Freedom at last!

Oh, I’m so glad we decided to extend our cruise by doing a back to back! Otherwise it’d almost be time to pack up to go back to the wintry freezing snowy nort’. UG!

I’m definitely trying to relax and enjoy. It’s hard to get out of go-go-go mode, especially after how work has been the past couple months. But I think I finally hit vakay mode yesterday. Thought I’d post a few pictures of the trip so far.

We left Friday Jan 30 for Ft Lauderdale and spent the night there – you never know if there’s going to be a problem with flying and airports at this time of year, and we wanted to take no chances with this trip! We ended up cruising out of Ft Lauderdale a little later than expected, so we saw a pretty sunset.

We didn’t get into our first stop, San Juan, Puerto Rico until around 3:30-4pm. Since we’ve been there numerous times, we decided to try a different type of tour. We were to start at 9pm, so we had time to walk around a bit ourselves, go back onboard for dinner, then head off for our Segway tour. Any idea what that is? It’s kind of like a scooter on steroids. It provides the horsepower, you just have to increase/decrease speed and steer. It was TOTAL fun!! But we hadn’t brought the camera to our tour, so no pictures to share of that. These pictures are from our earlier wanders-on-our-own.

Again, we’d been to St Thomas numerous times, so we decided to hop the ferry and head over to St John. The ferry ride was FUN and FANTASTIC! …to me, anyway. It was pretty rocky, and I got pretty durn wet. LOL It was like a rollercoaster ride without the upside down part. At St John we grabbed an open air taxi and took a 2 hour tour. It was only Greg and I, which was really nice. We saw lots of beaches, went to Annaberg Plantation.




In Antigua we had prebooked an excursion with a local guide, highly recommended by the cruisecritic.com board. He was nice, informative. We went to some of the highlight sites: a 200+ year old church, Nelson’s Dockyard, a nice overlook, Shirley Heights.
Yesterday we were in Tortola – more on that later when I have pics to share.

About the ship… it’s big, as expected. Lots of people, as expected. Flamboyant, as expected. Round the clock food, as expected. LOL We really haven’t enjoyed the big screen tv on deck yet, the timing of the events there coincide with the timing of other things we’re doing. The shows have been good – the last two nights I would even have to say GREAT! Last night’s comedian had me totally laughing. The big production (music/dance) show the previous night had smoke, laser lights, flying streamers, audience interaction, even fire! Our cabin is smaller than expected, a minor disappointment to me – apparently Carnival has decided to reduce the size of the inside cabins in the newer ships – this seems backwards of other lines which have been increasing the size of their insides. But it’s all ok – we don’t spend much time in the cabin.

The one really unexpected thing – the motion of the ocean has been pretty bad. It doesn’t really bother me. But it’s still kind of weird. Well, not weird, because if I’d have thought about it, I would have expected it. We are used to sailing in the Caribbean, which is pretty calm. Well, we’ve actually done most of the cruising on the Atlantic side, so yes, it is going to be rougher. Funny – they even had the barf bags hanging by the elevators the first couple days.