Cruisin'

I'm back from vacation and we had so much fun! I took tons of pictures, though not as many as I thought I did. We drove to Galveston, Texas which took us about 12 hours. We drove down the night before and then boarded the ship around noon on Sunday. The rooms are small, but that's ok because you barely spend any time in them. We were confused at first because there were only 2 small beds in the rooms that had 4 people booked in them. Turns out they have bunk beds that come down from the ceilings. Since there were only 3 people staying in our room we had them push the small beds together to form a King size and Gabby took one of the bunks. Since we had an interior room we found out very quickly that it gets very dark in the room at night. So dark in fact that we couldn't see our hands in front of our faces. We ended up leaving the light on in the bathroom with the door cracked opened.

My sister found out quickly that the toilets are nothing to mess with. My niece is 2 and mostly potty trained but accidents happen. She messed her pants on the first night and my sister did what she always does, rinse them out in the toilet. Now the toilets on the ship are like those on airplanes, they use a vacuum to suck the waste down and use as little water as possible. Now my sister had by this time already found this out, but not thinking she flushed the toilet anyways while cleaning out my nieces underwear and WOOSH...down they go! We all found out a few minutes later when my nephew knocks on the door to inform us that "Mommy flushed Rylee's underwear!" Sam was so embarrassed but told us what had happened. The next day though their toilet stopped working so they had to have a cruise employee come and fix it. He pulled the underwear out of the pluming and Sam got them back. It was good for a laugh.

We had so much fun on the trip though. The food was wonderful, there were a ton of activities, a casino, comedy shows, just about anything you could want if sitting out in the sun isn't your thing. We spent time doing some of the trivia. Gabby and I won the Harry Potter trivia, well, really she did as she knew all the answers, so I let her keep the trophy. A plastic gold cruise ship, lovingly referred to as a "Ship on a stick". Later on Brian joined us for some of the Disney trivia and he was the only one in a room of maybe 100 people to know the movie one of the songs came from. I don't know the song, but the movie was "The Happiest Millionaire". I think he was the only one there that had even heard of it. Because of that, we talked the guy running the trivia into giving him a reward even though we didn't win the trivia. He received a "Boat on a Rope" or a medal.

The kids enjoyed the water slides and water park on the boat and spent a lot of time there. Then each evening we'd all get together for dinner. We had an assigned dinning time of 6pm and sat at one big table right in the middle of the dinning hall. It was like eating at a five star restaurant every night. They'd bring bread, then an appetizer, entree, and then desert. I'll go more into that with another post as I tried to take pictures of ever dish I had since I ate some things I'd never had before.

We visited 3 ports while we were out. Cozumel, Mexico, Belize City, Belize, and Mahogany Bay, Isle Roatan, Honduras. My favorite by far was Honduras where we went to a private island called Little French Key. It was absolutely gorgeous! Time for some pictures!

Where we spend a few hours swimming! The water was so clear and blue! It was cloudy that day so it didn't photograph well, but it was beautiful.

They had a little zoo there also.

Funny story about the monkeys. They had a drink there called a Monkey Lala. It was chocolatey with alcohol. Just before leaving the island we all got one last drink. My dad got a Monkey Lala and found out why they named it that (least why we think they did). We had to walk past the monkey's to get to the dock and my dad stops and jokingly asks one of the monkey's if he'd like a drink. The monkey takes him at his word though, grabs his straw, rushes up one of the branches and proceeds to lick it clean. It happened so fast that we were just shocked. I wish I would have gotten a video of it.

We only went shopping in Belize so not much to take pictures of, but I did remember to take a selfie before getting back on the boat.

Belize was interesting because there is a reef that prevents the cruise ships from getting close than 8 miles from the coast. That and the port isn't deep enough. So we all had to take a number and wait for it to be called and then got on small boats called tenders that held between 100 to 200 people. After that it was a 20 minute ride to shore. The water was a bit rough getting onto the boats and a combination of that, wet steps and flip flops caused Sam to fall getting in. She cut her arm and bruised it petty good but other than that she was fine. But the shock of it made her sick for the ride to shore. Thankfully there were some cold packs aboard and the lady sitting next to Brian was a former EMT. Sam also got checked out at the first aid station in port. She was just bruised and was fine the rest of the day. It shook up Collin though and he didn't want to get on any small boats again. Thankfully it wasn't an issue when we got to Honduras as we had to take a much smaller boat to Little French Key but that was barely a 5 minute trip across calm water so he was fine.

Cozumel was another beach day, actually our first. We went to a private resort that day that had a large inflatable course out in the water and a small water park full of slides for the kids. They enjoyed the slides more than the beach but that's ok.

We were greeted by this on the dock.

We had so much fun in port that I really didn't remember to take a lot of pictures.
I did get some good ones of the ocean from the boat though.

Sunset our first night...

Sunrise on our second to last day...

View from the boat.

On the last morning we went to the Green Eggs and Ham breakfast with Sam I Am.