  Last week we went on a cruise to the Western Caribbean.  It was our first cruise, hopefully not our last!  Now, I have been looking forward to this little adventure for 14 years now so I had some seriously high expectations and amazingly enough, it was better than I had thought it would be!  We left the kids with Grandma & Grandpa Shawcroft for the whole week.  They were awesome to take on our kiddos for so long!  It was harder than I thought on Braden and on me when we said our goodbyes - but the kids had a blast at Grandma's and we had a blast as well!  Here's a re-cap of our fun week!

Saturday, February 28th

Bon Voyage!  Here's a picture from the International Pier in Ft. Lauderdale where ours was not the only enormous cruising sky-scraper to hit the water that day!

Monday, March 2nd

Montego Bay, Jamaica

Our first island adventure was in Jamaica on Monday.  We stepped off the boat and there was our Jamaican friend looking for some tip money with his "Jamaica background" and his Rasta Tam hat! 

Our adventure in Jamaica was a fun one.  We rode up into the mountains and the jungles of Jamaica - way up above Montego Bay where we did some kayaking and then had some DELICIOUS virgin pina coladas and got an authentic tour of a banana plantation.  Jamaica wasn't my favorite place.  In fact, it was quite humbling and I felt downright uncomfortable at times.  We drove through the city and up into the mountains where we passed little tiny villages, small shacks without roofs, burned-out houses with families living in them, women sitting in dirty yards washing laundry in buckets, schools where children sat outside in a circle around a teacher without books, desks, chairs, or even a roof.  It was during that bumpy ride up into the jungle that I decided when Lehi had his vision on the Tree of Life and he saw a "great and spacious building" - it must have been a cruise ship.  As we drove up into the mountains, through poor and desperate-looking neighborhoods, we could see, towering behind us as we drove, the immense cruise-ship at the port.  We were the ultimate symbols of luxury and extravagance, walking off our ship with more food than we could even dream of eating, and entering this sad island nation where poverty, drugs, and hunger were overhelmingly apparent even in the "tourist areas."  I have decided Jamaica is a beautiful island, and yet it is sad and dirty and overall, a humbling place to visit.  For instance, our river tour guide works only when a cruise ship is in port.  He has no other means of employment.  During the busy season he usually works once or twice a week.  During the off-season, he has no work.  As I watched these women washing clothes by hand in buckets, I felt guilty for complaining that my dishwasher was leaving "scum" on my dishes!  What an ungrateful fool I am sometimes! 

Okay, all that aside, we had a fun adventure that day.  Here are a few pictures from the kayaking.  The river was mostly slow with a few little rapids to keep us awake, beautiful flowering trees towered overhead, and bananas and bamboo grew thick along the banks of the river.

Can you see the bananas hanging in this tree?

We passed a spot where bamboo rafts are used to carry the tourists down the river.  The Jamaican raft-drivers float the tourists downstream, then then have the difficult task of pulling their bamboo rafts back up against the current.  It looked like hard work!  They have long bamboo poles they use to help push their rafts up in the deeper parts of the river.  In the shallow areas, they attach themselves with a long rope to their rafts and then they literally drag the rafts behind them as they walk up the river.  I was glad that we were providing our own "engine" with our kayaks and especially glad that our river guide would be able to pile all the kayaks in a truck and drive them back to the starting point! 

David and our "river pilot guide" at the end of the kayaking.  No problem is what we heard the Jamaican people say all day!  Our guide informed us that because Jamaica has so many problems, everyone has to say "no problem" just to survive.  :)

After the kayaking ended we boarded this ultra-modern vehicle for our tour through the banana plantation.

We learned all kind of interesting things about bananas!  Our fun guide even sang us the "banana song" and we all learned just what "6-hand, 7-hand, 8-hand bunch" means in the song.  He was a great guide!  He showed us how the banana stalk is full of fibers which are used to make nylons and fishing line, etc.  It was an interesting tour!

David is "sneezing" the sample of stringy fiber from the center stalk of the banana plant.

