Saturday, January 3 ~ Antigua ~ 7am to 4pm

Jason and I visited Antigua on our 2018 Celebrity Eclipse cruise, and while we had an enjoyable time on our full day beach-hopping and snorkeling boat tour with Eli’s Eco Tour, we knew we wanted to do something different on this cruise.  Antigua is known for having 365 beaches, one for every day of the year, but most of the tours I found involved taking a boat around the island and swimming to shore (similar to what we did in 2018).  We needed something different for this cruise that would be more 4-year-old-friendly, but it didn’t take me long to pick out our perfect excursion: Stingray City!  Jason and I visited Stingray City in Grand Cayman back in 2016 and we loved it, so I was thrilled when I found out there is a similar attraction in Antigua.  The main website for Stingray City didn’t give you an option to book a tour directly with them, so I sent them a message to ask about our options.  They replied that I needed to book through Princess since I was coming to Antigua on a cruise ship.  You already know how I feel about excursions through the cruise ship, so I searched for alternatives and found a company called Antigua Chiama IT Tours.  Their office was located very close to the cruise ship docks (in fact, I was pretty sure it was at the same location as where we met Eli’s Eco Tours so I could envision exactly how to get there), and they provided roundtrip transportation to Stingray City on a bus.  Once we arrived, there was a short 8-minute ride on a boat out to the sand bar, so that seemed reasonable for Ian, and we could feed and play with the stingrays for an hour and a half before returning to the bus for the drive back to the cruise port.  While the excursion seemed very expensive, costing $135 per adult, children aged 4 and under counted as “infants” and only cost $14, so it would only cost $284 for our family of 3.  I invited my brother to join us (this was definitely not an excursion that would interest my parents!), but he declined because his kids were too old for the infant pricing and it would have cost his family of 4 nearly $500!  I didn’t blame him for wanting to skip this tour, even though he did think his kids would enjoy it.  In all honesty, I was a little hesitant about if it would be safe for Ian, but I messaged the tour operator and they assured me it was safe for people of all ages as the water is calm and shallow (although it was likely to be too deep for Ian to stand and Jason or I would have to hold onto him), and the boat ride was very short.  

So remember how I mentioned that we needed to go to sleep early last night in preparation for an early wake up time this morning?  Well, we needed to meet our guide by 8am, so I wanted to leave the ship by 7:40am.  Now that we had a good routine that was working for us in the mornings, I knew I needed to wake up 2 hours before the time I wanted to leave the ship in order to have enough time to get myself ready and fed, and then to repeat the process with Ian.  That meant that my alarm was set for 5:40am this morning!  I don’t even wake up that early at home, so it’s amazing the things I am willing to do for an adventurous vacation!

It was still dark outside when I woke up, and by the time I got up to deck 16 for breakfast, I could see the first hints of light in the sky.  I stepped outside to the area around the aft pool and was greeted with a stunning view of the full moon shimmering against the water.

I guess there are some perks to waking up this early!  

Antigua looked so pretty with all the lights twinkling and the first moments of sunrise lighting up the sky.

I decided to streamline my breakfast this morning because I knew we would be back on the ship before lunch time, so there was no need to overstuff my belly.

By the time I finished eating, the ship was just starting to back into our berth.  

I got back to our cabin by 6:30am, and was not surprised to see that Jason and Ian were still asleep.  I woke them both up so Jason would have time to get dressed and go upstairs for his breakfast.  Ian usually takes a while to perk up in the mornings, so I hurried him along by suggesting he eat his waffle outside on the balcony.  While he ate, we were treated to a beautiful view of the sunrise over Antigua.

I spotted the yellow building with a thatched roof just a short walk away from the end of our pier.  That was where we needed to meet our tour guide, so it was nice to see how close it was to our ship.

Out in the distance, on top of the hill, we could see a huge church.  My parents had booked an island tour today so I had a feeling they would be visiting that church as, even from this distance, you could tell it was something worth seeing.

Once everyone was dressed and ready to go, we got off the ship at 7:45am.  Down on the pier, I realized we had a great view of the aft port side of the ship, which meant we could see our cabin!  

I don’t think I have pointed it out to you yet, so allow me to make it more obvious.  In the photo below, the yellow square is my cabin, and the red rectangle is my parents’ cabin.  This gives a really good perspective to see just how massive their balcony was!  

We walked through the port gates and onto the boardwalk along the water.

Even with Ian’s slow walking, it only took us 5 minutes to walk to the meeting spot for our tour.

There were a few people sitting beside the building and they asked who we were looking for.  We told them the name of our tour company, and they said our guide would be here soon.  A few minutes later, a lady walked up with a list of names on a piece of paper including mine.  She introduced herself as our guide for today, and her name was… Phoenix!  We all got a kick out of that and told her that we live in Phoenix, Arizona.  It turns out that Phoenix was not her birth name, but more of a nickname that she adopted after all the struggles she has endured and overcome in her life.  

Phoenix led us and another couple to her minivan that was parked out on the street.  She said there was already another couple in the car who she had picked up from their hotel earlier this morning, so there were 7 of us on this tour today.  Jason, Ian, and I climbed into the back row of the minivan, which was a tight squeeze so we were glad that Ian is so small!  Phoenix said it would take about 35 minutes to drive across the island to Stingray City, but we were early enough that she would have some time to point out a few landmarks along the way.

Within 2 minutes of driving away from the port, Phoenix pulled over to point out the oldest Anglican Church in Antigua.  At first, I thought she was talking about this little building… 

Then, Phoenix pulled the car forward a little more and I noticed the spires peaking out from behind those tall trees.

I realized this was the same church that I saw from our balcony this morning!  Ironically, the photo I took from the ship was much better than anything I could capture from the car because the tall trees blocked my view.

Next, we drove past a mural that was painted by school children from Antigua and Barbuda.

Much like Martinique, Antigua grows a lot of sugar cane.  This used to be a huge sugar cane factory, but Phoenix said it burned down and they did not have the finances to rebuild it.

Next, we drove past a huge cricket stadium.  It was built in 2006 and used to host major sporting events including the 2007 Cricket World Cup.

Phoenix pointed out that the colors of the seats inside the stadium were in the pattern of the Antigua and Barbuda flag.

Just beyond the cricket stadium, there was a random herd of donkeys on the side of the road.  This was at the intersection of two major roads, each with several lanes of traffic, so I had to wonder how they got out there!

Phoenix passed around examples of their currency, the Eastern Caribbean Dollar.

Phoenix pointed out this beautiful view overlooking the Atlantic Ocean.  This meant we had driven across the entire island since our ship was docked on the Caribbean Sea side.

We pulled into the parking lot at Stingray City at 8:50am and climbed out of the minivan.

Across the lawn, we could see that there were already around 100 people here from a cruise ship tour.  Phoenix said the Stingray City guides would take over as our guides, and she would be waiting for us when we returned.  She recommended that we leave anything we did not want to get wet in her minivan, and she had rash guards for us to borrow if we needed them.  Once we were all ready, she told us to go over to where the other people were gathered and the Stingray City guides would explain how things would work.

The guide explained a few safety things about how to safely hold and touch the stingrays.  He said we were not allowed to wear any kind of water shoes, and that we should shuffle our feet when walking on the sandbar to avoid stepping on a stingray.  They had life vests available for us if we wanted them, but they were optional for adults.  We brought a life jacket from home that we knew fit Ian well, and I was glad I did because their child-sized jackets would have been way too big for him.  They also provided snorkels and masks, but of course we had our own, including toddler-sized goggles for Ian.

The guide said that we should split up into groups as they had 5 boats to bring us all out to stingray city.  Three of the boats were smaller, holding 16 people each, and the other two were much larger and held up to 40 people.  We picked one of the smaller 16-person boats, but I later realized that was a mistake because the small boats didn’t have any shade over the seating area (only at the very back where the person driving the boat was standing), and we were seated on benches without a back rest (which is definitely not ideal for Ian, especially not on a fast-moving boat).  The larger boats had real seats with full back rests, and they had a canopy covering the full length of the boat so everyone could sit comfortably in the shade.

We sandwiched Ian between us on the bench for the boat ride to make sure he stayed safe.

The ride out to the sandbar only took 8 minutes, and luckily the water wasn’t too choppy and we felt secure on the boat.

When we arrived, the boat tied up to a floating platform, and the guides helped us all climb out.  There were ladders at the end of the platform so it was easy to climb down into the water.  Jason climbed down first, then I helped Ian climb down so that Jason could carry him while I climbed in to join them.

I could immediately tell that the water here was much calmer than when we did the same tour in Grand Cayman.  I remember being thrown around with the waves last time, but today, that wasn’t an issue.  When we first entered the water, it was too deep for me to stand, so I put on my snorkel and started to swim towards where I could see other people gathering.  Right away, a giant stingray swam below me!

You had to be careful because there were long chains under the water, I assume used as a tether for the floating platform.  

It was frustrating that the guides wouldn’t let us wear our water shoes because there were a lot of rocks in this area and we were afraid we would cut our feet without shoes on.  I understand that they don’t want you to wear flip flops or sandals that aren’t secure on your feet, but I don’t understand why we couldn’t wear our aquasocks that are very tight and definitely wouldn’t have fallen off.  

At first, it was extremely chaotic.  There were well over 100 people in the water, all trying to see and touch the stingrays.  There were 4 or 5 guides who were different from the guides driving the boats.  These guides must just stay out in the water all day to assist with letting visitors hold the stingrays, but we really struggled with these guides.  They were all incredibly rude and borderline aggressive about getting everyone lined up in the water to hold the stingrays.  They kept yelling at us to stay in line, but there were multiple lines and no one really knew where they were supposed to stand.  When it was finally our turn, they insisted on us smiling for their photos on their camera even though I had my own camera and asked them to use my camera.  We knew our time holding the stingray would be extremely limited and we didn’t want to waste that time posing for photos we had no intention of buying.  We had seen them take photos with other people’s cameras so we knew that wasn’t an issue, and they were just giving us a hard time because they were hoping we would buy their expensive photos.   When they finally took our photo, one of the guides stuck his hand in front of the camera!  Seriously?!

I literally had to beg them to take a second photo.

At least that one came out better, but the whole experience was really off-putting.  It was really a shame that Phoenix couldn’t be our guide out here with the stingrays because she was so kind.  These guides out in the water were all so rude that they kind of ruined the experience for us.

After that, we tried to do some snorkeling, but the guides kept yelling at us to move out of the way from where they were standing.  There was a strong current in this area and it pushed everyone in that direction, like it or not!  There were just way too many people for the space we were allowed to be in.  I resorted to just planting my feet and sticking my head under the water in hopes that I would see a stingray swim by.  There was just no way to actually go snorkeling here.  

I tried to capture how busy it was in the photo, but it doesn’t do it justice.  Apologies for the water mark in the middle of my lens!

The water was very murky, so it was hard to see the stingrays approaching.  I only saw them when they were very close to me, so it was hard to take good photos.

Despite all the chaos, Ian had so much fun touching the rays and laughing whenever one swam by him.  He thought they were tickling him, and when they slid up his body, he thought they were giving him a hug.  Jason ended up holding Ian the whole time because the water was so deep that when I stood, only my head was above water and that wouldn’t have worked for me holding up Ian safely.

I think part of the problem was how they organized things here.  When we did this same activity in Grand Cayman, your own guide from your small tour boat got in the water with you and helped you play with the stingrays so everyone had a lot more personal attention and time to interact with the animals.  Here, there were only 4 or 5 guides to be shared amongst over 100 people, and no one knew which guide we should go to.  It was just very disorganized and I think it would have been better if they had more guides and assigned each person to a specific guide so we would all know exactly who was our guide and we would have a more structured turn with the stingrays.

Anyway, I snapped a few more photos under the water and then I was ready to get out.

In total, we were in the water for 30 minutes.  I took this photo when I was back on the floating platform, so you can get a better idea of how crowded it was (and there were already a bunch of people who had gotten out of the water before us).  

This whole experience would have been a whole lot better if it was less crowded.  I did not realize when I booked this tour that we would be lumped together with all of the people from the cruise ship tour.  There were only 7 people in Phoenix’s minivan, and I thought those would be the only people in my group once we got in the water.  That small group experience is what I thought I was buying a ticket for, so it was disappointing to be lumped together with so many other people.

We climbed back onto our boat and got dried off and settled while we waited for everyone else to return to the boat.  In total, we spent 45 minutes here at the swim platform, then made the 8-minute boat ride back to the island.  Once back at the offices, the guides handed out cups of very strong rum punch.  Maybe they knew how rude the guides were out in the water and that we would all need a little rum to take the edge off??

Obviously, Ian couldn’t have any rum punch, so Phoenix brought him over a little package of cookies to have as a special treat.  That was really thoughtful of her, and we appreciated the gesture.  We spent about 15 minutes enjoying our drinks, then piled back in the minivan at 10:45am for our drive back to the cruise port.

On the way, Phoenix pointed out this fence made of old car parts.

So remember how when we originally got in the minivan this morning, Phoenix said there were already 2 people inside who she had picked up from a hotel?  Well we needed to drop them off prior to returning to the cruise port.  Unfortunately, that added an extra 45 minutes to our ride.  We were originally supposed to be back at the port by 11:15am.  We were on track for that timing, but we didn’t actually get there until after 12 noon because of the detour.  

On the bright side, we were boarding well ahead of the rush, so there were no lines at the gangway.

Back on board, we went straight up to the Lido buffet for lunch.  Most passengers were still out in port, so it wasn’t too busy.  I filled my plate with options to share with Ian, and we found an empty table next to the window to sit and eat.

I couldn’t decide what I wanted for dessert, so I took an assortment and cut them all in half to share.

After lunch, Jason took Ian back to the cabin for their showers and to nap.  I decided to relax near the aft pool so I wouldn’t disturb their nap.  Since I was near the bar, I couldn’t resist ordering an Ultimate Cooler.

It looked like some more clouds were rolling in.

I stayed out there for about an hour, then snuck back into the cabin to shower and get ready for dinner.

As I mentioned earlier in this review, my mom, brother, and I discussed a few nights of the cruise when we would all dress in coordinated outfits.  Tonight was one of those nights, and we decided to all wear nice casual outfits in shades of light/medium blue.  We didn’t love the photos we took in random locations around the ship earlier in the cruise, so tonight, we decided we would have one of the ship’s photographers take the photo.  It cost $25 to purchase one digital print, but we decided that was worth it because all 3 families would have access to the file to make our own prints in whatever size we wanted.

Hoping to take our photo before eating dinner when someone might spill something on their clothes, we all met near the mid-ship elevators on deck 6 at 4:45pm.  We didn’t realize it, but the ship’s photographers don’t start taking evening photos until 5pm.  The good thing about that was it meant we had unobstructed access to the giant gold heart!  Usually, the ship’s photographers hog this heart so we were never able to take a photo here.  We all took turns taking fun photos with the heart, and of course, the kids couldn’t resist climbing on it!

