Vacation Recap

I suppose I should get this entry written before I forget all the details of our cruise.  All the pictures from our trip can be found here, but I’ll post quite a few of them within this entry too.  Get comfy because this is going to be a long entry.  So without further ado, here is our vacation re-cap.

Sunday

This was our day of travel.  We saved over $200 a person by flying out Sunday instead of Monday.  I had never flown on Sun Country Airlines before, but apart from the tight seating, I was very impressed with them.  They had an excellent beverage selection, and instead of just a bag of pretzels, we had a grilled cheese sandwich, a cookie, and some gummy Life Savers.  MSP is Sun Country’s hub, and the Tampa flight is only a seasonal route, so I guess that explains why the cabbies and hotel shuttle people in Tampa had never heard of them before.  On our way to the hotel, I noticed that we seemed to be on a very long bridge, but it was dark so I couldn’t tell for sure.  I didn’t realize this, but it turns out that Tampa has bridges that span across the Bay.  The one we were on was eight miles long.  I had a better view of it the next morning when we drove to the sea port.  I’m just amazed at the engineering feat of building an eight mile bridge.  That’s impressive.

We got a very low rate ($40/night) for the hotel we stayed at, the Days Inn Clearwater.  Note to self: you get what you pay for.  Right next door to the hotel was a “gentlemen’s club,” and when we got to the floor our room was on, it smelled like urine.  The room was fine, but the hallway was rank.  Later I noticed that they allowed pets, so I hope that’s what the odor was from.  Plus the first room they put us in hadn’t been made up that morning, so I had to complain and get a new room.  Overall, it really wasn’t that bad though.  They had an average continental breakfast in the morning, and we had a free shuttle ride from the airport.  That still made for a good value overall.

Monday

Once we got on the cruise ship, we found out that we were going to be at the late seating for dinner which was at 8:30 PM.  That’s pretty late for us, so we tried to get moved to an earlier seating.  We were disappointed that we were put on a waiting list, but it turned out that we would have a great time at our late dinner seating, due mostly to our awesome waiter. (More on him later.) 

After some mandatory emergency evacuation training where we had to wear life-jackets what were way too tight around our necks, we were free to do whatever we wanted.  Just like our first cruise 6.5 years ago, it was raining when we left port.  This made for some great pictures of a full rainbow, and even a double rainbow.  Here’s one of the pictures that we took with the panoramic setting of our camera.  We have software that stitches the pictures together to form one complete picture.  Unfortunately, this picture was taken when the rainbow was starting to fade, but it was the most impressive rainbow I’ve seen in my life.

For dinner that night I had the beef fillet which was excellent.  We met Catalin, our waiter, who was from Romania, but he told us that we could call him “Bobby.”  I didn’t understand why at first, but after he did some Robert DeNiro impressions, I realized that he looked an awful lot like a young Robert DeNiro.  Among other things, he entertained us by pretending to do little pole dances as seen here:

Dinner quickly became our favorite part of the day and we all looked forward to the great food and even better service we were going to get.  Bobby really went out of his way to make us happy, and we expressed our appreciation in his gratuity at the end of the cruise.  I also found it interesting that Bobby has a computer science degree and used to work in that field back home in Romania before leaving to work for Carnival several years ago.  He was very good at what he does now, and it was obvious that he enjoys it very much too.

Tuesday

This was our “Fun Day at Sea,” and the weather was beautiful.  I spent most of the day lounging on the upper deck, and actually ended up getting a little too much sun.  As you can see, I got lobsterfied.  My ankles were the worst, but I also had a couple spots on my arms that I missed the sunscreen with. 