Before we got back onboard the Ruby Princess after our day in Jamaica, we had to snap this picture of David to show how HUGE this boat really is!  There were 18 decks on this boat - and that's not counting the ones we couldn't get to!  It's like a floating city sky-scraper! 

Sunset in Jamaica.  Just after we got back to our cabin we noticed this gorgeous sunset slipping by outside our window.  It's beautiful even from inside our little cabin!

Tuesday, March 3rd

Grand Cayman

Grand Cayman was probably my favorite stop on our cruise.  It was beautiful!  The seas were a little choppy as we approached the islands so instead of porting at Georgetown, the ship circled to the south side of the island and into "Spot's Bay."  We were a little nervous about getting to our snorkel/sting ray adventure that we had already booked because of our distance from Georgetown so we were in the first tender to leave the ship that morning.  We arrived on the beach before the photographers had even gathered to begin taking the obligatory "souvenir shot" and then we grabbed a taxi and went straight to the headquarters of "Captain Bryan's Adventures."  We actually made it in plenty of time for David to grab a croissant at the English Bakery across the street where we discovered how dismal the American dollar compares to Cayman currency.  :)  After a little wait, our snorkeling excursion was ready to go!

As we rode on a beautiful catamaran across the clear blue waters and out to the famous Sting Ray Sandbar, our "captain" told us it was 7 years good luck to kiss a stingray.  Bring on the good luck!  David's ready for his back not to hurt at all!  :) 

Now it's my turn for 7 years of good luck! 

The sting rays were so amazing!  There's a sand bar just behind a reef where for generations, fishermen would clean their daily catch of fish before heading into the island.  Sting rays began gathering on this shallow sand bar to enjoy the free meals the fishermen provided every day.  Soon a few brave fishermen discovered that the sting rays had become gentle and docile.  Now, it's the biggest tourist attraction on the island!  At first it's a little nerve-wracking to jump into the water spotted everywhere with the dark shadows of sting rays floating around.  The first time they brush right across your chest, legs, or back, looking for food or just to say hello, it's a little scary!  But soon we discovered how much fun they are to play with!  We snorkeled through the shallow water, watching them float all around us.  We got to hold them, pet them, and of course, kiss them!  They are soft and a little squishy to hold - it's so cool!  When they are hungry they dart around through the water, watching for handouts and concentrating on eating.  But when they get full, our guide was explaining to us as he "snuggled" with a large female sting ray, they like to hang out and they're content to be held, petted, and handled.  The guides who come out every day have gotten to know some of the sting rays so well they name them and look for their favorites when they come.  This was an AMAZING moment I'll never forget!

Back massage anyone?  Our boat captain offered me a back rub compliments of a friendly female sting ray.  How could I refuse?  It felt so good! 

We learned that the females get the largest and usually turn lighter as they age.  The males are smaller, darker colored, and usually not quite as friendly. 

After our sting ray adventure, our catamaran sailed just a little further out to the reef that forms a barrier to the island.  The water was pretty choppy and the current kept pulling us back to the boat so we had a hard time actually getting out to the reef but we did see a few fish!

We stopped at one more reef before we headed back.  This reef was a little closer to shore and the water was much calmer.  We loved this stop!  We saw lots of beautiful fish swimming around the corals and this time the current pulled us away from the boat which resulted in a bit of swimming to get back to the boat.  We took lots of pictures with our little under-water camera but I don't have those pictures developed yet so I'll have to post some of those when I see if any of them turned out!

Wednesday, March 4

Cozumel, Mexico

What an adventure we had in Mexico!  We were in the first group off the ship when it finally docked at Puerta Maya in Cozumel.  We were supposed to be taking the 8 am ferry over to Playa del Carmen but they didn't let us off the boat until 8:10 and then we found that we needed to get several miles down the beach front to the International Pier to find the ferry.  That was just the start of a hectic but fun day!

Here we are at Puerta Maya.  We already knew we'd missed the first ferry and we knew we had an hour before the next ferry.  We didn't know yet, how far away we were from the ferry pier!  It was such a beautiful, warm, sunny morning, we decided to save some money and walk to the ferry pier.  That was a great idea until we realized how far away it was and how badly we needed to catch the 9 am ferry.  We ended up running most of the way and then we missed that 9 am ferry by about 60 seconds!  That really set us behind for the rest of the day!