Mimi and Pop wanted a photo with their 3 grandkids:

We still had a few minutes to spare before the photographers were set up, so I left the rest of the group and wandered over to the Bellini Bar for a Raspberry Romance, with prosecco, chambord, and raspberry puree.

By the time I got back, I could see the kids were getting a little restless.  At least they skewed in the direction of silly behavior, as opposed to Ian’s usual hangry behavior (especially this close to dinner time!)

We decided that instead of staying in this location and having the ship’s photographer retake the photos we just took with the gold heart, that we should go up to deck 7 and find a more simple background for our group photo.  Easily enough, there was a grey background directly above us on deck 7 near the mid-ship elevators, and it would contrast nicely with our blue outfits.  The photographer took about 10 different photos with the whole group and with just my parents and the 3 kids.  He said they would be available to preview in our app by the end of the night.  

I will just skip ahead to finish up this part of the story… As it turned out, the photos weren’t available in the app until the next morning (it wasn’t a problem for us, but just letting you know the timeline).  My parents decided to buy a package of 5 digital prints for $100 (that’s how I have access to the professional photo of them with the kids in Dominica), and this was the photo that they picked to purchase for our group photo.  I think everyone looks great, including the kids, but I don’t think my mom realized that she was the only one not looking at the camera when she picked this image.  It was really hard to see the fine details when looking at the preview on your phone screen, so she probably should have taken the time to look at the photos using the larger computer monitors in the photo gallery.  Oh well!  Otherwise, it is a great photo and definitely came out better than anything we were able to arrange on our own under the harsh lighting in the public spaces on the ship.

By the time we finished taking our photos, it was 5:15pm and time for us to head down to the Amalfi dining room for dinner.  Tonight was another night when my parents wanted to eat dinner in the suites dining room, so we parted ways for the evening, and my brother’s family and mine had a little more space at our usual dinner table.

For my appetizer, I ordered the mushroom arancini.  I saw that the description included “zesty” tomato sauce, which I know is code for “spicy.”  I asked Bernardo if it was possible to swap it for just regular tomato sauce, and he said that was no problem at all.

One of the entrees on the adult menu was chicken parmigiana.  This is one of the few dishes that I know Ian loves.  After several nights of him only eating plain pasta with no protein for dinner, I asked Bernardo if I could order the adult entree for Ian’s dinner, and of course he said yes.

This is the face of a boy who is thrilled to have one of his favorite foods for dinner, and after I took this photo, he devoured it!

I probably should have ordered the same dish for myself, but instead, I ordered the giant meatballs in creamy truffle polenta.  This dish was a miss for me.  I didn’t care for the texture of the polenta, and I thought the meatballs were too dense.  This was one of the very few dishes that I didn’t care for throughout all the dinners we ate in the dining room, so overall, I thought those were pretty good odds!

Luckily, I didn’t go hungry because Jason and I also ordered the creamy spinach and mushroom gnocchi to share.  This dish was a 10/10 and I could have eaten the whole thing myself!

We skipped dessert tonight, and took Ian straight up to camp when they opened at 7pm.  During dinner, my brother mentioned that his family was going to the 7pm show, so they offered to save us seats in what had become our usual section (way at the back of the theater in the rows just to the port side of the lighting control booth).  By now, we knew we could rely on the cruise director to spend a few minutes talking prior to the performer taking the stage, so we trusted that we wouldn’t miss any of the show.

Tonight’s performer was Rob Watkins, a comedian, magician, and ventriloquist who has performed at the Magic Castle in Hollywood.  We all loved his act, but we found ourselves watching his image on the big screens as opposed to seeing him on the main stage because we were sitting too far back to really appreciate his ventriloquism.  I guess we should have opted for seats closer to the stage for this act!

The show ended a few minutes before 8pm, at which point Jason and I went straight back to the far aft of the ship for the Marriage Match show in the Vista Lounge.  This was rated PG-16, so my brother had to skip it because his kids were too young (just one of the many reasons we took Ian to camp after dinner!).  Apparently, many other passengers had the same plan we did, because when we arrived at the Vista Lounge, it was crazy crowded!  Jason and I split up, each checking a different section of the lounge for empty seats, but every single seat was either occupied or reserved.  Did these people just camp out in here all night to ensure they had a seat for the show?!  Admitting defeat, we got a couple of drinks from the bar (an elderflower and meyer lemon spritz for me, and a Manhattan for Jason), and we stood behind a row of seats towards the back of the room.

When the game started, the host introduced 3 couples that he had pre-selected from the audience.  Not that Jason and I had any desire to participate, but I found it odd that they pre-selected the couples because when I have seen this game played on other ships, they usually pick contestants as part of the show.  I wonder how early those people had to be in the Vista Lounge, and how they were chosen as the 3 contestants?

We stayed for the first 3 questions, then decided we were tired from standing, so we left in search of dessert.

We had yet to try one of the premium desserts included in the Plus Package, so we went down to the gelateria at the Piazza on deck 5.  You could order a scoop of gelato, an enormous ice cream sundae, or a slice of cake.

I opted for a slice of black forest cake, and Jason had a scoop of gelato.  Both were delicious, but I can’t imagine anyone ordering two of these desserts every day of the cruise (that’s what is included with the Plus Package).

When we were done, we went up to find seats in Princess Live.  We knew we would be early for the 9:15pm trivia, but the theme was “Guess That 80’s Song” and we knew it would be heavily attended, so we had to arrive early if we wanted a place to sit.

As it turned out, this was not our favorite way to play music trivia.  We were right in assuming it would be crowded, as it was standing-room-only by the time trivia started.  The problem was that the songs the crew member selected were very easy, and they played half the song so everyone heard the chorus.  At that point, everyone in the room knew the song, and the host just let us scream out the name of the song as we went along, so there was no winner because everyone had the answer spoiled for them.  It was more of an 80’s music sing along than music trivia, and it felt pointless.

We stayed until the end, and by then it was time to pick up Ian at camp and head back to the cabin for bedtime.

Today’s drinks total: 15

Up next: a much-needed sea day after 5 days in port

Friday, January 2 ~ Martinique ~ 7am to 5pm

Aside from Princess Cay, Martinique was the only other new port for me on this cruise, so I was very excited to research what it had to offer.  I was a little nervous about the language barrier, as this is a French-speaking island, so not all of the tours are offered in English.  Also, unlike most Caribbean islands which accept US Dollars, Martinique’s primary currency is Euros, so I knew I needed to book a tour online and pay with my credit card, as opposed to hiring a taxi to take us to a local beach where they would expect payment in cash.  The further I got into my research, it seemed that Martinique’s tourism was more geared towards people taking land vacations as opposed to cruises, so while I did find several options of things that would be fun to do, most of them left from locations across the island from the cruise port and there was no way to get there.  Even Princess only offered 10 excursions at this port (as opposed to 20+ options in the other ports), so our options proved very limited.

One option that I seriously considered was a DIY beach day.  There are a stretch of beaches located across the bay from the cruise port.  These beaches are frequented by locals and tourists alike, with some offering more calm, sandy beaches and others offering good snorkeling.  There is a ferry which goes back and forth across the bay, so it would be possible to walk from the cruise port to the ferry, ride the ferry across the bay, then wander around in search of a good beach to hang out on for a few hours.  Unfortunately, I had a lot of concerns about this plan.  Firstly, there wasn’t much information available online so it was hard to plan out all the details in advance.  I like to know exactly what we are doing and how we are doing it, especially when traveling with a child, so ‘winging it’ in a country where I don’t speak the language didn’t seem ideal.  In theory, the ferry runs on a schedule, but I read several reports of the ferry running late and the schedule not being predictable, so again, that was not ideal, especially when traveling with a child.  I didn’t want to spend the whole day worrying about the return ferry and not knowing exactly what time we had to get back to the ferry terminal to ensure we would get back to the ship before sail away.  I read varied information about exactly where the ferry terminal is located in relation to the cruise ship dock, with some people saying it was up to a 30 minute walk.  Thirty minutes of adults walking would take us closer to an hour when walking with Ian (and we couldn’t bring a stroller if we were going to the beach).  There is also the issue of currency and possibly needing Euros to buy ferry tickets and food or renting loungers/umbrellas at the beach.  All of this just seemed very complicated and stressful, especially with such limited information available online before the cruise.  In the end, I decided that booking a tour with cruise port pick up/drop off and where we could pay online in advance using a credit card just seemed to be our best option in this port, even if that meant spending more money than a DIY beach day.

Tours in Martinique were either on a boat (sailboat/catamaran/speedboat) to go snorkeling, or in a van/bus for a land-based island tour.  We didn’t think Ian was old enough to be safe on a boat tour where he would have to swim in deep water (remembering that after 3 summers of weekly swim lessons, he can still barely float!), so we focused on the island tour options.  Martinique is shaped like a vertical oval, with the cruise port in the middle of the coastline, so most tour operators either take you north or south, depending on what you want to see.  The north end of the island seemed less developed, with tours taking you on a hike through the forest to see a waterfall.  While that sounded beautiful, that didn’t seem appropriate for a 4-year old, so we opted for a tour of the southern end of the island, with a stop at the rum factory (again, definitely not 4-year-old appropriate, but at least it was safer than hiking through a forest!), and an hour and a half at Les Salines beach.  This beach was one of the top reasons I booked this tour.  The photos online were stunning, and reviews of the beach described it as one of those beaches you would see on a wall calendar, with palm trees swooping out over the ocean.  Because it was located on the far southern tip of the island, most cruise ship passengers don’t get to see that part of the island and it isn’t as crowded as the beaches I mentioned earlier which are accessible by the ferry.  Honestly, I wasn’t totally thrilled with the idea of this tour, especially since it seemed too expensive for what we were doing ($74 per adult, $58 per child), but I just couldn’t find anything else that worked for us and this seemed better than staying on the ship and skipping the port entirely.  Once we picked this tour, I asked my parents and brother if they wanted to join us, but everyone passed.  My parents aren’t really beach people, and my brother thought it was too expensive.  I went ahead and booked the tour through Viator.

Before I continue detailing our day spent in Martinique, I think it is important to mention something else which nearly prevented us from taking this cruise had we not found out in time.  Before this cruise, Ian had taken 3 prior cruises (two to the Mexican Riviera out of California, and one to Alaska out of Seattle).  Each time, we used an original copy of his birth certificate as his boarding documentation and we never had any issues.  Children’s passports are only valid for 5 years, so we wanted to delay purchasing one for Ian until it was absolutely necessary (ie: taking an international flight, which he has yet to do).  Jason and I have always used our passports.  

In October, I was reading through some of the fine print about the documentation required to take this cruise.  I had assumed Ian would be fine to use his birth certificate as he had done in the past, and that was true for nearly every island in the Caribbean… except two: Guadalupe and Martinique.  Wait, what?!?  I re-read the fine print again to make sure I was understanding it correctly, and even did some Google searches to get more clarification.  Apparently, Guadalupe and Martinique require a passport for everyone who visits their island, even when coming from a cruise ship.  There are often exceptions made for children under age 16, but not on these two islands.  Every single person is required to have a passport when your ship docks there, even if the passenger does not plan to get off the ship and step foot on the island!  I called Princess just to be sure I understood everything correctly, and yes, sure enough, we were scheduled to visit one of the only two islands where Ian was required to have a passport.  

Panic set in.  We were now just 2 months away from flying to Florida to start this vacation.  I was very concerned that we wouldn’t have time to get him a new passport in time.  I immediately went online and booked him an appointment for a new passport application at the local processing office near our house.  Luckily, I was able to get an appointment the following week on October 15, but that was still cutting it too close for comfort.  Fun fact: AAA takes free passport photos for their members in some states, including Arizona, so at least that saved us some money.  At the passport office, they said there was no need to pay for expedited processing and that we would receive Ian’s passport in a week or two.  This was during a government shutdown, so I was very worried that would impact us, but he said that it would not be an issue, and that since Ian is a minor, his application would be processed faster because he is unlikely to have a lengthy criminal history requiring extensive background checks.  Makes sense, I guess!  

Sure enough, I got an email 10 days later stating that Ian’s application was approved, and his new passport arrived in the mail a few days after that.  Whew!  I was so glad that all worked out so seamlessly because that would have been a disaster if we got to the Port Everglades and were denied boarding because we didn’t realize he needed a passport!  By the way, my brother had to go through the same process to get passports for both of his kids, and he also received them quickly.  Consider this your warning if you ever take a cruise that ports in either Martinique or Guadalupe… everyone needs a passport!!!  I actually found it odd that our travel agent did not know this detail.  She knew Ian was planning to use his birth certificate, so it would have been helpful had she notified us he would actually need a passport and we could have gotten it sooner and avoided the stressful last minute application.

Okay, now back to our regularly scheduled programming…

When my alarm went off at 6:40am, we were already docked in Martinique.  Why are these ports getting earlier and earlier every day?!  I got dressed as quietly as I could, being careful not to wake the boys any earlier than necessary, then I snuck out of the cabin in search of breakfast.  This was the quietest and the emptiest I had ever seen the hallway…

I was upstairs and eating my usual breakfast by 7am.  

After I finished eating, I took a quick peek outside.  It was shaping up to be another beautiful day in paradise!

Way off in the distance, we could see another cruise ship docked at a different port on the other side of the city.

Continuing with our routine, I brought a waffle back to the cabin for Ian to eat for breakfast, and sent Jason up to get his own food.  We had to meet our tour guide outside the port gates by 9am.  I appreciated that our tickets included detailed directions on how to find our guide depending on which of the 2 ports we were docked at.  I double checked the papers that were left in our cabin last night to figure out which port we were at, and luckily it did say we were at the Tourelles Cruise Terminal.  Not knowing exactly how long it would take us to get off the ship, exit the port, and locate our tour guide, we left the cabin at 8:30am.  As it played out, the port was really small and as soon as we exited the port gates, we saw our guide holding up a sign with our name on it.  I really appreciate when the guides make it so easy and stress-free to find them!  It was only 8:43am, so we still had a few minutes to wait for the other people on our tour to find us.

A few minutes later, our guide said we were all set, and led us through the parking lot to a fairly new 25 passenger bus.  She introduced herself as Mariela, and our driver was Jonas.  We had about 20 people on the tour with us, so it was a fairly full bus.  There was a chance we would have as many as 50 people on the tour, requiring a full-sized coach bus, so I guess this was better than it could have been.  

Once everyone was seated, we headed out for our first stop.  On the way, we saw miles and miles of sugar cane fields lining the highway.

The first stop on our tour was Trois Rivieres rum factory.

The symbol  of the rum factory was a windmill, and it was easy to see why:

The grounds were beautiful, and we started off with a tour through the facility, guided by Mariela.

