I'm Not Dead!

I know I’m a total loser/blog slacker but…well, that’s just my life.  Since nothing super exciting is happening around our household, you’ll just be getting a few posts about the big things that have happened, starting with April.  What happened in April? Well since you asked… This happened.

That’s right. We went on a cruise.  I really wanted to go on a cruise before kids came into the picture, so we did.  We decided to make that our big trip for this year, and our anniversary celebration.  There was a little stressing getting there, but once we were on that ship, we were ready for a week of relaxation.

We got on the ship in Florida (which was my first visit to that state, and another one I get to check off my visited list) on Saturday and had fun exploring.  The first night at dinner..uhm yum. We met the folks we’d be eating with for the rest of the week and we got lucky.  They were all super nice, and we enjoyed being able to get to know some new people. Patti & Mick from Ohio, and Chris & Kim from New York. 

Everyone at the table had put ‘private table’ as a preference, but I’m glad they stuck us together for the week.  They were all so nice we even ended up doing things with them beside eating dinner.

Sunday was our first day on an island.  We woke up to the beautiful view of Princess Cay on the island of Eluthera.—check spelling--   We got on the little boat that took us to shore, and just marveled at the color of the ocean. It kept changing colors from emerald green to the clearest turquoise, and colors in between. It. Was. Gorgeous.  We spent about 6 hours on the island taking in the relaxing atmosphere.  We were able to bring our own snorkeling gear which was a huge plus. I spent a little time in the water, and Kirk spent a lot of time in the water.  We both applied sun block multiple times, and both still ended up with awful burns. I’ll admit that it was quite frustrating since we were both trying to be very careful.  I spent a lot of time in the shade, and he was in the water.  It wasn’t the way that we wanted to start our week, but thankfully I’d made sure to bring lots of after sun lotion full of aloe and Vitamin E.  There were 2 things that day that were quite memorable. The first thing was that Kirk was out in the water and some random lady thought Kirk was her husband and started yelling at him to come back and to get out of the water.  I couldn’t tell at first who she was talking to, and by they time I realized it was Kirk she was yelling at, she’d followed him halfway down the beach.  Eventually he realized she was yelling at him, and was able to let her know that he, obviously, wasn’t her husband.  The second thing.. Well when Kirk was snorkeling he found a beautiful shell. He brought it to me so I could see it, and we were trying to make sure there was nothing currently residing in the shell before we decided to take it back to the ship with us.  He and I both checked as well as we could and decided it wasn’t a home.  We took it back to the ship with us, and left it on the counter in the bathroom while we got ready and went to dinner.  When we got back to our room Kirk went into the bathroom to get something, and I heard a (girlish) yelp! I ran over (more like took a couple quick steps) to see what was the matter, and it turns out there was indeed a little crab living in the shell.  We quickly tried to decide what the correct course of action was.  They had made lots of announcements about not throwing things over the side of the ship, so that was out.  Then we though maybe I could pretend to be seasick and kinda drop the shell over as I was ‘being sick’ but figured that also wasn’t really a feasible idea.. Eventually we decided that we’d be to our next island by Tuesday morning, and it was already late Sunday night, so we put a little water in the bathroom trash can, along with the shell, and we’d just take it off the ship with us and release the shell along with its crabby inhabitant. Sounds like a good idea, right? Well, it turns out that crabs can’t live out of salt water that long… The next morning Kirk had to send the crab to its watery grave, and I got to feel bad about unintentionally murdering an innocent creature. 

Thankfully Monday was much more eventful. I took a photography class and after dinner we watch a “Movie Under the Stars”.  The cruise line we were on had a giant screen above the swimming pool that they played new-ish movies on.  They also passed out blankets and popcorn. We watched Jack Reacher which turned out to be a pretty great movie.

Tuesday we arrived at the island of Curacao.  We didn’t have any pre-planned activities in mind, so we spent a bit of time when we first got there just wandering around, and I did a bit of shopping. We found a tour bus that took both of us for only about 20 bucks around the island and to a quite beautiful beach.  We thoroughly enjoyed our time at the beach till it was time to leave.  The tour guide said they’d be picking us up at a specified time, and when that time came around there was no one in sight.  The other people from our group that were on the beach with us were also no where to be found, which started spelling disaster.  LUCKLY there was another tour bus heading back to the port that let us jump on and ride back with them.  The only stipulation was that we had to sit on ice chests, as there were no seats left. And that we had to act as ‘bar tenders’ and pass out the rest of the drinks.  Both were things I could handle.  By the time we got back we had a bit of time to wander a while longer.  The buildings were so beautiful and colorful, and we got a new camera so I had some time to play with it.

Wednesday was the island of Aruba. Yeah, baby…  Talk about a vacation. Kirk had a friend that spent a week there and was able to give us some great ideas on what to do.  We ended up renting an ATV to ride around the island for the day.  Conveniently we were able to get the price from $150 down to $80, and got a couple more hours then they wanted to give.  Turns out I’m really good at playing the cheap wife, to the more accepting husband.  We spent the day going from beach to beach, and to a couple other island sights. 

Wednesday night we also celebrated our anniversary. They brought us a delicious chocolate cake, and decorated our room door with balloons and a ‘Happy Anniversary’ sign.

Thursday and Friday were both on ship days, where we did things like watch an ice carving demo, went on a tour of the kitchen, and enjoyed a formal dinner when every one at our table tried escargot. We got to enjoy, or at least watch the on board shows (which to be perfectly honestly, could not compare to troupe cabana shows.  I’m fairly certain that if 10 troupe kids had 2 days to practice we could have put on a waaaay better show.) and play lots of trivia games.  We watched another Movie Under the Stars, which was The Life of Pi.  I’ve decided it should be illegal to show movies about sinking ships, on a ship. It was a great movie, maybe just not one to watch on a huge ship in the middle of nowhere.

Unfortunately on Saturday our week of fun in the sun came to an end and we had to return to normal life.  Boy was it fun while it lasted though..