We got on the ferry in Cozumel and suddenly discovered David was going to be in big trouble.  The ferry was small and enclosed, stuffed with row after row of seats, crammed with people, and it started rocking and rolling on the waves as soon as it left the pier.  Poor David, that was probably the longest 30 minute boat ride of his life!  He was turning green and he was so miserable.  I felt so bad!  We finally made it to Playa del Carmen but since we had missed the first 2 ferries from Cozumel, our "chauffeur" who was scheduled to pick us up and take us to our Hidden Worlds jungle adventure, was long gone!  We had to make our way ourselves!  A taxi ride would have been $40 so we decided to be adventurous and squished ourselves onto a "colectivo" - a mini van which was basically a bus.  For only $2/each we found ourselves dropped off on the side of the road just outside the entrance to "Hidden Worlds."  Finally, we had made it to our destination for the day! 

Hidden Worlds was a fun adventure!  We got set-up with wet suits and then boarded our "limo" - a very old, hardly recognizable truck base with a "cage" on the back to hold the people.  We bounced our way back into the jungle where they dropped us off at the "Jungle Center."  We had a short hike through the jungle and by some Yucatan Monkeys before we found the entrance to the "sky cycle."

Yucatan Spider Monkey

David set up the camera on a tree stump so we could get a picture of the two of us along the trail to the sky cycle.  Nice remote shot Dave!

The sky cycle was a pretty clever invention!  They designed a "bicycle" that attaches to a zip line.  You pedal the bike to move along the cable.  Sometimes there's a little bit of a climb, mostly it was pretty flat, and sometimes you had to use your feet on the pedals as the "breaks" when we went downhill.  What a fun way to explore the jungle near the cenotes!  At first we were way up high, right along the tree line, then we went down into the trees and down even more into the cave where we started exploring the cenotes.

Here I am in the trees on my "sky cycle!"

We entered a cavern where we got off our bikes and donned our snorkel gear.  We followed our guide into the water of the cenote.  This was a cool adventure!  It was very dark.  Stalactites and Stalagmites stuck up and hung into the water all around us.  At some points we ducked through small little spaces with cave walls all around us and black, darkness so thick we couldn't see a thing.  Then the cave would open up into a big cavern with sunlight peeking through and the green leaves of the trees showing through the cracks.  We had fun floating around in this "hidden world" and our guide was quite entertaining as he explained in broken english about the stalactites and how he got fired for taking tourists too far off the beaten path.  We were using our underwater camera to take pictures during this part and we're hoping some of them turn out because this place was incredible!  It was like we had left planet earth and entered a new world where mysterious, dark caverns filled with water were connected to each other by dark, deep tunnels. 

After the cenote snorkeling, we got back on our sky cycles and biked through a few more caverns before we climbed back out into the jungle again. 