The sidewalk was painted to resemble a river, as in Trois Rivieres, or Three Rivers.

Mariela showed us the sugar cane plant, which was more than double her height.

Then she showed us this banana tree.  She said both crops were common throughout the island.

We followed Mariela further along the path.

Ian is always happy when he gets to climb (or in this case, descend) stairs…

Mariela explained something about this tree, but I can’t remember what she said.  I just thought it was pretty, and that the base looked like a mermaid’s tail!

There were also fan palm trees growing throughout the property.  There was a ton of fruit growing on this tree but it was not ripe yet.

The grounds here were lush and so inviting to visitors, with many benches in the shade where you could sit and enjoy the scenery.

Next, Mariela took us on the tour of the buildings where they produce the rum.

You could easily visit this factory on your own and do a self-guided tour because they had signs explaining each step of the process.

As we saw on our drive here from the cruise port, Martinique grows a lot of sugar cane.  Not surprisingly, Trois Rivieres grows it here on their property to use when making rum.

First, these machines chop and grind the sugar cane plant.

Then, they use these machines to extract juice from the sugar cane, which is then filtered and pumped into fermentation vats.

These fermentation vats could each hold 3000 liters of sugar cane juice.

The rum is then aged in oak barrels inside the cellar, but we were not able to enter that building (I’m not really sure why).  

While we were listening to Mariela explain the aging and bottling process, this cat came over to say hello.  I think this was Ian’s favorite part of the tour!

After Mariela was finished with the tour, she escorted us back up the hill to the tasting room so we could try a few samples of rum.

We were offered tastes of 3 types of rum, but as soon as I tasted the first one, I knew it was not for me.  I wished they had some fruit juice to mix with the rum because I would have much preferred it as a rum punch, but I guess that defeats the purpose of trying their specially aged and crafted rums.

After my first sample, I decided to use my time more efficiently and took Ian to find the bathrooms.  They were quite a hike away from the tasting room, located back behind the factory buildings.  It’s too bad I didn’t inquire about the facilities earlier while we were still down in that direction touring the factory.  The bathrooms were clean and spacious, and it was a good thing we used them now because this was the only bathroom we saw all day!  We didn’t know it yet, but there were no bathrooms at the beach.

As we made our way back up the hill to the tasting room, I noticed a group of people crowded together and looking down at something on the ground.  When I got closer, I saw they were watching this vibrant caterpillar crawling across the sidewalk.  It was a good thing someone noticed him and bent down to take a look because that likely stopped someone from stepping on him!

In total, we spent 40 minutes here at the rum factory.  It obviously wasn’t the highlight of our cruise, but it was an interesting place to visit and it was nice to have a little something else to do besides just spending the whole day at the beach.  Mariela gathered everyone together and said it was time to get back on the bus to head off for our next stop.

I thought our next stop was to go straight to the beach, so I was surprised when Jonas pulled the bus over to the side of the road.  Mariela said we could get off the bus at this park for a scenic view point.  There was even a little gazebo where we could stand for shade.

The park had these large signs, but the words were all in French so I couldn’t understand them.

**0956

**0957

Looking straight across the bay, we could see Club Med (although honestly, we were too far away to really see any details at the resort).

To the right, we could see a large marina with tons of boats.  I had some suspicions in the moment, and just Googled it for confirmation, that this was where we would have had to meet some of the boat tours I researched.  We were really far from the cruise port at this point, and I can only imagine how expensive it would have been to hire a taxi to get here.  That just made me more confident in my decision to keep things simple and take a tour that provided roundtrip transportation from/to the cruise port!

If you look very closely, you can see St. Lucia out in the distance in this photo.  Mariela said it is usually too hazy to see as far as St. Lucia, so we were lucky today.  

We only stayed here for about 5 minutes, so it was just long enough to take a few photos and admire the view.  Then, we all piled back onto the bus to head down to the beach.

It took about 30 minutes to drive down to Les Salines beach.  When we arrived, it was about 11am local time and the parking lot was PACKED!  There were so many cars lining the street leading towards the beach, and there definitely weren’t any parking spots big enough for our bus.  Jonas was nice enough to let us all out close to the beach entrance, then he drove off to find somewhere to park.  Mariela escorted us along this boardwalk and down to the beach.

Mariela showed us the spot where she would be sitting in the shade of the palm trees, so we would know where to find her if we needed her for anything.  She said we would have 2 hours here at the beach and that we should meet back at this spot by 1pm local time.  Before we all dispersed, she surprised us by pulling out a bottle of rum and a carton of guava juice from her cooler.  She gave everyone a plastic cup and then made us each a cup of rum punch.  They really like their rum punch to be very strong down in Martinique!  I took one sip and immediately asked her to top me off with some more guava juice!

This area right near the beach entrance seemed too crowded for my liking.

I assumed it would be less crowded if we walked further down along the beach, and asked Mariela if we should go left or right.  She said to go down to the right as that was her favorite spot on the beach.  Sounds good to me!  

We continued walking until we reached the end of the section where vendors were renting lounge chairs and umbrellas.  There were still plenty of people around, but it wasn’t nearly as crowded as at the beach entrance.  We found a nice flat spot of sand under the shade of the palm trees, and laid out our towels to set up camp for our time here.

Ian was eager to play in the ocean, so Jason took him down to the water while I spent a few minutes walking along the beach.

The beach was stunning, with soft white sand, bright blue water, and palm trees sweeping out over the beach.  I have a feeling it was more crowded today than normal because this was Friday of New Year’s weekend and I am sure that even the locals were at the beach to enjoy their time off.

I didn’t want to stray too far from the boys, so I turned around to head back towards our towels.

I sat in the shade for a few minutes, just relaxing and people watching.  Just a word of caution… Martinique is a French territory, and the beaches here have different modesty requirements than the beaches in the States, for example.  We noticed a handful of women walking down the beach topless, but luckily, we didn’t see anyone fully nude.  I was a little concerned about how Ian would react, but he was too busy playing to notice anything out of the ordinary, and we certainly didn’t draw his attention to it, so it was a non-issue.  I was careful to avoid taking photos when these people were nearby, so hopefully there’s nothing too risque in the background of any of my pictures.

Eventually, I decided to join the boys in the ocean.  The water was the perfect temperature and felt very refreshing.

Ian was having so much fun trying to step on the water as it came ashore.

I had brought a few pre-packaged granola bars from home to take with us on port days, so we each had a little snack while we enjoyed the beach views from our towel in the shade.

Around 12:45pm, we packed up our stuff and headed back to meet Mariela.  Instead of walking back along the beach, we opted to walk along the street just behind the trees where we were sitting.  There were a few stalls set up back there, selling clothing, bathing suits, and souvenirs.

There was also a small restaurant.  It’s too bad we didn’t see this earlier or maybe we would have bought something for lunch (although now that I think of it, they would have had to take credit cards because we didn’t have any Euros to pay in cash).

We made our way back to the main entrance to the beach where we saw Mariela sitting, and waited there for the rest of the group to join us.

When we were all there, Mariela escorted us out to the parking lot where Jonas was waiting with the bus.  He was double parked, so I have no idea where he went for the last 2 hours, but at least he was able to bring the bus close to the beach for us to re-board.  The bus ride back to the cruise ship took exactly 1 hour, and pretty much everyone on the bus took a nap… except Ian!  Even Jason fell asleep for most of the ride, but Ian refused to close his eyes and just kept talking to me the entire ride so of course, that meant I didn’t get to nap either.  He was hungry, so it was a good thing I brought snacks from home.  He ended up eating all of the pretzels and goldfish crackers I had brought with me, which ultimately meant he wasn’t hungry for lunch when we got back on the ship.  It was far from a nutritious lunch, but at least it kept him quiet while everyone else was sleeping on the bus.  It was a huge relief when I finally saw the ship from my window and knew we were almost back at the port.

Jonas dropped us off right next to the port gates promptly at 2pm.  Overall, we enjoyed this tour and appreciated that we got to see a lot of the coastline of Martinique.  I later spoke to my brother, and he said he and his family took a 30 minute walk into town, but didn’t find much worth seeing and returned to the ship before noon.  My parents found another couple and shared a taxi ride into town (since there was no chance they would walk 30 minutes to get there), and they also just poked around in some of the shops for a little while before returning to the ship.  I was glad we booked this excursion in advance and had the opportunity to see more of the island.  

As a side note, I just looked a little closer at Google Maps regarding the ferry to the public beach.  Remember how I saw another cruise ship docked on the other side of the city earlier this morning?  Well it turns out that is the real cruise terminal, and the ferry leaves from right next to there.  We were docked at the commercial shipping port, which Google says is a 25 minute walk to the ferry dock.  There was no way to know which port we would dock at until the night before we arrived and our steward left that paper on our bed, so had we planned to take the ferry to the beach, we would have been really annoyed that we weren’t docking at the tourist cruise port right next to the ferry dock.  Again, I am very happy with my decision to book this tour for our first visit to Martinique!

We were back on the ship by 2:15pm.  Jason took Ian back to the cabin to shower and nap, while I went up to the Lido buffet in search of something for lunch.  Unfortunately for me, there was not one single protein in the entire buffet that I could eat.  Every single option was spicy, and I really cannot tolerate spicy food.  There was an Indian station, a Mexican station, and one other generic station, but literally every protein was spicy.  There was a salad bar so I guess I could have made a salad, but I really wanted something with protein in it.  I had just eaten pizza for lunch yesterday, so I didn’t really want that again.  The line for the Salty Dog was extremely long, whereas there were no lines at any of the other places, so obviously I wasn’t the only person who found the other options limited.  

I waited in line for 15 minutes, and when it was finally my turn, they said it would be another 30 minute wait for my order to be ready (even before I told them what my order was!).  I told the lady taking the orders that all I wanted was just one plain hot dog with nothing on it, and at first, she said it would still be a 30 minute wait.  Why don’t they just have plain hot dogs and hamburgers always ready to go?  I understand if you want one of the specialty options where they need to make it fresh for you with those specific toppings, but I just wanted one plain hot dog.  There was a manager standing nearby, and he overheard my pleas and said he could get me a hot dog without having to wait.  I thanked him profusely, then went to the condiments station, only to find that they were out of ketchup!  Seriously?!  There was a passenger standing there who said he already told the crew and someone went in the back to get more ketchup but he had been waiting a few minutes and it still wasn’t replenished.  I didn’t know how much longer it would take and I was famished by this point, so I took my hot dog into the buffet area and found some ketchup in there.  When I finally sat down to eat, I was pleasantly surprised by this hot dog.  It was the perfect combination of crispy skin and juicy meat, and the bun was just the right length and thickness to create a perfect ratio of hot dog to bun in every bite.  I’m not exaggerating… this was one of the best hot dogs I have ever had!

After I inhaled my hot dog, I went back to the cabin to shower.  I shouldn’t have been surprised to see that Ian was still awake and fighting his nap.  I took over negotiating with Ian so Jason could go up to the gym for an hour to do his run.  Ian ended up just playing in the cabin while I took my shower and got dressed for the evening.  Ian was still fighting his nap when Jason returned from his run, so he took a quick shower and we decided to just head out and get an early start on our evening.

Our first stop was at the Crown Grill Bar.  I ordered a Champagne Cosmo, with Absolut Elyx vodka, cointreau, champagne, cranberry, and lime, and Jason ordered the Aviation, with aviation gin, luxardo maraschino liqueur, violet liqueur, and lemon.  That drink was very out of character for Jason, but I think he just wanted some variety.

We took our drinks to-go and walked over to Princess Live where they were hosting Shabbat Services.  

Ian attended a daycare/pre-school at our synagogue for 3 and a half years, and even though he now goes to Pre-K at public school, he still loves going to our synagogue’s monthly Tot Shabbat services.  When we mentioned the idea of going to services, Ian was very excited about it, so we got there a few minutes early to get our seats.  I was surprised to be greeted by a Rabbi as I was expecting this to be more of a passenger-led informal service.  There was a table set up with full-length prayer books, mini challahs, Manischewitz wine, and fake candles to light.  It was an impressive set up and Princess Live was roped off and labeled as a private event so no one would interfere.  Unfortunately, in the 5 minutes between us arriving and the services starting, Ian pulled a Jekyll and Hyde move on us and morphed from happy/quiet to crazy/hangry.  He started yelling that he didn’t want to be there, and he was making quite a scene.  We didn’t want to bother other families, so we decided to leave just as the service started.  

We went back to the cabin to calm him down in private.  My mom was out on her balcony and heard the commotion.  She knocked on our balcony door, surprising all of us (even though we knew the balconies were connected), and she offered to take Ian to dinner at the buffet since she was already taking my niece and nephew.  Ian was okay with that plan, and Jason and I were happy to let her distract him and get his behavior under control.

With our new-found freedom, Jason and I decided to order some drinks to the cabin and enjoy some peaceful time on the balcony watching the sailway from Martinique.

That enormous church midway up the hill was called Église Catholique Sainte-Thérèse.  According to Google Maps, it was only a 13 minute walk from where our ship was docked, so it might have been interesting to hike up there and check it out.

There was some kind of factory directly across from the cruise port.

We saw them loading some cars onto this boat.  I don’t think it was one of the ferries to the local beaches, but maybe it went to a neighboring island?

We could see an airplane coming in for landing at the international airport, located just across the bay from the cruise port.

Once we were far enough out into the bay, we could see the cruise ship docked at the other port was from Mein Schiff.

Once we were further out to sea, we could focus our attention on the stunning sunset.  

Looking back towards Martinique, we could see the full moon hovering in the sky.

We heard a knock on our cabin door, so Jason went inside to retrieve the drinks we ordered from room service: a cosmo for me and a manhattan for him.  Cheers to a beautiful evening at sea!

I couldn’t resist the opportunity to pose Jason holding my drink at the perfect angle…

We stayed out on the balcony long enough to watch the sun dip out of sight.  Even though there were plenty of clouds in the sky, there weren’t any along the horizon, so we thought we might be lucky enough to see the elusive green flash.  No such luck, but it’s always fun to look for it.

We decided to skip dinner in the dining room, and instead opted for a low key meal in the Lido buffet.  

This was the menu from the dining room tonight:

We checked the Medallion app to see where my parents and Ian were, and we could see they were all still on the port side of the buffet, sitting in the section of tables towards the aft.  In an effort to avoid running into them, Jason and I took the mid-ship elevators up to Lido deck, then walked along the starboard side of the buffet area.  Unfortunately, the forward section of the buffet was not set up yet, so we did have to go to the aft section near where my parents were sitting, but we were careful to not get close to their table.  We were able to each gather a full plate of food and sneak back to the forward seating area on the starboard side to eat in secrecy.  Since the food stations in that section were still closed, we were the only people eating in that area so we actually had more privacy than we intended, but it was worth it to avoid running into Ian.

