Jessica and I had a great time on our cruise.  It was our first cruise experience and I had been planning it for several months.  It ended up being pretty inexpensive.  We took a seven day western Caribbean cruise at the cheapest time of year and I used up 5 years of accumulated credit card points to pay for the cruise.  I also picked up an airline voucher at a discount rate to buy our plane tickets.  We ended up flying into West Palm Beach because it was almost $200 cheaper than going straight to Miami for the flights I wanted.  We got in a few days early to enjoy south Florida and drove down to Key West, a place I've always wanted to visit.  The next day, we stopped in the Everglades.  I've described these few days in previous posts, complete with our late night drive through the flooded streets of Miami Beach in bumper to bumper traffic after a college football game.

Western Caribbean Cruise 2008 Pictures

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Our time on the ship was great.  I didn't have much to compare it to, but it was close to what I expected and hoping for, though I was pleasantly surprised by how friendly the staff was and the also surprised by the food onboard.  We attended many of the onboard activities and shows.  The marriage game and the final evening's show were the best.  In Jamaica, we went on a tour with Peat Taylor.  We were the first group to Dunn's River Falls and we had fun climbing the falls.  The place seemed like a job creation place, complete with everyone having their own tip jar and the venders were rather aggressive.  Next, we went tubing down a river.  The lush surrounding forest was beautiful.  Our boy guide hurried us down the river and they tried to sell us pictures of ourselves.  I just took my waterproof camera on the tubing run and I'll have to get the pictures developed later.  Our last piece of the tour was driving around Ocho Rios.  We drove around the outskirts and up a fern gully.  We traveled around the side of spice mountain and back down for some shopping.  Jessica even got sucked in by some vulture venders and I narrowly escaped the drug sellers near the entrance.

In Grand Cayman, it was a night and day difference between there and Jamaica.  The streets were very clean and you could have mistaken it for a quiet well-kept American town if it weren't for British driving laws and the amazing number of banks everywhere.  We took a snorkeling tour and visited stingray city and a few surrounding areas.  It was a lot of fun and Jessica had to be warmed up to the idea of making friends with the stingrays.

In Cozumel, we did more or less a self-guided tour and we got our own ferry tickets to Playa del Carmen and we walked further into town until I found a colectivo that would take us to the Tulum Ruins for $3.50 per person.  It was a true Mexican experience, as it was all locals in the van with us and we watched Mexican music videos along the way.  Here and Jamaica was a bit of culture shock for Jessica.  We visited the Mayan ruins and it was really neat.  I hung around the tails of the tour groups to listen.  There were quite a few mosquitoes there, especially on the south side of the ruins.  We fortunately had bug spray.  One of the highlights of the afternoon there was being able to cool off in the ocean below.  That really took the edge off the heat of the day.  We headed back to Playa del Carmen and did some quick shopping before we caught a ferry back to Cozumel and boarded the ship.  I had a great time conversing in Spanish and noted that the Spanish there was a lot cleaner and more understandable than what I hear back home and in border towns like Tijuana.

Our dining room staff was great.  One of our waitresses was from Hungary and she was trying to learn Romanian, as she was headed to Romania to live with her fiance.  I spoke with her in Romanian when possible.  The food was fantastic and it was rather different, picking anything and everything off the menu and eating as much as I wanted.  For breakfast, I loaded up with bacon.  I think I ended up gaining 5-7 lbs onboard, as I wasn't used to eating that much and definitely not following up heavy eating by lounging around.  We even won some cash in the casino (not much though :-)).  It did keep us entertained for several hours over the course of several nights.  Jessica was on one of the first game shows and won us a "ship on a stick," which is Carnival's affectionate term for their plastic trophies that they give to guests.

The cruise was a lot of fun and a great value.  I told Jessica that we probably would have to put a cruise into our vacation circuit.  So far, we've been consistent in rotating a tropical vacation with road trips every other year.  We might have to make it a three-stage rotation.  However, we'll see...depending on how the situation is with children.  Kiara stayed home with grandma and her aunts and no doubt had a good time being the center of attention.  I set up a webcam so that we could video chat and we did so often when we were in Florida.  We even did a video chat in the pouring rain while sitting in our rental car in front of the movie theater.  We ended up seeing Eagle Eye and Flash of Genius on this trip. 

It was a lot of fun and a trip to remember.