When we got back from the cycling adventure we suddenly looked at our watches and realized it was 3:00 pm.  We were still a bouncy 25 minute "limo" ride away from the entrance of the park, then a 40 minute colectivo ride, a 30 minute ferry ride, and another 3 mile run back to the ship where we were supposed to be by 5:30 pm.  We had to hustle!  We had Hidden Worlds call us a taxi which was waiting for us at the entrance of the park in 3 minutes.  We told the driver we needed to hurry and hurry he did!  What took us 40 minutes in the colectivo took our taxi driver about 25 minutes.  He was flying down the road and only paused long enough to pass the cop with the radar gun pointed straight at him before he sped right up again!  He pulled up to the street where we could catch the ferry at 3:55 pm and we dashed down the road to buy our tickets for the 4:00 ferry only to discover that Rachel was totally incorrect in thinking there was a 4:00 ferry!  The next ferry wasn't scheduled to leave until 5:00 pm which meant we were in some serious trouble!  The 5 pm ferry would mean we would be at the International Pier in Cozumel about 5:30 which would put us still a taxi drive away from our boat which meant we were going to be VERY late!  We were standing there in dismay, wondering what we could do, when Rachel noticed a ferry being loaded right then with passengers all wearing a "Princess cruise line" sticker.  She recognized a few other people we had met from the boat and realized they were the ones who had scheduled a tour through the cruise line and they were being taken on their own ferry back to Cozumel.  We approached the man with the tickets for this ferry and explained that we were passengers on the same ship and trying to go to the same place and would he please let us pay for a ticket to get on the same ferry as the rest of the people?  He firmly said "no" and explained how these people had scheduled through the ship and there was no way we were going to be allowed to join the ferry without being part of the tour, etc. etc.  Our last hopes dashed, we stood there dejectedly, watching the wise ones who had paid all that extra money for their tour through the cruise line but were now being transported directly back to the boat.  After standing there for at least 15 minutes looking like the pathetic, lost, desperate tourists that we were, one of the employees of the ferry waved us over to him.  He quickly said that if we would purchase tickets for the 5:00 ferry, he would trade those tickets for tickets for the ferry being loaded right then.  With humongous cries of relief David sprinted over to the ticket booth to buy some tickets.  We tried to give him a tip we were so grateful but he wouldn't even accept it!  (First and only time during the trip someone refused a tip!)  He was an employee of the same ferry company that runs the regular ferry so he just took our regular ferry tickets, handed us two of the pink tickets the cruise passengers were using to get onboard that ferry, and hushed us on our way.  What a lucky break!  We were so grateful to be on a ferry and headed back to the ship that David didn't even care that he was heading back onboard the "puke boat" as he called it.  This ferry was a little different and had a large section up top that wasn't enclosed.  David sat right on the edge and didn't have nearly as miserable a time as he had during the first ferry ride.  And, because this ferry was privately chartered just for the cruise passengers, it took us straight back to our ship!  Hurray!  The ferry landed at the pier right next to the ship at 5:20 pm.  We hadn't done any souvenir shopping yet and wanted to get a few things so we did a 10-minute marathon souvenir stop.  With $3 t-shirts, Mexican vanilla, $.50 bracelets, and bottles of hot sauce, we had something for everyone in the family and were back on the ship by 5:30 pm!  What a busy, crazy, exhausting, stressful, but fun day we had in Mexico!  We were disappointed that we didn't have time to see the ruins at Tulum plus there are so many other things we would love to do there that we have decided some day we'll go back and spend a week at least on the Yucatan Peninsula! 

Thursday, March 5

Fun Day on the Ship

 After our busy day in Mexico, and with David still reeling with motion sickness from the ferry ride, we were grateful that Thursday was a quiet day on board the ship.  David took medicine and slept in a little, Rachel hit the gym, then David surprised Rachel by signing us up for a ballroom dance competition that night.  We had way too much wonderful food, we saw an amazing show called "Broadway Ballroom" in the Princess Theatre, then we went to Club Fusion for the dance competition.  We did a little bit of triple swing and found ourselves the winners of a bottle of champagne.  (Here's a photo of us all sweaty from our dance!)The other couples in the competition looked at us like we were absolutely insane when we promptly handed our bottle of champagne over to the members of the band.  One of the men looked at me and asked, "What, are you pregnant?"  I said "Well, actually, I am, but we don't drink alcohol anyway!"  Let me tell you, handing that bottle of alcohol over to the band was the best thing we did!  They became our biggest fans and best friends the rest of the cruise.  They asked for our song requests, announced that we had come in when we walked into whatever room that happened to be playing, and were just overwhelmingly grateful for their free bottle of bubbly!  :) 

After the ballroom competition ended and our favorite band quit playing our requests for the night, we wandered out to the Piazza just in time to witness the insanity of the "Champagne Waterfall."  Over 600 crytal goblets were constructed into a pyramid.  After all the streamers had been thrown and the crowd was foaming at the mouth for their free bubbly, they started pouring bottle after bottle of champagne into the top glass.  As more champagne was added, it started spilling over into the next layer of glasses and cascading down the sides of the "waterfall."  A band was playing, people were dancing, free champagne was circling the room, and everyone was in a party mood!  This was midnight and we weren't nearly as excited about the free alcohol as the other thousands of people were, so we left the insanity and the future hang-overs behind us and went to bed! 