Tonight’s theme was Mexican food in the buffet, so I knew Jason would have no trouble finding things he wanted to eat.  I was a little worried for myself since I am not a big fan of Mexican food, but luckily there were plenty of options for me, including chicken pad see ew, veggie lasagna, garlic shrimp, and scallops ceviche.  Yummmm!

When we went back for dessert, I noticed there was a chocolate fountain station with a crew member dipping strawberries and marshmallows per request.  There was a short line when I got there, so I got to watch him dip the skewers for the people ahead of me, and this crew member was seriously having so much fun!  He said this was his favorite thing that he got to do working in the buffet area, and his joy was contagious.

I asked for 2 skewers, each with 2 strawberries, so I could share one with Jason.  As if that wasn’t enough chocolate, I also got myself a brownie.  Jason snatched one of the strawberries before I could take my photo…

Just as we finished our dessert, my mom texted to ask if we were ready to receive Ian.  We admitted that we had been hiding on the other side of the buffet, and said it was okay for them to bring Ian to us.  My parents had 7pm dinner reservations in the suites dining room, so they left to go eat their dinner and Jason and I took Ian up to deck 17 for camp.  

Tonight was one of those nights when we wished there was more of a stagger between camp opening and the show starting.  After we dropped Ian off at camp, we raced across the ship because we had planned to make it an early night, pending an extremely early wake up time for tomorrow’s tour, which meant we needed to see the 7pm show tonight.  Luckily, as we noticed was his routine all week, the cruise director was still talking to introduce tonight’s performer when we got to the theater at 7:05pm.  I hadn’t spoken to my brother all afternoon so I didn’t know what his plans were, but as we entered the theater from the back and started walking down the stairs to find open seats, I saw his family sitting in a row with 2 empty seats!  I slid into the seat next to my brother without saying anything, and when he turned his head, he was very surprised to see me there!  

Tonight’s performer was a singer named Nick Rashad Burroughs.  He has performed in several musicals on Broadway, including playing Ike Turner in the Tina musical, understudying for Billy Porter in the original cast of Kinky Boots, and he also played Toulouse-Lautrec in Moulin Rouge.  We all really enjoyed his high-energy performance with excellent vocals and a commanding presence on stage.

The show ended around 8pm.  As we exited the theater, I wanted to stop by at the Bellini Bar to pick up a Tropical Bellini.  I noticed a large crowd down in the Piazza and then I remembered tonight was the Silent Disco!

We knew we needed to pick up Ian soon from camp, but we wanted to just stop by the Silent Disco for a few minutes.  We have done this once before on a Celebrity cruise, and we had so much fun that I knew I wanted to do it again.  It’s too bad we didn’t have the time to stay longer, but we did stay long enough to dance to two or three songs.

This was obviously a popular event on the ship as I don’t think I ever saw this many people in the Piazza (well, that’s not true, there were definitely at least this many people in the Piazza while we were waiting for our tender tickets to be called at Princess Cay, but I definitely never saw this many people at an evening activity in the Piazza!)

Even my nephew was having fun!

At 8:20pm, Jason and I decided we really needed to get going, so we returned our headphones and made the trek up to camp to pick up Ian.  We took him back to the cabin and got him into bed as quickly as possible in hopes that he would get a good night’s sleep before tomorrow’s grand finale excursion!

Today’s drinks total: 15

Up next: Antigua

Thursday, January 1, 2026 ~ Barbados ~ 8am to 6pm

I have been to Barbados on 3 prior cruises, and each time I went to The Boatyard on the beach at Carlisle Bay.  In my early 30’s, that was the perfect place for an easy beach day.  The beach there is absolutely stunning, with soft white powder sand and calm turquoise water.  There are plenty of lounge chairs and umbrellas, and they offer a convenient boat to take visitors snorkeling with sea turtles and over a shipwreck.  The vibe is festive, with loud music and a full restaurant and bar, and playing on the toys anchored in the bay is included in the price of admission.  It made for a reliably fun and convenient beach day on all 3 of my prior visits to this island.

When I saw that we would be returning to Barbados on this cruise, I knew I needed to do something different.  Ian is too young for snorkeling and swimming out to the water toys, so we couldn’t take advantage of those activities, and the vibe is not really family-friendly.  Since we had just off-loaded Ian into my parents’ care for the last 2 days, it was time to find an excursion that we could do together as a family, so I did some research about other things to do on the island.  There are lots of tour operators who will take you on an island tour, but I didn’t really care about seeing Rihanna’s house or the Governor’s mansion, and I knew Ian wouldn’t care about that either.  The giant rocks resting on the beach at Bathsheba looked interesting, but that alone wasn’t much of an excursion.  That’s when I discovered Harrison’s Cave- a system of caves located in the center of the island, filled with stalactite and stalagmite formations which formed naturally from water erosion through the limestone rock.  There is a tram that takes visitors on a tour through the caves, making this a very safe and family-friendly excursion.  The one problem was that not many tour operators offer excursions to Harrison’s Cave because it is located up in the hills in the center of the island, and most other tours stick to the beaches and the perimeter of the island.  It doesn’t really matter which vendor you pick because you are just using the vendor as transportation to the caves.  Once you arrive, the caves have their own tour and everyone has the same experience with riding on the trams.  Princess offered this as an excursion, but it was $180 per adult/$120 for Ian, and that seemed very expensive for just driving us out to the caves, taking the tram tour, and driving us back to the ship.  In theory, if we had our own car, we could drive there ourselves and just pay the admission fee to the caves directly for $57 per adult and $40 for Ian, so I just couldn’t justify paying such a large mark-up for Princess’s excursion.  

Instead, I found an excursion with Sun Tours Barbados, which charged $120 per adult/$80 for Ian, and not only would they pick us up at the port and take us to Harrison’s Cave, but they would also take us to the Barbados Wildlife Reserve to see monkeys and some other animals and plants.  That just felt like a better value for our money, so once we knew that’s how we wanted to spend our day, I invited my parents and brother’s family to join us.  My parents immediately said yes, which was good because this would be the only excursion that we took with them for the whole cruise.  Unfortunately, my brother said he’s taken his kids to something similar on a different vacation and he didn’t want to do it again.  My nephew’s name is Harrison, so I really thought my brother would want to join us, but I guess we would go to Harrison’s Cave without Harrison! 

Last night, I set my alarm to wake me up at 7:30am this morning.  Unlike the first half of the cruise when we could sleep in a little later because we weren’t scheduled to dock until mid-morning, the last 3 ports required us to wake up a bit earlier.  I quickly got dressed, then went up to the Lido buffet by 8am to get my breakfast.  At exactly 8:01am, the Captain made an announcement that the ship was cleared and we were allowed to proceed ashore.  We were scheduled to arrive in Barbados at 8am, so that confirmed my memory that you can usually get off the ship at the scheduled arrival time, and yesterday was not normal when we couldn’t get off until 35 minutes later (and of course, that happened on the one day that the timing really mattered for us!).

Before I got my food, I stepped outside to take a few photos of the port area.  There were 3 other ships in port with us today, including the Viking Sea, Marella Discovery, and Royal Caribbean’s Jewel of the Seas.  Every time I have been to Barbados, there have been several other ships docked here, but it has never been an issue because Barbados has a huge tourism infrastructure and it can handle multiple cruise ships on top of the visitors on land vacations.

Using the wide angle lens on my iPhone, I could barely capture parts of all 4 ships in one photo:

I didn’t take a photo of my breakfast because it was the same thing I ate every other morning on this cruise: a hard boiled egg, a pre-made cheese omelet, and a croissant with cream cheese and lox.  When I finished eating, I picked up a freshly-made waffle that I watched the crew member remove from the waffle iron, and brought it back to the cabin for Ian to eat for breakfast while Jason went up to the buffet to get his own food.  By this point on the cruise, we really had a good morning routine that worked well for maximizing our time, which felt like another perk of the 10-day cruise versus a 7-day cruise.  On 7-day cruises, it always feels like by the time we get a rhythm going and work out a good routine, the cruise is over!  

Bellies full and bodies clothed and sunscreened, we met my parents in the hall and all got off the ship together around 9:30am.  We needed to meet our tour operator by 10am, and didn’t know how long it would take us to reach the meeting point, especially considering we were docked at the furthest berth from the visitors center.  Luckily, Princess provided a free shuttle between the ship and the visitors center, and there was a constant flow of shuttles such that as it filled up, it drove away and there was already another shuttle waiting behind it.  That meant there was no line to board the shuttle and we pulled away a moment later.

The shuttle dropped us off at the entrance to the visitor center, so we walked through the long hallway, bypassing all the souvenir stores, and followed the signs in search of desk number 8.

We walked up to the desk at 9:50am, with 10 minutes to spare before our assigned meeting time, and were happy to see a representative from Sun Tours was waiting for us.  He told us to wait on the side for the other people on our tour to arrive.  Everyone else arrived a few minutes later, and we were loaded onto a nice, new 15-passenger bus and pulled away from the port at 10am on the dot!  This was a huge relief because when I booked the tour, the information said we could have a maximum of 32 people on the tour, but it turned out that there were only 11 of us!  

Our guide’s name was Paul, but honestly, he wasn’t much of a guide.  He didn’t talk or narrate or give us any history about Barbados.  Today was New Year’s Day, and it seemed like he was just filling in for the person who is typically the guide for this tour.  Paul didn’t even have bottles of water for us on the bus, even though that was listed on the tour description as being included.  I usually take bottles of water off the ship for each of us, but I didn’t do that today, expecting water to be provided (we are usually offered bottles of water even when it is NOT included in the tour description!), so we had to make due with the half-full bottles that were left over in my backpack from yesterday’s tour.

We pulled up to the Barbados Wildlife Reserve at 10:40am, but Paul was surprised to see a chain lock across the width of the driveway so we couldn’t pull in.  We knew it was New Year’s Day so we double checked with Sun Tours before booking this tour that everything would be open for business, and they said yes.  Paul spent a few minutes on the phone outside the bus, and came back to say there was a gas leak and they had to close down the reserve until it could be inspected for safety.  Not one person on our bus believed that story, and we all thought it was more of a staffing issue after they partied too hard on New Year’s Eve.  Paul said he would take us out to the east side of the island to see the views, and we would come back to the reserve at the end of the day.  I immediately knew that would never happen.  A few weeks ago, we received an email from Harrison’s Caves with our scheduled tram tickets and those were for 1:20pm.  The tour there would take a little over an hour, and we still needed time to drive back to the cruise ship before the tour was scheduled to end at 3pm.  There wouldn’t be time to return to the wildlife reserve at the end of the day, so Paul was just saying that to appease us and soften the blow.  

Paul drove for another 20 minutes to the Animal Flower Cave.  I had read about this place when researching things we could do in Barbados, but I immediately eliminated it as an option because in order to see the cave, you have to climb down a steep, slippery staircase which neither my parents nor my 4-year old son could do safely.  When he parked the bus in the parking lot, Paul said that we were just here to see the views of the coast and we would be here for about 15 minutes so there wasn’t time for people to go down into the cave, even if they wanted to.

Making the best of it, we walked around the grounds to see what there was to see.  Ian liked this statue of a woman in a traditional dress.

We walked down a paved path towards the right side of the property and were met with this view of the rugged east coast.  

It reminded me a lot of Shete Boka National Park in Curacao, with the waves crashing up against the tall cliffs along the coast.

We saw there was a restroom here, so we took advantage of that, then we noticed on the left side of the property, there was a large playground.  At this point, we were out of time and needed to meet back at the bus, so it would have been nice if Paul mentioned it to us when we arrived.  He knew we had a child with us and I know Ian would have loved to play for a few minutes.  Fortunately for all of us, Ian didn’t see the playground because as soon as I saw it, I turned around and walked the other way before he got that far down the path!  Otherwise, I’m sure you would have heard him crying from miles away!

Back on the bus, we drove 25 more minutes to Cherry Tree Hill Reserve, not to see the trees, but to see the views.  You could see pretty far down the shore from up here, so we spent 5 minutes admiring the view.

We got back on the bus and drove down the hill back to the shore.  On our way, we passed a farm with dairy cows. 

Paul pulled over so we could see the only windmill left in Barbados.  He said that they used to have the 2nd most windmills in the world (2nd to Holland, obviously!), but they were all destroyed in a hurricane.  

When we pulled away from the windmill, we saw a herd of animals that we thought were goats, but Paul said there were actually Black Belly Sheep.

This is a better photo to see their black bellies…

Can you tell that Paul is really struggling to fill the time?  Remember, our tour started at 10am, we arrived at the closed wildlife reserve at 10:40am, and the Harrison’s Cave tour tickets weren’t until 1:20pm.  We had a lot of time to kill!

Continuing our drive, we saw some beautiful views of the ocean crashing up against the shore.  I didn’t see any surfers, but I imagine this would be a fun place to go surfing with all of those waves.

Paul pulled over to the side of the road to show us this mountain that looks like the profile of a man’s face, and if you look very closely, there is a small rock on what would be his forehead.  You can’t really tell in this photo, but that small rock looks like a man playing the piano.  

Back on the main road, we continued our drive along the Atlantic coast.  

Back when we were at the wildlife reserve and knew we would be taking an extended island tour, I asked Paul if we could visit Bathsheba.  This was somewhere I always wanted to see, and I don’t think our tour was originally supposed to stop here, so I guess this was one benefit of the reserve being closed today.  Paul parked the van on the side of the road and told us we could have 10 minutes to take some photos here.  I thought there was a sandy beach here, so I was surprised to see this huge grassy hill leading down to the shore.

When we reached the shore, we had incredible views of all the giant rock formations dotting the coastline.  

https://flic.kr/p/2rRRtM5

Ian wasn’t as impressed by the giant rocks as he was by the giant hill.  He loved running up and down the hill, and after spending so much time cooped up in the bus, it was nice that he had a chance to run around for a few minutes.

At 12:15pm, Paul said we needed to get going so we could get to Harrion’s Cave in time for our tour there.  We arrived at Harrison’s Cave at 12:40pm, so we spent over 2 and a half hours driving around the island since leaving the port at 10am, with only 2 opportunities to get out and stretch our legs for 10 minutes each time.  I just pulled up a map of Barbados and plotted the places we visited.  I didn’t realize it at the time because Paul did a horrible job of narrating and telling us where we were driving, but we drove all the way up to the north end of the island for the Animal Flower Cave, and then down half the length of the east coast of the island to get to Bathsheba.  It would have been nice if Paul explained a bit more about Barbados along the way.  Even if he wasn’t prepared to give us a fully guided island tour, even just sharing his knowledge about life living on the island would have been better than nothing.