Tuesday was the formal night for dinner and there was a captain’s party before dinner where they had appetizers and free cocktails (one of only two times the alcohol was free).  After that, it was on to the dining room for dinner, where the prime rib was my meal of choice.  It was decent, but required quite a bit of work to trim all the fat from it.  Here are a few pictures of us dressed to the nines for formal night:

After dinner, we headed to the Candlelight Lounge for an evening of karaoke.  I was delighted to see that they had “The Humpty Dance” in their karaoke library.  For maximum effect, I first performed my old stand-by of Neil Diamond’s “Cracklin’ Rosie,” which went over very well, before later totally changing gears for “The Humpty Dance.”  When it came time for Humpty, the DJ totally ruined the moment for me by starting up the wrong song to begin with.  Apparently, the crowd would have rather I sang Cher’s “If I Could Turn Back Time,” because they booed when he stopped that song.  They got into Humpty at first, but some drunk girl up-staged me by getting up on stage and doing some Humpty dancing.  As it turned out, I think that’s the last time I’ll ever perform “The Humpty Dance.”  It will rest beside “Chocolate Salty Balls” as songs that seemed like better ideas in theory than they were in reality. 

Wednesday

Grand Cayman was our port of call on Wednesday.  We had to get up early to be one of the first groups of people to take a tender to shore.  There was still quite a bit of debris and destruction left from 2004 when hurricane Ivan hit the island.  I also found it interesting that they drive on the left side of the road here, but there seemed to be an equal number of vehicles with steering wheels on the right and left side.  All drivers were very good about stopping for pedestrians in the crosswalk though.  Nobody seemed put-off because they had to wait for this, like is usually the case in the U.S.

For our shore excursion on Grand Cayman,  we booked a snorkeling and Stingray City adventure.  Most of the time was spent on the boat getting out to these places, and we had just thirty minutes in the water at each stop.  Snorkeling was okay, but having done it twice in my life now, I don’t feel a need to do it ever again.  I saw a stray stingray, some coral, and lots of fish, but ingested enough salt water that it made the experience less enjoyable.  Stingray City is just a big sand-bar out in the ocean where lots of stingrays hang around because they’re going to get fed.  I did learn that stingrays are not opportunistic feeders, so when they are full, they will stop eating.  Their mouth is on their under side and their eyes are on top, so they can’t really see what they are eating.  They usually troll around the ocean floor and suck up their food, and this suction is very powerful.  For that reason, when you are feeding them you have to be careful that you don’t wipe the squid juice on your clothes, or else the stingray might mistake you for food and give you a big hickey!  Many jokes were made about this as you can imagine.  I touched the stingrays, but didn’t end up holding one like most of the others did.  Overall, I thought this excursion was just okay.

When we got back on the ship, we ate lunch and then I took the best nap of my life.  We were in an interior room, so when the lights were off, it was pitch black.  It was impossible to have any idea what time it was when waking up in the morning, and the same was true for an afternoon nap.  I went down at 3PM, and woke up very refreshed.  Thinking I’d been out for less than an hour, I was shocked to see that I had actually slept for 2.5 hours! 

There was a comedian, Big Tony Esposito, doing his “R rated” material at midnight, so we went to that show.  We laughed a lot, and really enjoyed his act.  His style of comedy was right up my alley, as there was plenty of toilet humor. 

Thursday

Thursday’s port of call was Cozumel, but I actually never made it to the island because my shore excursion required me to head to the mainland.  Everyone had to take tenders to both the mainland and Cozumel, but prior to last fall’s hurricanes, cruise ships were able to dock in ports at Cozumel.  Hurricane Wilma completely destroyed these docking piers, which were made of reinforced concrete.  It’s amazing how much destruction nature can cause, and the evidence of destruction was everywhere.  There were lots of dead palm trees, debris laying around, and lots of construction efforts going on to repair the buildings that were damaged.  The day we were in Cozumel, there were supposed to be TEN other cruise ships in Cozumel, each one having a few thousand people on it.  It’s absolutely astonishing to think about how much money was lost for every day they had to turn away these ships after the hurricane.  It’s no wonder they tried getting the major stuff up and running again as fast as possible. 

I ended up going to the Mayan ruins of Tulum which was on the Mexican mainland.  We took a 45 minute tender ride to get to Playa del Carmen, and then an hour bus ride to get to Tulum.  Ten years ago, the population of Playa del Carmen was just a few thousand people, but it’s now over 200,000!  It’s known as the “melding pot” of Mexico and is growing at five times the rate of the rest of the country.  I thought that was amazing.  Before getting on the bus, one of the first signs I saw was for Wal Mart.  I guess there’s no way to escape them! 