The "champagne waterfall" was quite pretty - but it seemed pretty over-the-top even for the amazing, ornate, extravagant Princess ship we were on!  Wow what a strange, ostentatious world a cruise ship is! 

Friday, March 6

Eleuthura Island, the Bahamas

"aka the Princess Cays"

Stay tuned for photos from our fun, sunny day in the Bahamas.  We left our nice camera behind and took the little disposable cameras which we haven't developed yet.  The Princess private beach and snorkeling area on this Bahaman island is beautiful.  We found a great spot to snorkel and saw more beautiful fish than we had yet during the trip!  All was great until we got out of the water and Rachel noticed some red spots on David's leg.  We looked and saw they were also on his arms, neck, back, etc.  He went to the ship medic on the island and was told he had run into jellyfish "larvae" - apparently they are like baby jellyfish and they "sting" in a smaller, less painful way.  David must have swum right through a patch while we were snorkeling.  You never know what'll happen in the ocean!  Anyway, those red spots are still there almost a week later but they haven't bothered him too much so hopefully they'll fade soon. 

Saturday, March 7th

Ft. Lauderdale and the Everglades

First thing Saturday morning we had to leave our gigantic paradise on the sea!  After welcoming us so warmly one week ago, the crew sure seemed anxious to get rid of us that morning!  ;)  We were given a time and a meeting place for our disembarkation.  Our meeting time was the last at 9:20 am so we had several hours to get breakfast and grab a few last pictures of the beautiful boat without too many people on it!

David saying goodbye from the Sports Deck.

The Princess Theatre where we saw comedians, magicians, acrobats, dancers, singers!  All the performers were amazing!

We had some fun dancing in the Wheelhouse! 

Relaxing on the Promenade Deck before we leave!  This deck was so cool at night!  It was the closest outside deck to the water.  Walking out at night with the water rushing by right under you was exhilarating!

Gator Huntin' in the Everglades

After they finally kicked us off the Ruby Princess, we shuttled to the airport and picked up a rental car.  After finding a disgusting but cheap little motel room for the night, we drove out to the Everglades for a little 'gator hunting adventure.

We rode on an airboat around the Everglades for about an hour, watching for alligators and feeling grateful that we weren't stuck somewhere in that unfriendly environment!  The water has piranha-like fish, the beautiful flowers all over have black widow or brown recluse spiders hiding inside them, and there are alligators hanging out everywhere, so still and camouflaged you don't see them until you're right next to them!  Again, we used our disposable camera for the pictures from the boat so we still need to see if we caught any pictures of alligators.

After the air boat ride we watched an alligator "wrestling" show where a man who must be completely insane walked barefoot into an enclosure full of alligators and stuck his hands in their open mouths, stuck his chin in their mouth, straddled them, flipped them, and did all sorts of crazy tricks which must up his health insurance premiums daily.  :)  It was a fun way to spend the afternoon although by this point in the trip, all David and I wanted to do was go home and see our kids!!!!!

I definitely don't need the sign that says "don't feed the alligators" - I'm not crazy enough to get that close!

The End

Sunday, March 8th

We had an insanely early morning, we had to get up at 1:00 am mountain time to get our car rental back and get to the airport for our EARLY flight home.  First we went to Memphis Tennessee where we took our Delta flight, operated by Skywest, operated by Northwest, operated by Mesaba Airlines which amazingly enough did eventually get us home.  Tom picked us up from the airport and we were so happy to see our wonderful kids again!  Ben hugged me for about half an hour and wouldn't let me out of his sight the rest of the afternoon.  We sure missed them and are grateful to Grandma & Grandpa Shawcroft for taking care of them for over a week.  The next morning we woke up to a few inches of snow and a cold day to remind us that spring hasn't quite arrived in Utah yet, despite our tan faces!  We had a wonderful, fun, enjoyable "dream" vacation.  We're ready and excited for this next baby to come join our little family this summer!