We went inside of the visitor center and waited while Paul stood in line to collect our tickets and wrist bands for the tram tour.  He pointed us towards an elevator at the back of the visitor center, and said he would be waiting for us in the parking lot when we finished our tour.  It seemed a little weird that he didn’t escort us any further because when we got off the elevator, we didn’t know where we were supposed to go.  We eventually figured out that we were supposed to go inside another building.  There was a 3D model of Barbados, and a TV screen playing a video about the island.

One of the cave employees came into the room and explained that something happened earlier in the day which delayed the tram tours, so they were now running 40 minutes late.  This meant that our 1:20pm tickets were now being changed to a 2:00pm tour.  Seriously?!  We were just so frustrated at this point with all of the issues we encountered today.  We thought it was very strange that we were first hearing about this now, and that Paul either didn’t know or opted not to tell us (since we never spoke to anyone at the front desk upstairs and he handled the check-in process for us).  We decided to just hang around in that waiting room in hopes that they would find space for us on an earlier tour.

A few minutes later, he came back to collect the people for the next tour.  Sure enough, after he took a headcount, there were empty seats available and we were able to join with that group.  Whew!  It’s a good thing we didn’t leave!  He gave us each a hairnet and told us to take a seat on a bench in the next room.  Once everyone was seated, we watched a 9-minute movie about the geology of Barbados and how the island and these caves were formed.  It was really interesting to learn that background information prior to seeing the caves so we understood what we were seeing.  After the movie, the staff handed out helmets for everyone, and they even had a child-sized helmet for Ian.  Then we all left the theater room and boarded the tram that was ready and waiting for us.  We were concerned about Ian being able to see, so we went right for the front row of the first tram car.

Unfortunately, we couldn’t quite fit all 5 of us on one bench so Jason sat behind me in the 2nd row with a few other people from our Sun Tours group.

The tram ride was 40 minutes long and was fully narrated by a guide.  Prior to the cruise, I had read tons of reviews about this cave tour and so many people mentioned that it is very cold down there, so I made sure to pack jackets for us in our day bags so we would be comfortable.  It turns out that that was completely unnecessary as it was very humid and warm, at least on the day we were there, and I was sweating within minutes of starting the tour.  What I found really strange was that there were drops of water falling from the ceiling of the cave and dripping on us the entire time such that all of our clothes and bags were wet, and I tried to use my body to shield the spare batteries and electronics in my backpack because I was unprepared for them to get wet.  If there’s one thing I would tell people planning to visit these caves, it is to pack all of your valuables inside plastic ziploc bags and be prepared to get very wet!  

The tram drove slowly through the caves, and the guide pointed out different stalactite and stalagmite formations along the way.  They had a system of lights where the guide turned on the lights for each section as we drove by so we could see it better.  I took over 200 photos during the tour, but it was hard to fully capture the beauty of these caves in my photos and many of the photos didn’t come out great because of the wet and dark conditions.  I will just share the best photos here…

We weren’t allowed to touch any part of the caves, but I was curious if this wall was cold because it looked like icicles…

Everywhere we looked, there was something unique and beautiful to see.

This was our guide… I wish I could remember her name!  She was great, offering funny commentary about everything we were seeing.  We could tell she really loves her job.

These formations looked like jelly fish…

At one point, we passed another tram driving in the opposite direction…

Our guide explained that this row boat was here in case there was ever a need to make an emergency escape from the caves.  There was a river behind that opening in the cave, and you could use that boat to row to safety if needed.  That was reassuring, I guess!

There were two opportunities when the tram stopped and we could get off and take photos.  The guides had bright flashlights, and that really helped us get amazing photos.  I appreciated that they took these photos on our personal cameras/phones and didn’t force us to take the photos on their cameras and then pressure us to purchase the pictures in the gift shop.  

The second stop was at a small lake with a waterfall.  Notice how curly my hair is in these photos?  You can’t tell because we are both wearing black, but we were soaking wet by this point.

At the end of the tour, we returned our helmets and exited the caves out into the adventure park section of the grounds.  There was an elevated ropes course, a zipline, and a few other activities.  Access to this adventure park cost an additional fee beyond the tram tour, although I am not sure about the pricing because it wasn’t really an option for our group when visiting with my parents in their 70’s and my 4 year old son.  It did look like a lot of fun though, and we would consider coming back if we return to Barbados when Ian is older.

We took the elevators back up to the level with the visitor center.  I noticed there was a giant statue of monkeys… unfortunately, this was the closest Ian would get to a monkey today!

As we exited out to the parking lot in search of Paul and our bus, I saw these purple flowers outside the visitor center entrance and thought they were so pretty!

We got back on the bus around 2:30pm and Paul said it was time to drive back towards the port.  While we were driving, someone asked what had happened with the “gas leak.”  Paul admitted that he did not really believe that there was a gas leak, and he said that he spoke with his manager at Sun Tours so they were aware that we never got to visit the wildlife reserve.  Part of the fee we paid to take this tour included our entrance to the reserve, but Paul indicated that we were all on our own to reach out to Sun Tours and request some kind of refund.  I thought that was kind of annoying- we were clearly due a refund for those tickets at a minimum, and it should have been issued automatically without us having to fight for it.  Luckily for my family and my parents, we booked through Viator as a middle man, so we did not need to communicate directly with Sun Tours.  When we got home, I sent a message to Viator’s customer service explaining what happened.  Since the original tour description said that we would visit two places, and we only got to see one of those places, Viator issued us a 50% refund.  I was very happy with how Viator handled the situation, and I appreciated that they made it easy for me and didn’t require me to go back and forth with them to plead my case. 

Anyway, back to the bus ride back to the port… Paul pointed out as we drove past the mansion where Rihanna lives, but I wasn’t able to snap a photo because it was on the opposite side of the bus.  He then showed us the house where Rihanna grew up.  He said that she still owns the house today even though no one lives there.  He actually said something about it being used as an AirBNB rental, so I just looked it up… It is a bungalow with 3 bedrooms and 1 bathroom, and rents for around $150 per night.  That seems very reasonable considering they could easily charge more for it being the house where Rihanna grew up.  Then again, it is located on a street where the locals live, so it is not very close to the touristy sections of Barbados or to the beach or anything like that, so I’m not sure how much demand there is to stay here.

Notice the yellow square painted on the sidewalk which says “Rihanna” (making this house easy to spot for tourists who want to take a photo of it)…

It had been a long day and poor Ian was exhausted.  He nodded off when we were just 5 minutes away from the cruise port…

We were dropped off back at the port at 3:30pm.  None of us had any interest in shopping at the souvenir stores at the port, so we just walked through the building to find the shuttle buses back to the ship.  Luckily, there were plenty of shuttles and we were on our way back to the ship a few minutes later.

Back on board, we went up to the cabin to drop off our bags and get freshened up for dinner.  We decided to use another one of our casual dining meals tonight, but that wasn’t going to include Ian (sorry, buddy!), so we took him up to the Lido buffet to find him something for dinner.  We got there at 5pm expecting to find something at the dinner buffet, but they didn’t open until 5:30pm.  We ended up getting him a slice of pizza from Alfredo’s Slice by the pool.

Ian was still hungry after he finished his slice of pizza.  By then, the kids section of the buffet was open so we got him a few chicken nuggets.  It was nice to see him eat something besides plain pasta for dinner!

For those who are curious, here is the dining room menu from tonight:

When Ian was done eating, we went over to the Piazza to listen to the music and do some people watching while we waited for camp to open at 7pm.

Since we happened to be standing outside of Gigi’s, I asked Jason to get us a table for dinner while I took Ian upstairs to camp.  Luckily, there was no wait and he was seated right away.  We remembered from when we ate here last year that the pizza is so big that there was no way for us to finish our own pizzas, so this place works great to share one of the casual dining meals from the Plus Package.  

We decided to share the Mozzarella Fresca e Verdure Grigliate appetizer, with fresh mozzarella, roma tomatoes, marinated grilled zucchini, roasted red and yellow peppers, basil pesto, with fresh basil garnish.

For our entree, we shared the vegetarian pizza, with tomatoes, mozzarella, grilled zucchini, sun-dried tomatoes, roasted bell peppers, mushrooms, red onion, avocado, and basil.

It is hard to see the scale from this photo, but the pizza was so big that we didn’t finish it even with us sharing the one pizza!  By the time dessert came, I was too full to even take a bite so Jason got the whole tiramisu to himself.

After dinner, we walked around the ship to work off the meal.  We ran into my brother’s family as they were leaving the early showing of the production show and they said it was amazing and they loved it.  Jason and I had planned to go to the 9pm showing, so that got us excited to see it.  

My sister in law offered to take a photo for us because we were sort of matching tonight:

Next, we stopped by Crooners for a drink.  Jason ordered a glass of port, and I ordered the Dunes martini, but asked them to pour it in a glass I could walk with.  The Dunes had Malibu coconut rum, melon liqueur, banana, pineapple, and lemon, but I don’t like bananas so I asked if it could be made without that and the bartender said it was no problem.

Drinks in hand, we walked over to the theater to get seats for the 9pm show.  Tonight’s show was called 5 Skies, and this was the only production on this cruise that was new to us.  In the Patter, the show was described as “Mind blowing theatrics of a virtual reality world comes to life through technology and acrobatics.”  That sounded really unique and like something we would enjoy, but it turned out that we thought the show was really weird.  It was about a video game where the main character had to complete 5 levels to win the game and save a princess.  That caught us off guard as it was so different from the other production shows we’ve seen on Princess, and we doubted most of the passengers on the ship would enjoy it considering they were mostly an older demographic.  Did Princess forget who their typical demographic was?!   Don’t get me wrong… There were parts of the show that we loved!  The costumes, sets, and technology used throughout the show were a huge step up from typical cruise ship production shows and you could tell that Princess invested a lot of money into this show.  It just seemed strange to have a show like this on a ship that caters more to an older crowd who wouldn’t appreciate this show.  I doubt any of them are gamers or appreciated much of the music featured in the show.  

The set design was really impressive, especially considering we were on a cruise ship.

This part was kind of weird… the main character gained the ability to fly?  They spent a long time with him “flying” around the stage on this contraption that looked like a chair a masseuse might use.

The next song was Wings by Little Mix, so naturally the dancers came out dressed like colorful butterflies, complete with antennae headpieces and flowing wings.

The next song was Believer by Imagine Dragons  The dancers were suspended from bungee cords and kept jumping up and doing flips and kicks in sync with the music.  It was very creative and definitely nothing I have seen before on a cruise ship!

The next part of the show was when the plot got weird(er).  The princess came out to sing…

And then the dancers were rolling around the stage on hoverboards and kick scooters.  They couldn’t really perform choreography on the wheels so they just kind of rolled around back and forth across the stage.

Then something happened and a planet exploded??  And the main character died??  Or maybe he didn’t die because suddenly he was face to face with the princess?  They totally lost me with the plot, but I will give them credit for the special effects during this part!

And then the whole cast came out at the end and everyone was alive and happy again.

Overall, I didn’t know what to think walking away from this show.  Like I said at the beginning, the costumes, set design, and special effects were incredible, especially considering we were on a cruise ship!  But the plot was bizarre and definitely not on-brand for Princess.  

The show ended at 9:45pm.  In what was becoming a nightly ritual, we made the mad dash across the entire length of the ship to the aft elevators, then went up to deck 17 to retrieve Ian from camp.  Each session of camp had a theme, and tonight was Pirate Night.  Ian left camp wearing this hat and he also had an eye patch, but he didn’t want to wear it.  I was so glad to see how much fun Ian was having at camp on this cruise (a HUGE improvement over our Discovery cruise last winter!)

We took Ian back to the cabin so we could get a good night’s rest before an early port day tomorrow.

Today’s drinks total: 12

Up next: Martinique

When I was looking at possible itineraries for this cruise and I saw we would be visiting Dominica, I was immediately sold on this itinerary.  Way back in 2010, I took a cruise on the Celebrity Summit and Dominica was by far my favorite port.  Back then, hardly any ships visited this tiny island in the Southern Caribbean, and it felt so special to experience such lush natural beauty.  I took a full day excursion with Levi Baron of Bumpiing Tours (yes, it was spelled with two i’s, and no, I don’t know why!), and to this day, it was one of my all time favorite cruise port days.  I was very disappointed to learn that Bumpiing Tours is no longer in business, seemingly due to the lack of tourists visiting the island during the pandemic.  Regardless, I was still thrilled to return to Dominica and I hoped to find a similar tour to show Jason the beauty of this island.  

Unfortunately, once again we didn’t dock until 10am today.  Much like yesterday, it was very challenging finding a tour that started so late in the morning, as most tours started between 8-9am.  Since relatively few cruise ships visit Dominica, they don’t have as big of a tourism infrastructure as a more commercial island like St. Thomas.  There are only a handful of tour companies to pick from, so once again, I considered just booking our tour through the cruise line.  I really wanted to relive the tour I took in 2010, so that meant snorkeling at the champagne reef, swimming through Titou Gorge, and hiking to the hot springs at Trafalgar Falls.  Princess did offer one tour that visited all those places, but it was very expensive at over $200 per person, and it was an 8 hour tour.  That meant that if everything went according to plan and if we stayed on schedule, we wouldn’t return to the ship until 6pm (and honestly, I didn’t think it was possible to stay on schedule with a cruise ship excursion as the one Princess excursion I booked last year was an hour and a half late returning to the port and we nearly missed the last tender from Cabo!  Yes, I know they would have held the ship for us, but still, you know what I mean…).  Tonight was New Year’s Eve, and I really didn’t want to first get back to the ship that late, still needing to shower and get ready for dinner.  I assumed this would be a formal night, and I knew my parents really wanted to take a big family photo tonight so we needed time to get ready for that, and if we didn’t get back to the ship until 6pm, we probably wouldn’t be ready for dinner until closer to 7 or 8pm.  That just didn’t work for us, especially on New Year’s Eve.

Continuing my search, I looked through every option on Viator until I finally found the Shoreside Fun-Day with Titou Gorge, Hot Springs & Champagne Reef through Waitukubuli Adventure Tour Company.  This tour had over 150 five star reviews, visited all of the places I wanted to see, and managed to do it in just 5 and a half hours.  Perfect!  I emailed the company because their website only offered a 9am start time, but when I explained that our ship wasn’t arriving in port until 10am, they said that was no problem and they cater to cruise ships so they would meet us at the port at 10:30.  That meant we would be back at the ship by 4pm, giving us plenty of time to get showered and ready for dinner with my family.  

Oh, and in case you were wondering about Ian’s plans for the day… My parents graciously agreed once again to take Ian (and his cousins) for the day so my brother and I could enjoy the activities in Dominica.  My parents booked a Princess excursion to take the kids on a tourist train ride around Roseau.  It seemed like an easy activity that worked well for all ages, and they hung out on the ship with the kids for the rest of the day until we were back onboard.