The ruins themselves were pretty interesting.  The site in Tulum was not a major Mayan city, but just a trading post.  It was actually built at the highest location on the whole Mexican Gulf coast; a whopping 43 feet above sea level.  I found it amazing that the Mayans knew this was the highest point.  The Tulum post thrived between 200 and 900 A.D, but was used until about the 1400’s.  This surprised me, because I had assumed that this site was much older than that.  In 1840, a New Jersey lawyer came down and explored the jungle, only to stumble upon the temple.  The jungle had completely overgrown all of the Tulum site, and it wasn’t until the third day of exploration that he noticed another building just a stone’s throw away from the temple.  The jungle was that thick!  Of course, there isn’t any evidence of a jungle at the site now, and I took quite a few pictures of the ruins.  Here is a shot of the main temple, and the view behind the temple.  It was beautiful.

I definitely made the correct choice in going to the ruins instead of deep sea fishing.  It was terribly windy on Thursday and being on a small fishing boat would have been awful.  Plus, on the tender back to the ship, Holly sat near some people who did the deep sea fishing.  They said that nobody even got a bite, and they asked the captain to take them back early because the seas were so rough.  Someday I’ll check deep sea fishing off my list of things to try, but waiting to do that was definitely the right move.

For dinner I had the grouper, and this was the best fish I’ve eaten in my life.  It was absolutely delicious.  After dinner we went to the nightly show which was a Blues Brothers tribute.  I love the Blues Brothers and all the music they performed, so this was another show that was right up my alley.  The cruise director played the role of Jake, and was was a great fit.  The guy playing Elwood didn’t quite fit the bill though.  The live band was excellent and they performed classics like “Soul Man, Sweet Home Chicago, Shake Your Tailfeather, I Can’t Turn You Loose,” and many more.  If you ever want a Blues Brothers album, I suggest you go with The Definitive Collection.  There are lots of good tunes on that one.  Also featured as a second part of the show was a guy that balanced a lot of stuff, like putting the handle of a dagger in his mouth, and balancing a sword on the end of it, tip to tip.  It was okay, but he went by just one name and had cheesy music playing during his act; something I consider to be typical cruise ship entertainment.

Friday

The weather was lousy.  It was raining and relatively cold, so we spent the whole day indoors on our final “Fun Day at Sea.”  I made several trips to the 24 hour soft-serve ice cream machine, and ended up watching Batman Begins on the TV in our room.  There’s not much else to mention about Friday except we ended up getting back into the Tampa port eight hours early to beat some fog that they predicted for Saturday morning.  Everyone stayed on the boat until morning, but the shops and casino on board had to close when we entered U.S. waters. 

Saturday

This was the most boring day of my life I think.  We got off the ship at 8:30AM, but our flight didn’t leave until almost 10PM.  The Tampa Aquarium was right by the sea port, so we went there for the morning after it opened at 9:30AM.  After seeing everything at the aquarium, we grabbed some lunch at a nearby Hooters, and then took a cab to the airport.  We arrived at the airport at 2PM, and found out that we couldn’t check in until 6:30PM.  So we sat around for 4.5 hours just killing time.  When 6:30 rolled around, we checked in and went upstairs from where we had been sitting all afternoon.  To our surprise there were many shops, restaurants, and tables up there that we could have been at this whole time.  This was all in one central location before the security checkpoint.  Time seemed to pass a little quicker up there, and at 8:45PM we finally headed to our gate.  Our plane was about fifteen minutes late getting to Tampa, so that delayed our flight a bit.  On the plane we were served a bag of pretzels, a cheeseburger, and a cookie, along with a beverage.  The only downside to flying Sun Country is the lack of flight options outside of MSP.  I’d fly with them again in an instant.  Anyway, we finally got back to MSP a little after midnight, and drove back home to Rochester.  It was 3AM when I got to bed.

Overall, this was a very relaxing vacation, and we had a great time.  It just seems like when you add everything up, the transportation, food, entertainment, service, and lodging, a cruise is an excellent value.  I’ve now been on two cruises, and wouldn’t hesitate to go on another one, especially to Alaska. 

If you read this entire post, I thank you.  Don’t worry, I’ll probably never write this much in one post again, or maybe not even this much in a whole week’s worth of posts.