Last month, we finally went on the cruise we'd been planning for over a year. This was in place of the one we didn't get to go on for our first anniversary, because the boat left without us (how mean!). I won't tell the whole story here - it's too painful! - suffice it to say, we were really looking forward to this one. We both love the warm weather and even though our trip didn't have as much of that as we hoped, we enjoyed experiencing the Caribbean.
This time we flew in on a Saturday, 2 days before our cruise left. This gave us plenty of time to relax. We hung out in our hotel room, watched TV (which is something we only do when we're traveling since we don't have TV at home), went for walks, and went swimming. We took a one-hour bus ride to the port on Monday morning, and there we were, on our ship! It was actually the same ship we cruised on for our honeymoon! We couldn't believe we actually made it on this time and were going to the Bahamas!
The cruise had two stops, Coco Cay (the cruise line's private island) and Nassau, the capital city of the Bahamas, on New Providence Island. We stopped in Coco Cay the day after the ship departed Florida. It was a really fun stop. Everyone on the island was from our cruise, so it didn't seem too crowded and they were able to include lunch with our excursion. We went snorkeling in the crystal clear Caribbean water. It was my first time snorkeling, and it was amazing. I love how you can sort of float along with almost no effort; slightly kicking your feet to move yourself through the water is all you have to do. The bottom of the ocean was beautiful to see. There were so many colored fish, starfish, coral, conch shells, sand dollars, and...WE SAW A MANATEE! I believe wild manatee sightings in the Bahamas are pretty rare, since manatees are endangered animals. Chase and I were the only people that saw it, I'm not sure if the other people that were snorkeling around us believed us, but we kept wanting to tell everyone, we were so excited! It was less than 3 feet from us. It was so friendly and docile. It stopped in the water near us and let us look at it while it looked at us for what felt like several minutes. Then, just as quickly, it swam away and was gone. It was definitely one of the most amazing things I have ever seen! The people preparing us for our snorkeling expedition did not even mention the possiblity of seeing a manatee, or maybe we would have invested in the disposable underwater cameras they had for sale...I wish we had a picture of our manatee! But here is what it looked like:
It was smaller than I expected. After seeing it, we talked with one of the cruise employees working on the island, and she said there was a family of manatees living nearby, a father, mother, and a baby. I am pretty sure the one we saw was the baby, or at least young, manatee.
Here are some more pictures of Coco Cay. It was a beautiful day. I ended up with a sunburn (as usual) even though I used lots of SPF 50. I'm pretty sure I was the whitest person on that beach.
The next day our ship stopped in Nassau. It was actually kind of disappointing. It was raining all day, so even though we were docked and didn't have to be back on the ship until 11 PM, we went back around 1 PM because it was freezing cold, pouring rain, and there really wasn't that much to do there. Nassau seemed like a rather dirty, seedy city that really catered to tourists. Everywhere you walked there were people shouting at you to buy something that they were selling. We took a water taxi over to Paradise Island, hoping that would be a little better. Most of that island is owned by the Atlantis Resort, which has a huge hotel, condo residences, a casino, shops, restaurants, and aquarium, and a water park on the island. Of course, this didn't make things any cheaper there! They owned everything and could jack up the prices. So lunch for the two of us at Johnny Rocket's was $30. And we didn't even get drinks. Also, you had to pay to go on the beaches.
The Atlantis Hotel on Paradise Island
Us on Paradise Island
The aquarium on Paradise Island
Nassau
This one kind of shows how bad the weather was. The islands were beautiful though.
The next day we were at sea all day on our cruise ship. The cruise lines do a pretty good job of coming up with activities to entertain people on days like that. Chase and I won second place on the cruise's ship scavenger hunt, so we are now the proud owners of 6 Royal Caribbean pens. Chase also entered the men's sexy legs contest, and he won a medal for "Best Flamingo Legs"!
Showing off the medal (and the legs)
We had a great time on the cruise. We ate dinner with some fun people that sat at our table every night. There was a honeymooning young couple from Boston, another couple from Michigan, a British couple that lived in France (and entertained us every night with their stories) and a couple from Hong Kong. We all got along really well and even hung out outside of dinner! The last night we all went to the ship's piano bar and listened to the pianist play and sing request after request from people on the ship. It was a great time.
On the day the cruise ended, we decided to go to Disney World. We had free passes from participating in
Disney's "Give a Day, Get a Disney Day" program. We spent our day at Epcot Center. I had never been to Disney World at all. Chase had been once to all the parks, and recommended Epcot as the place to go for me. Since he said the Magic Kingdom at Disney World is pretty much just like Disneyland, and I've been to Disneyland tons of times, we opted for something different. Epcot was great! I loved seeing all their depictions of the different countries, with the shops and restaurants located in each one. We ate lunch in "Morocco", and also visited Japan, China, Germany, Italy, France, Norway, Mexico, and probably some others!
Italy
Norway
There weren't as many rides at Epcot, but there were a few really fun ones we did go on. They had a lot of other fun things like films about the environment or the different countries, shops selling things from those countries, and (this surprised me) tons of the Disney characters roaming around! We saw Alice in Wonderland and Mary Poppins in England, Aladdin and Jasmine in Morocco, Beauty and the Beast in France, Snow White in Germany, etc.
There is so much to see in Disney World; if we were ever going to hope to see it all I think we'd have to make that a week long trip in itself. The trip was amazing. It wore us out though (or mostly the traveling wore us out I guess) and we were glad to get home. I think Lucy was glad to see us too, although she had a fun time spending the week in Woodland Hills with Chases's parents. Now she's used to having us home and back to her regular antics.
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This was a very interesting book that I got for Christmas a couple of years ago. (Yup, I'm catching up on my Christmas presents for the last several years.) It is thought to be an original manuscript written by a black slave woman in the 1850s. It was found at an auction by Henry Louis Gates, and researched and edited by him. There is a lengthy introduction about the acquisition of and the research done on the manuscript, which is what made it take a while to read. The book itself is fairly short, probably less than 200 pages. Gates makes the case that this is the first novel ever written by a female slave, and possibly by a black woman at all. The novel is though to be fiction, but heavily influenced by actual events in the author's life as well as the literary style of the day, namely the gothic and sentimental novels of the 19th century. An interesting read, mostly for its novelty. Three stars.
I just finished this one. This book was very sad, and actually kind of depressing. It's a holocaust story, but not your typical holocaust story. Told from the point of view of a Polish Gentile survivor of Auschwitz and a young American writer, it addresses issues not only of the war and the holocaust, but also of the decade of the 1940s and the feeling and mood of the time. It talks about how Americans, even though we were part of the war, for the most part did not know what went on in Europe during those years. It suggests that the suffering of the Holocaust was endured and experienced by many peoples throughout Europe and the world, not just Jews, and draws parallels between anti-Semitism and the heated racial tensions in the American South in the first half of the twentieth century. The book had a little more profanity and other explicit scenes than I would have liked, but it was a wonderful, sad, heart breaking story that still applies today. Four stars.