I woke up at 7:30am, quietly got dressed in the bathroom, and snuck out of the cabin leaving the boys to sleep a little later.  I decided to try a new strategy today and go up to the buffet for breakfast on my own.  I knew I could grab my food and eat fairly quickly without having Ian in tow.  I doubled up on protein to ensure I stayed full through the morning, but our excursion included lunch so I didn’t have to overdo it. 

That chocolate chip pancake was actually meant for Ian, and I brought it back to the cabin when I finished my food.  By then, Jason was awake, so I sent him upstairs to eat breakfast while I got Ian dressed.  We took his pancake out to the balcony to check out the views.  We could see that we were off the coast of Dominica, and it was shaping up to be another beautiful day in the Caribbean.

Around 9:30am, I took Ian upstairs to drop him off at camp.  We planned the same schedule with my parents as yesterday where they would pick Ian up at camp, feed him lunch, and then head off for their excursion.  I went back to their cabin to drop off the camp beeper and Ian’s day bag with my parents.  By then, it was just before 10am so Jason and I took our bags and went down the mid-ship elevators to deck 5 to wait for the announcement that the ship was cleared.

And then we waited.  And waited some more.  The crew who were stationed in that area for crowd control told us to line up near the stairs, so we went where we were told.  A few minutes later, there was an announcement that they were having trouble securing the gangways and it would take a little longer before we could go ashore.  By the time they finally gave the all clear that we were safe to disembark, it was 10:35am.  We were starting to get stressed out because we were supposed to meet for our tour just after 10am, and on every other day of the cruise, we were cleared to get off the ship exactly at our scheduled arrival time.  This was the one and only day when our timing really mattered because it was our longest excursion and we knew we were already going to be tight on time to get ready for New Year’s Eve dinner, so it was less than ideal that this was the only day when we had a 35 minute delay before we were allowed off the ship.  Even the crew members were getting a bit stressed with people coming off the elevators and cutting ahead of people who had been standing in line from the start.  Once the captain gave the all-clear, it was chaos as everyone scrambled down the stairs towards the gangway.

Once we were off the ship, we exited the port area through the security gates and we immediately spotted a woman holding a sign for Waitukubuli Adventure Tours.  We were very appreciative that she made things so easy for us, because it can sometimes be hard to find your tour operator in a sea of people.  We were the first people from our tour to arrive, so she asked our guide to walk us to the van so we could sit and wait comfortably in the air conditioning.  We were assigned to a 12-passenger van, but there were only 6 people on our tour so we had plenty of space to spread out.  The others arrived a few minutes later, and we were driving away from the port by 11am.  

Our guide/driver introduced himself as Adin, and his assistant was Leo.  He said that because we got a late start to the day, we would be back at the ship around 4:30pm.  I had no way to communicate with my parents at this point because I didn’t have cell service in Dominica, so we just crossed our fingers that the tour ran on time and we would be back onboard with enough time to get ready for our 6pm dinner reservations.

We drove for about 30 minutes through the streets of Roseau and out along the coast to our first stop of the day: Champagne Reef.  Adin explained that Dominica is home to 9 active volcanoes, making it the island with the highest concentration of active volcanoes in the world.  These volcanoes regulate their pressure by emitting gas, which creates bubbles under the water.  These bubbles can be seen when snorkeling off the shore of Dominica, hence the name Champagne Reef.  Adin said that if you ever cannot see the bubbles, then you’d better get off the island because it means a volcano is about to blow!  Funny enough, when I visited Dominica in 2010, I did not see any bubbles when we snorkeled at Champagne Reef.  I spent the last 15 years thinking it was just a gimmick and that there aren’t actually any visible bubbles there, so I was really looking forward to a second opportunity to see the bubbles.

Adin pulled over to the side of the road and parked the van.  We were all the way up at the top of a cliff, but I could already see that the water looked beautiful and I couldn’t wait to get in!

Adin and Leo helped everyone get fitted with fins, snorkels, masks, and life jackets.  They said the life jackets were mandatory.  When we were ready to go, we followed them down a flight of stone stairs to the beach.  I remembered from the last time I was here that the beach is very rocky, so we wore our water shoes for the walk.

One by one, the guides helped us into the water, and we all waited for them to join us so we could swim together out to the reef.

That was one huge difference from the last time I was here.  As I remember it, the guides just told us to go in the water and we would see bubbles.  They didn’t escort us to a specific place, and I don’t even remember them being in the water with us.  It was just a murky sandy-bottomed ocean, and it was very disappointing to not see any bubbles.  The guides justified it by saying it was usually a very calm area to snorkel, but we were unlucky because the seas were rough that day and that’s why we couldn’t see the bubbles.  Now coming back here 15 years later, the seas were still rough, so somehow I doubt there is ever calm water near this beach.  Either way, it was a much better experience this time around as we had two guides in the water with us, escorting us the entire way.

Even though we were always close to the shore, the water was very deep for most of the swim.  As we swam, we could see tons of yellow tube coral.

We swam along the coast for 10 minutes, and the water was really rough the entire time.  I was very thankful for the mandatory life vest because without it, I would have been afraid I might drown.  I noticed Adin had stopped swimming and he was gathering everyone around him.  He said we reached our destination and told us to all look below the surface…

OMG!!! BUBBLES!!!  I couldn’t believe it!  After 15 years of skepticism, I finally got to see the bubbles of Champagne Reef, and they were amazing!  There were so many bubbles coming out of the ground, and they glittered beautifully in the sunlight.  It was hard to capture a good photo, so these are the best I got.  Honestly, I think it was even prettier in person.

A selfie just for fun!

I spotted a sea urchin below the bubbles…

Not the best photo (and what’s up with all the fogging on our goggles?!), but here’s proof that Jason was there too!

We stayed out with the bubbles for about 10 minutes, then started our swim back to the beach.  Along the way, I spotted a big fish, but I’m not really sure what kind it is.  There weren’t many fish out there, but that’s okay because that’s not why we were there anyway.

There were a ton of these yellow columns, and I loved how easy they were to spot with the bright color contrasting with the dull ocean floor.

There was also one big yellow brain coral:

The guides helped everyone climb out of the water when we got back to the beach because the current was rushing towards the shore and there was a steep drop off so we had to be very secure on our feet to safely reach the beach.  We spent a total of 30 minutes in the water.  While it was definitely more advanced swimming conditions than the typical calm Caribbean water, it was well worth the effort to see those incredible bubbles.

Because Dominica is a volcanic island, most of the beaches have black sand.  It’s always interesting to see something unique like that.  We didn’t spend any time on the beach though because we had lots more to see and do on the island, so we followed Adin back across the beach and up the stairs to get back to the van.

Once we were all back at the van, we returned our life vests and snorkel gear (for those who borrowed it from the guides) and were given a cold bottle of water from their cooler in exchange.  That was much appreciated after a challenging 30-minute swim in the salty ocean.  Adin asked us what we wanted to eat for lunch so he could place our order with the restaurant.  There were 4 choices, including rotisserie chicken and fries, spicy chicken and fries, jamaican patty, and chicken curry in roti.  I ordered the rotisserie chicken and Jason ordered the chicken roti.  Everyone climbed back in the van, and Adin called in our order as he started driving back towards town so it would be ready when we arrived at the restaurant.

First, we drove back into Roseau and stopped at a building where Leo hopped out and exchanged our life jackets.  At first, I assumed they were just getting a dry set so when we got to the next stop, we could put on a fresh jacket, and I thought that was excellent customer service.  That wasn’t really the intention though as the first life jackets were the thin, inflatable ones, and the replacements were more sturdy foam jackets which we would need for Titou Gorge.  I’m not really sure why they didn’t just have both kinds of jackets in the van from the start of the day, but the stop only took 5 minutes so I guess it wasn’t that big of a deal.

Next, we drove to the restaurant so Leo could go inside and pick up our lunch orders.  They were all individually packaged in styrofoam containers, but he didn’t distribute them right there because we were double parked in a busy part of town.  We continued driving until we reached the botanical gardens.  This wasn’t a formal part of our tour, but we had to drive through it to get from Champagne Reef to Titou Gorge, so we just looked at the sites through the windows as we drove along.  

One of the main attractions in the botanical gardens is this school bus, which was crushed by an African Baobab Tree during Hurricane David in 1979.  Thankfully, no one was inside at the time, and the locals decided to leave the wreckage in place as a reminder of that horrible storm.  Over time, the tree continued to grow around the bus, making an interesting landmark.

This was a natural bamboo house that you can actually walk inside of, but obviously we didn’t do that as we just looked at it from the van.

When there was space to pull over, Adin stopped the van so Leo could get out and distribute our lunches.  I looked out the front windshield and saw that we were parked in front of a big red tourist train!  I had seen pictures of the train that my parents and the kids would be riding on their excursion and it looked just like this.  By now, it was 1pm, and I knew their excursion started at noon, so it was very likely that they were on this train!  

Just then, the train started moving and it drove right past our van.  Sure enough, I saw my parents and the kids in one of the rows in the middle of the train!  Jason was sitting on that side of our van, so he opened the door and stuck out his head and yelled my mom’s name.  At first, she looked so shocked and confused about who was calling her name!  She started laughing when she saw it was us, and the kids got a kick out of it!  I didn’t get any photos of this because it happened so fast, but it was really funny that we saw them on their tour.  Timing is everything in life!

After all of that excitement, I opened my lunch box to dig in.  Adin told us to eat while he continued driving to Titou Gorge.  The chicken was delicious, and there were so many fries that I shared some with Jason.  I didn’t take a picture of his lunch but he said it was really good too.

As we drove up into the mountains, Adin pointed out these towers and said they are building a cable car and zipline across the valley.  He said it is possible to hike up to the top of the mountains, but it would take 6-8 hours for an experienced hiker, and this cable car is meant to show you the same views but it will only take a few minutes to reach the top, and then you zipline back down.  If you look closely, you can see two lines connecting the towers.  I don’t remember which is which, but one is for the cable car and the other is for the zip line.  He said the construction is almost done and it should be completed for tourists to enjoy within a few months.

We finally pulled into the parking lot of Titou Gorge at 1:30pm, so we had been in the van for an hour and 15 minutes!  It didn’t feel that long, and we appreciated that as he drove, Adin spent a lot of time explaining things about life in Dominica, like their government, agriculture, school system, economy, tourism, and a few other topics.

I don’t think I’ve posted a photo of it yet, but this was our van for the day:

Leo handed out the foam life vests to each of us, and helped us adjust them to fit snuggly.  Titou Gorge was very busy when we arrived, so we had to park our van at the bottom of a hill and walk back up to the top.  

The scenery was beautiful, with lush green trees and a river flowing between large rocks.

At the top of the hill, we saw the other parking lot, which was filled with tour vans, but it looked like people were returning to those vans after finishing their visit to the gorge so hopefully it wouldn’t be too crowded when we got inside.  There were a few vendors selling souvenirs, and a small restaurant with a bathroom which Adin said we were free to use.

Once everyone was ready, we climbed down a slippery set of stairs into the water.  The guides warned us the water would feel “refreshing”, but that was really just code for FREEZING!  Having done this before, I knew what to expect and that it was worth it to suffer in the cold water for a few minutes until my body adjusted, but other people ahead of us needed a little more convincing.  The line was slow-moving, and it took a few minutes until it was our turn to jump in.

We stood in the shallow section of water, waiting for everyone else in our group to join us.  The bottom of the river is very rocky, much like the section of river we saw on our walk from the van, so I was happy I wore my water shoes.  The guides didn’t mention anything about footwear, so half our group was wearing flip flops and I think they wished they had something to protect their feet.

As you swam into the gorge, there was a rope swing that you could climb up, but none of us tried it.  The easiest way to acclimate to the cold water was to just stay submerged, so I wasn’t really tempted to climb up the rope and need to get used to the water again.

I apologize in advance for the quality of these photos.  It was very dark inside the gorge, and while we could see well enough with the light that peeked in between the canopy of trees above us, my camera isn’t great in low-light conditions.  

Looking up, you can see the dense canopy of leaves above the gorge.  It’s really amazing that anyone discovered this was hidden down here!

After about 3 minutes of swimming, we came to an opening, and Adin told us to gather around as he explained that this was one of the filming locations used in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies.  He showed us where they drilled into the rock walls to attach their cameras, and you can still barely see evidence of it today if you know where to look.  

Despite how busy it was in the parking lots and in the initial entrance area into the gorge, our group of 6 plus our 2 guides were the only ones in this area, so we floated here, enjoying the peace and tranquility for a few minutes.

We started seeing people swimming past us towards the exit, so we took that as our cue to continue on, swimming deeper into the gorge as it would now be less crowded in there.  When we got to the end, there was a small waterfall with a ledge.  Adin and Leo climbed up first so they could help each of us climb up against the rush of water.  There was only a narrow opening to stand and wait, and there were still a few people ahead of us from a different group, so we waited for them to finish and have our own turn with the huge waterfall up ahead.

When it was our turn, the guides helped us down into a pool of water under the waterfall.  

The force of water was so strong that it felt intimidating, and I was afraid to get too close to the waterfall for fear of being knocked over.  The floor was very slippery, with loose rocks that moved as you stepped on them, and it was hard to maintain your balance with the current.  I told Jason that I just wanted to take a quick photo with him to prove we were there, but then I needed to get out before I twisted my ankle.  One of the people on our tour was right next to me and offered to take our photo.  This is probably the least flattering photo I have ever taken, but it will have to do!

The photo was blurry from water on the lens, but I didn’t care.  I wasn’t staying down there any longer because I was really nervous about the conditions.  The guides helped me climb out, and then I waited for Jason and everyone else to finish playing under the waterfall.  Some people were even crazy enough to stand directly under the waterfall!  After everyone was out, the guides took each pair’s photo without anyone else in the background.  I look like a drowned rat, but this definitely proves how hard we worked to reach this spot!

After that, we retraced our path to swim back out of the gorge.

The whole gorge isn’t that long, so it only took us 5 minutes to swim out based on the time stamps in my photos.  It also helped that we were swimming with the current in this direction, so that pushed us along a little faster than when swimming in.  

We all climbed out of the water, up the slippery stairs, and regrouped on terra firma.  Titou Gorge was just as amazing as I remembered from 2010, and it was definitely one of the highlights of our entire cruise.  It is such a unique place, and Jason and I were so grateful we got to experience it together.

On our walk back down the hill to our van, we noticed this van parked on the side of the road.  It had a flat tire, so I assume it was parked there when we walked up the hill earlier, but I didn’t notice it then.  Among other things, it included a picture of Johnny Depp from the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, so you could tell the people of Dominica were very proud of being part of that movie.

Back at our van, Adin opened the cooler again to offer us a bottle of local beer.  After such a physically challenging day, we thought we deserved a little treat and gladly accepted his offer.

We dried off, returned our life vests, and got back in the van to drive to our next stop: Trafalgar Falls.  This is a pair of huge side-by-side waterfalls, nestled within a lush forest.  When I did my tour in 2010, we climbed down between large rocks and into the natural pools created by these waterfalls, some of which were natural hot springs.  I assumed we would do the same on today’s tour because it did say “hot springs” in the description, but apparently the hot springs we were visiting were at a different location, and our stop here was just to quickly look at the waterfalls from the viewing platform.

To reach the platform, we first had to walk for about 10 minutes along a clear path with a ton of steps up and down.  We really got a workout today!

At the end of the trail, there was a large two-story platform with the perfect view of both waterfalls.  They were just far enough apart that it was really hard to capture both in the same photo, so I regretted only carrying my underwater camera because I’m sure the 0.5 wide angle lens on my iPhone would have worked better.

I loved how the one on the left cascaded down between the rocks, zig zagging back and forth to carve its path.

Even though Adin said we were not supposed to swim here, Jason wanted to climb down to the rocks just to take a quick look.  There were other people from different tours who did get to swim in these natural pools, so I’m really not sure why we didn’t get to do it too.

After about 10 minutes of looking at the falls, Adin said it was time to walk back to the van.  It was now time to drive to our last stop on the tour, the hot springs.  He didn’t really explain anything about this place, but I think it was some kind of spa?  

This was the front entrance, and we went inside by climbing the stairs in the middle of the photo…

One of the guides said that there were several different pools here that had different temperatures.  He recommended we start with the warm pool, then go to the hot pool, and end with a quick cold plunge in the cold pool.  The cold pool did not contain sulfur, so that would also serve as a way to rinse off the sulfur from our skin and bathing suits.  Knowing we would visit a sulfur-based hot spring today, I purposely wore a black bathing suit to avoid it getting stained.

There were 3 or 4 sets of 3 pools, and at first, they pointed us towards these pools that were already crowded with people from other groups.

We started to get in, but then one of the ladies in our group noticed another set of pools that were completely empty!  That was more our speed, so we followed her down to those pools and the 6 of us from our van had it all to ourselves.  Adin also poured us a cup of a very strong homemade rum punch to enjoy while we sat in the pools.

As compared to the natural rock formations that created Titou Gorge and the pools at the base of Trafalgar Falls, these hot springs seemed manmade from concrete and I’m not really sure where the hot water came from.  The concrete walls didn’t create the serene, natural environment that made the other stops so unique, and honestly, I wished we had just spent the time swimming at Trafalgar Falls and skipped this stop completely.

By the time we were ready to leave, the place had mostly cleared out and the other tour groups were gone.

It was now after 4pm, so we walked back down to the van, dried off, and boarded the van one last time to drive back to the cruise ship.  Overall, we had an amazing day in Dominica.  With the exception of the hot springs stop at the end, all of the other stops featured lush, natural beauty that is unique to this island, and the activities left us memories we will reminisce about for years to come.  If you are ever in Dominica, I would highly recommend this tour with Waitukubuli.

Adin dropped us off at the entrance to the port at 4:45pm.  That was a little later than we hoped to return, but luckily there was no line to reboard the ship and we were back in our cabin a few minutes later.  This was my first opportunity to communicate with my family all day, and as soon as I reconnected to the ship’s wifi, I was bombarded with texts from my mom.  Her app said that our dinner reservation was for 5:20pm tonight, and she was confused because she thought I said I had made it for 6pm.  I ran over to her cabin and said that yes, I definitely saw our reservation was for 6pm tonight when we boarded the ship.  Remember when I mentioned on embarkation day that my biggest mistake was in not taking a screenshot of all of our reservations?  Well this was when it came back to bite me because she said she had already called the dining room and they wanted to see proof that we had a 6pm reservation.  I was livid.  I knew for a fact that we had a 6pm reservation on just this one night, and I had a strong feeling I knew when the change happened.  The hostess we spoke to on embarkation night insisted that she needed to fix all of our reservations to link our cabins so we would always be seated at the same table, and must have not looked closely at our reservations and assumed we wanted 5:20pm every night.  I would wager money that she is the one who messed this up for us.  

It was now 4:55pm and Jason and I both desperately needed showers to wash off all the types of water we had submerged our bodies in today.  I left my mom to try to fix our reservation and got in the shower.  By the time I got out, my mom called the phone line dedicated to helping passengers in suites, pled her case, and somehow she managed to fix things so that we could have the 6pm reservation.   That was a whole lot of stress that we really didn’t need!  I frantically finished drying my hair and getting dressed while Jason showered, and we all met out on my parents’ balcony to take a family photo with everyone dressed up nicely for New Year’s Eve.  

It’s too bad none of us packed a tripod so we could get a better angle for this photo!  I guess my nephew didn’t like taking a photo from this angle either!

The last sunset of 2025 featured cloudless skies and a perfect reflection of the sun on the water.

This was one of my favorite photos from the whole cruise:

We arrived at the Amalfi dining room promptly at 6pm, and our waiters greeted us with a smile as if nothing was amiss.  I’m not sure if they knew about the reservations fiasco, but they treated us like it was any other night.

Last year, when we entered the dining room on New Year’s Eve, there was a table of festive hats, tiaras, and noise makers.  I expected the same tonight, but we didn’t see anything when we walked in.  Jason even went back to the front of the dining room to double check that we hadn’t missed it, and he came back empty handed.  The waiters didn’t know anything about it either.  Hmm, that’s weird!  Maybe they aren’t giving out hats this year?

Tonight was listed as a “smart casual” dress code, but pretty much everyone we saw in the dining room was dressed formally for New Year’s Eve.  Even though it wasn’t officially a formal night, there was a special menu offered for dinner, featuring a few more premium options than the regular menu.

I ordered the lump crab cake and beef carpaccio appetizers, and the surf and turf entree.  Everything was delicious!

Another night, another bowl of pasta for this little boy:

I loved how they plated my dark chocolate mousse cake for dessert.

As we were finishing eating dinner, we noticed the people at a nearby table were wearing the same Princess hats and tiaras we were given last year.  We asked where they got them, and they said they were handing them out in Princess Live, so up we went!  On our way, we saw there were giant number balloons for 2026, so we stopped for another group photo.  

When we got to Princess Live, we couldn’t find any party hats, so we asked one of the crew who was working in that area, but she had no idea what we were talking about.  This was getting frustrating!  Jason was determined to find hats for us, so he went on a scavenger hunt.  He started at the Capri dining room, but they sent him to the Santorini dining room, and they suggested he look up on the Lido deck near the pool, and they sent him down to guest services.  It turned into a wild goose chase, but no one would tell him where to get the party hats!  Meanwhile, we kept seeing people wearing them, so we knew they had to be SOMEWHERE!  Just when he was about to give up, he saw one lonely hat sitting on the bar in Good Spirits.  He asked the people standing next to it and they said it was theirs but they didn’t want it and Jason could take it.  He asked where they got it from, and they said Princess Live, so maybe we just had bad timing and the hats were all given away before we got there?!

While Jason was running all over the ship, the rest of us hung out on deck 7 overlooking the people dancing below in the Piazza.

While we were nearby, I stopped by the Bellini Bar to pick up a Fellini, with St. Germain, Chambord, Prosecco, herbal butterfly tea, and orange bitters.

We were still in the dining room during the 7pm show, so we decided we would all attend the late show together.  We still had some time before the show started, but we decided to just go get seats early to make sure we could find 9 seats together.  Strangely enough, all week the shows were at 7pm and 9pm, but tonight’s late show was scheduled to start a half hour early at 8:30pm.  I have a feeling a lot of people didn’t realize there was a different schedule tonight because the theater was nearly empty!  These photos were taken at exactly 8:30pm (in fact, the lights dimmed before I could take a photo of the starboard side of the theater, but it was equally as empty)…

Tonight’s show featured the rock singer, Stephanie Hodgdon, who had performed a few nights earlier, but she sang a different set list tonight.

Stephanie explained that she had a boyfriend for around one year who she met while performing on the ships.  He is one of the singers in the production cast on the Emerald Princess, and he was here on the ship with us tonight.  He came out on stage and they sang a duet of Shallow, so that was really fun to watch.

The guitarist was featured for a solo during one of the songs:

For the big finale, Stephanie donned these iridescent wings with LED lights and danced across the stage.  Everyone loved this part, especially our kids!

When the show ended, we went back to the Vista Lounge for the Family New Year’s Eve Party, but when we arrived, there was no one there!  I guess this was meant to be a place for families to celebrate together, away from the crowds of adults, but the room was empty so our kids didn’t want to stay there.  The one good thing about it was that we finally found the mother load of party hats!!!

Now we were ready to celebrate New Year’s Eve!

We went up to the Lido pool, but it was still too early and the party hadn’t gotten started yet.

They were definitely set up and ready for a party, though!  The hot tub was filled with ice and bottles of champagne!

We hung out and let the kids dance for a few minutes, but we could tell Ian was exhausted so we left at 9:30pm to bring him back to the cabin to get ready for bed.  These unwelcome pieces of paper were waiting for us on our bed:

I knew we weren’t going to be in a rush to get off the ship at the end of the cruise, so I marked off the box requesting luggage tags for between 8 and 8:30am, and left it on our desk for the steward to collect in the morning.

We all changed into pajamas fairly quickly, but as usual, Ian was so riled up that he didn’t actually get in bed until 11:45pm.  At that point, I decided to stay awake long enough to see midnight, even though I was in bed and could barely keep my eyes open.  Even with our sound machine on, I could hear the ship’s horn blow at midnight!  I imagine everyone was having a great time at all the parties around the ship, but I was just as happy to be asleep minutes later after an exciting and adventurous day.

Proof I stayed up until midnight:

Today’s drinks total: 12

Up next: Barbados

I have been to St. Thomas on two prior cruises, in 2012 and 2015, and both times I spent the day at Sapphire Beach.  Ever since, I have known that if/when I return, I want to go to Coki Beach to try something new.  I have read countless reviews of people doing a Discover Scuba Diving course from a shop on Coki Beach, and it seemed like such a fun way to spend the day: take an open-air taxi from the port area to Coki Beach, take the course, and spend the rest of the day relaxing on the beach and snorkeling at our leisure.  We loved the Discover Scuba course we took in Cozumel on our 2019 cruise, where we did 2 dives off the boat, so I was curious to experience scuba from the beach.  As soon as we booked this cruise and I knew we were returning to St. Thomas, I contacted the Coki Dive Center to book our tour.  Imagine my surprise and disappointment when they informed me that they are going out of business and will not be operating tours anymore.  I was so upset!  This was back in January 2025, and they said they were closing up their shop on February 1.  I asked if any other company offered a Discover Scuba course from Coki Beach, but they said no.

Okay, well this is a huge island in the Caribbean with tons of infrastructure for tourism.  Surely there must be a different company who can offer us a Discover Scuba Diving course, right?!  I spent the next few weeks combing the internet for every dive shop I could find, but I kept running into the same conundrum.  The tours all started at 8am (2 hours before we were due to dock) or 1pm.  I was worried that a 1pm tour would cut it too close to get back to the ship on time since it wouldn’t end until 5pm (the tours were all 4 hours long), and all aboard would probably be at 5:30pm.  It seemed like these tours were more meant for people taking land vacations and staying overnight on the island so their timing was more flexible, but obviously that was not our situation.  

Once I had exhausted all of my options, I looked at the excursions offered by Princess to see if we should just book through the ship.  While Princess did offer one Discover Scuba tour, it cost over $200 per person, and the reviews were terrible, saying you only had 30 minutes for scuba in the 4 hour tour.  That seemed very expensive and not worth the money so I continued with my research.  I still wanted to go to Coki Beach so I decided to look into the options at Coral World Ocean Park.  This is an outdoor aquarium located right next to Coki Beach, with shark, sting ray, and sea turtle exhibits.  They also have lots of water-based activities, including swimming with dolphins and sea lions, a sea trek, and SNUBA.  We did a sea trek excursion in Moorea on our honeymoon cruise through French Polynesia.  It was fun, but I didn’t want to do it again quite yet.  I actually made a mental note about it because it is the kind of thing we can do with Ian when he gets just a little older.  

I have never done SNUBA before, so it sounded like something fun to do as it combined the ease of snorkeling with the depth obtained with scuba.  They don’t have a Discover Scuba course, so I thought SNUBA might be a good compromise.  The experience lasts 75 minutes, with 4 start times each day, so it was definitely possible for us with our time constraints.  I liked that they only allowed 4 people per group, so it was possible it would just be us booked, or at most there would be one other couple and the instructor.  I also liked that there wasn’t as much learning involved as compared to Discover Scuba, so more time would be spent in the water.  Another benefit was that I was able to book online using Viator for $102 per person, with free cancellation until 2 days before the tour, and the tickets included general admission to Coral World so we could check out their exhibits before or after our tour.  I opted for the 1pm tour, figuring we would take an open air taxi to Coki Beach and arrive around 11am, spend some time exploring the exhibits at Coral World, take our SNUBA excursion from 1-2:15pm, and then have some time to go snorkeling on Coki Beach before needing to head back to the ship.  

Oh, and in case you were wondering what Ian was doing today… my parents were kind enough to offer to watch Ian today so we could take this tour (since there would be no way for us to do something like this if we had Ian with us).  They planned to take Ian on the Sky Ride cable cars up to the top of Paradise Point, and my brother’s family ended up joining too.  That was the perfect excursion for my parents to do with Ian, and he had a great time.

Since we weren’t scheduled to dock until 10am, we were able to sleep in a little bit and my alarm was set for 7:30am.  I got up and got ready for the day, then I went out onto the balcony to check out the current view.  It was shaping up to be a beautiful day in St. Thomas!

When I went back inside the cabin, Jason was awake and getting dressed, but surprisingly, Ian was still asleep.  He hadn’t woken up yet by 8:30am, but we really needed to get going, so I had to do the unthinkable and wake him up.  That is never a pleasant experience, but at least we could snap him out of his typical morning funk with the promise of a fun day in the Caribbean!  

We got him dressed and packed up a day bag for Jason and myself, and a separate bag with Ian’s necessities to hand off to my parents, then we all went up to the buffet for breakfast at 9am.  Not surprisingly, it was insanely crowded with everyone trying to grab breakfast before the ship docked at 10am, but at least we were able to snag a table by the window with a beautiful view.

I loaded up my plate with lots of goodies, hoping to keep my belly full until we returned to the ship later this afternoon.  

When we finished eating, we dropped off Ian at camp at 9:45am.  My parents are late risers and weren’t planning to go to the Sky Ride until the afternoon, so our plan was to leave Ian at camp for the morning, and my parents would pick him up at 11:30am for a quick lunch before they got off the ship.  I told that to the staff at camp, and also that Jason and I were going ashore so if there were any problems, they should contact my parents, and she said it was no problem.  She gave me a beeper (as we always got when Ian was at camp), so I went back down to the cabin to hand over the beeper and Ian’s bag of necessities to my parents.  

I took a quick peek outside and it looked like we were docked in St. Thomas, promptly at 10am as scheduled.  I have always thought this was one of the most beautiful harbors in the Caribbean.

Jason and I grabbed our day bags and went down to mid-ship deck 4 to get off the ship.  We exited the gate at the end of the pier and were surprised to see taxis waiting right there for us.  I thought I remembered that the last time we were in St. Thomas, we had to walk down the street of stores to a main road to get the taxis.  There was a man in charge of telling people which taxi to take to which location, so at first we stood at the end of the long line of people waiting for a taxi.  It was nice that they had a sandwich board listing the prices for all the places you could go on the island, so there was no question about what it should cost and you didn’t have to worry about negotiating prices.

I started to second guess that we were at the right spot, so I left Jason in line and went up to the man to ask if this was where we got a taxi to Coki Beach.  It’s a good thing I asked because that whole line of people was actually just for Magen’s Bay.  He called over to the driver of a 12-passenger van and asked if there was space for 2 more.  The driver said yes, so I waved Jason to come join me.  The van was almost full, so we crawled into the last 2 seats at the back of the van.  It was very cramped back there, and the air conditioning barely worked, but at least we didn’t have to wait very long and we were on our way by 10:30am.

I knew from my research that the drive to Coki Beach should take about 20 minutes.  Unfortunately for us, this taxi was also stopping at Secret Harbor, the Red Hook Ferry, and Sapphire Beach, so it took 45 minutes for us to finally be dropped at Coki Beach.  The taxi cost us $14 per person because we had 2 people (it would have been $18 for 1 person).  I asked if it was necessary to schedule a time for the driver to pick us up later in the afternoon, but she said we wouldn’t have any trouble finding a taxi whenever we were ready to leave as there were always taxis waiting in the parking lot to drive people back to the ship.  I was a little confused on exactly where we were supposed to go, so I asked the driver.  She said to go to the left for Coki Beach and the right for Coral World.  Simple enough!

I went up to the ticket window to check in for our 1pm tour at 11:15am.  They had all the prices for all the activities listed on the window, and I noticed that our Snuba tour still cost the same $102 as we had paid a year in advance.

At first, the woman at the counter said that the 1pm tour was overbooked, so she was glad we were early so she could send us out on an earlier tour.  She said to fill out the safety waivers now, and that we should come back to her at 11:40am for an update.  Oooh, maybe we would end up on a private tour if they were sending us out early on a tour that wasn’t pre-scheduled!

We walked around the grounds of Coral World to see what they had to see. There were several pools with different animals where you could watch them swimming around.  First, we saw a sea turtle.  It was really hard to take a good photo from above the water, but I tried my best.

We spotted a rooster walking around the tables outside the cafe.  Maybe he was hoping to pick up some scraps for lunch?

Next, we saw a pool with sharks.  

The restaurant had a large open-air dining room, with a beautiful view over the water.

We could see back down towards the sea turtle pools from up there.

Continuing our walk, we saw the sting ray pool, with a very feisty sting ray who looked like he was trying to splash his way up onto the sidewalk!

There was also a bird enclosure with colorful lorikeets.

By then, it was nearing 11:40 when we were told to return to the check-in desk, so we made our way back to the front of Coral World.  On our way, we noticed this sign showing the schedule of presentations.

When we checked in again with the lady at the desk, she said the 1pm tour was no longer overbooked and we would keep our original timing.  I’m not sure what happened there, but that left us with an hour and 20 minutes to kill.  We decided to use this time to walk over to Coki Beach and go snorkeling from the shore.  We originally planned to do that after our excursion, but we had the time now, and we figured the snorkeling would be more impressive if we did it before the Snuba tour. 

There is a marked path from Coral World to Coki Beach, so we followed that until we found the stairs going down to the sand.  We could immediately see that it was a busy day at the beach, with tons of people relaxing on lounge chairs and swimming in the water.  That wasn’t surprising though considering it was nearly noon, and there were 2 other cruise ships besides us who docked earlier in the morning, so I’m sure these people had been here a while at this point.

We weren’t going to stay at the beach very long, so we didn’t want to rent a lounge chair.  Instead, we found a place to leave our bags and towels on some rocks under the trees at the back of the beach, pulled out our snorkel equipment, and walked down to the water.  I wasn’t really sure where the “good” snorkeling was on this beach, but a good rule of thumb is to stay near the rocks.

This looked like a good place to snorkel…

Unfortunately, as soon as I walked into the water, I could feel that the current was really strong this morning.  It was approaching high tide and the waves were coming in strong, pushing me back towards the shore.  It was very choppy, and all the sand was churned up making the water too murky to see anything.  I put my head under water and immediately regretted it because all it did was leave my hair messy and wet, but there was nothing to see.  I could feel myself getting tired really quickly, and I realized that I had better quit now and conserve my energy or I would be too tired to enjoy our Snuba tour.  Jason wanted to swim out further and try to see if there were any fish near the rocks, but I had a feeling it wouldn’t be worth the effort so I just stayed back at the shore and kept an eye on him.  A few minutes later, he came back and confirmed my suspicions that the conditions were not good for snorkeling today.  This got me worried because if the water was this churned up at the beach, what visibility would we have just a few hundred feet away on our Snuba tour??

We probably stayed at the beach for a total of 20 minutes, then grabbed our bags and walked back to Coral World.  At the top of the stairs that led down to the beach, we spotted this convenient tub of water to clean the sand off our feet.  I thought it was funny that they wrote “not for feet” on the tub meant to return rented snorkel equipment.

As we re-entered Coral World, we spotted a few iguanas basking in the sun.

This guy looked like he was smiling at me…

We walked down to check out the other sea turtle pool, and noticed there were two turtles swimming in there.  Coral World has a rehabilitation center for sick and injured turtles, and they also care for turtles who cannot be released back into the wild, so I’m not sure which category these turtles fell under.

I have seen photos of this building hundreds of times in other people’s reviews.  I always thought this was where they had the under-water viewing windows to look at the fish swimming in the bay, so I was really looking forward to checking it out.  At one point in our planning, we suggested that my parents bring the kids here to Coral World to check out the exhibits while we did our Snuba tour, and perhaps they would even see us swimming through the windows.  They decided that was more of a journey than they wanted to embark on with the kids, so they stuck to the Sky Ride as it was close to the ship.

We walked out to the bridge and over to the round building, but we couldn’t figure out how to get inside.  There was a door, but it was locked.  We overheard someone nearby talking about it and they said the building was closed for construction right now.  That was a huge disappointment because this is a unique exhibit (the only one of its kind in the Caribbean!), and is meant to be a highlight of visiting Coral World.  Our tickets to Coral World were included in the price of our Snuba tour, but I would be really upset if I paid the $29 admission fee for just seeing the exhibits and found out afterwards that this place was closed for construction.  I also found it odd and disappointing that they would do construction during the peak tourist season.

Walking back along the bridge, we noticed these rafts out in the water connected to blue tubes, and realized those are used for the Snuba tour!  The prior group must have been out swimming right now, and we were getting excited knowing that it would be our turn next.

We also saw a ton of fish in the water over here, so we hoped they stuck around long enough for us to see them when we got in the water.

We still had some time before our tour, so we walked over to the Caribbean Reef Encounter.  When I first walked inside the building, I was confused because it looked like the photos I had seen of the undersea observatory, but this was not in the middle of the water- it was surrounded by land!  Then I realized there was a wall behind the rocks so this was an enclosed aquarium meant to simulate being in the ocean.  This is the description from the Coral World website:

An 80,000 gallon coral reef aquarium encircles you as you enter the air-conditioned Caribbean Reef Encounter. The aquarium is open to the elements, which means the hundreds of reef animals that are housed here receive natural day and moonlight and experience rain just like a natural reef would. This is an important factor in keeping the many corals and sponges alive.  Water is pumped in at a rate of 15,000 gallons per hour. It is made of concrete with 12, three inch thick acrylic windows for 360 degree viewing. This continuous supply of unfiltered sea water allows the living corals and sponges to grow naturally, while offering visitors a most attractive decor.

It’s hard to tell from this photo, but this fish was huge!  He just stayed in that one spot and didn’t move the whole time we were in there.  I’m not sure if he was sick, sleeping, or just enjoying the warmth from the sun, but either way, it made it easy to capture a photo of him!

When we exited the aquarium, we saw signs pointing towards the dolphin sanctuary.  I assume this is where they do the swimming with dolphins tours, but there weren’t any tours happening while we were back there.  It was a really large enclosure with a ton of space for the dolphins to swim around.  There was a long shaded walkway going out across the water so we could walk alongside the dolphins as they swam and jumped.  There was a staff member out there to answer any questions, and had we not needed to get back to the front desk for our tour, we could have spent a long time out here.

It was nearly 1pm, so we walked back to the front desk to check in (again) for our tour.  Our guide came over to find us and one other man who was also booked on the tour.  I’m not really sure what ended up happening that they thought it was overbooked, but the maximum number of participants for this Snuba tour was 4 people, so if anything, we were underbooked.  No complaints about that!  Our guide’s name was Glenn and he escorted us up a flight of stairs to an open-air “classroom” located above the front desk office.

Glenn told us to take a seat at the table, and he explained a few safety tips.  The other man had never done anything like this, and we could tell he was a little nervous about the experience.  We felt more confident knowing we had gone scuba diving before, even if it was nearly 7 years ago.  It did help to know the concepts and the hand signals to communicate under water, but even if we had no prior experience, Glenn was great at explaining everything we would need to know for Snuba.  He showed us how to use the regulator, how to clear our mask in case water got in, and how to equalize our ears.  One big difference from scuba was that we were tethered to the raft, so Glenn said that if we needed to go back up to the surface for any reason, we should pull ourselves up using our oxygen line.  That way, the raft would be there when we reached the surface and we would have something to hold onto while we made our adjustments.  I will say it was nice not having to stress about all the skills we were tested on for scuba diving, and this felt more relaxed and easier to learn.

When he was done with all the instructions, Glenn got us fitted for fins, a regulator, and weights.  He had eye masks we could borrow, but Jason and I opted to use our own masks from home since we knew they fit our face and did not leak.  Glenn offered to spray our masks with an anti-fog solution, so we let him do that since we usually just use the spit method and assumed his solution must work better. **Foreshadowing…**  

Before we left the classroom area, Glenn told us we could stash our belongings in a large plastic box that would be safe while we were out in the water.  One thing I was really worried about before this tour was if I would be allowed to use my camera to take photos.  The online registration information says that no personal cameras are permitted, and several of the TripAdvisor reviews said they were not allowed to use their own cameras and had to purchase photos taken by the guide.  Glenn did have a GoPro and took tons of photos throughout our time underwater, but I was thrilled that he said it was no problem for me to take my own camera and take my own photos throughout the dive!  For me, half of the fun is being able to document the experience from my own eyes, so I knew I would have more fun now that I was allowed to take my own camera.  

Once we were all suited up, we carried our equipment down the stairs and across the bridge, then down a few more stairs to the staging area.  This was underneath the building that was closed for construction.  We walked down a few metal stairs into the water, then sat down to put on our fins and mask.  While we did that, Glenn went out into the water to set up the rafts for our oxygen supply.

Glenn told us to sit down on the platform under water and to wait for him to suit up and join us, so I put my regulator in my mouth and sat down where I was told.  I was immediately surrounded by literally hundreds of fish!  Holy cow!  This was crazy!!  These must have been the fish we saw from up on the bridge an hour ago.  After the tour, Glenn told us these were called Horse-Eye Jacks because of their large eyes.  

I wasn’t wearing my watch, but it felt like we were sitting there a long time.  I kept floating up to the surface so I had to hold on to the bar and push myself down on the seat.  In the meantime, I just kept myself entertained by taking photos.  I was already so happy to have my own camera with me because Glenn wasn’t with us to capture all these fish since he was still busy getting set up.

When Glenn finally joined us, he instructed the other man to follow him, but then it seemed like he was getting him set up or put in place so I didn’t follow.  It wasn’t really clear what he wanted me to do but after another minute, I just went for it and swam down.  Glenn had warned us the swells were high the last few days.  He said it calmed down a little now, but the visibility wasn’t great.  We could see about 15 feet out, but beyond that was murky.  

Most of the area where we swam had a sandy bottom with the occasional rocks and algae here and there.  There were relatively few fish, and honestly there really wasn’t much to see.  I had always heard great things about the reef near Coki Beach and Coral World, so I’m not sure what happened but we did expect to see more down there.  Maybe we are just jaded because we had such an amazing experience on our prior scuba dive in Cozumel?

Glenn seemed to spend a lot of time helping the other man.  I don’t know exactly what was happening, but maybe he was having trouble equalizing his ears?  Jason and I just went off and explored on our own, making sure to keep an eye on Glenn so we wouldn’t lose sight of him in the murky water.  

Jason loved hovering close to the bottom of the water.  I, on the other hand, struggled with buoyancy issues.  One minute, I felt like I was sinking to the bottom of the ocean, and the next, I was floating up to the top.  I was afraid to get scratched on the coral and rocks, so I tried to hover somewhere mid-way down.  Glenn later told us we had gone down to a depth of 20 feet (another big difference from discover scuba, which can dive down to 40 feet because you aren’t tethered to the raft at the surface).  

I handed my camera to Jason to take a few photos of me, and he kept going down to the bottom to take the picture so I look like I am just snorkeling at the surface, but I assure you I was definitely deeper than it appears!

Does anyone else think this looks like a recreation of Nirvana’s Nevermind album cover?  Wearing a bathing suit, of course!

I signalled to Jason to adjust his angle, and I think this photo looks much better…

Some more Horse-Eye Jacks came out to find us.

At some point, an air bubble got trapped inside Jason’s rash guard, so it looked like he had a fish caught in there that was trying to escape!

A mid-snuba selfie… notice that my mask is starting to fog.

We met back up with Glenn and he swam backwards to capture a few photos of us, so I took a photo of him!

He spotted a ruby brittle star and swam down to pick it up.  

He handed it to Jason to hold, but Jason dropped it before he could hand it to me.  Bummer!

We saw one giant brain coral with some interesting bright blue coral growing on its side.

I could tell we were nearing the end of the tour, so I swam up to Glenn and signaled to him to see if he could take my camera to take some photos of Jason and I together.  I had asked him about that back in the classroom and he said it was no problem, so I handed him my camera.  Unfortunately, these came out horrible!  I think the sun was behind us, so there was bad lighting, and the water was so murky you can’t see any coral or fish or anything in the water.  At least it shows we were on the excursion together, but really the photos are disappointing.  

You can see in that photo that by the end of the tour, my goggles were so foggy I could barely see anything.  I guess Glenn’s magic spray didn’t work so well after all!  I probably should have just swum back up to the surface to remove the goggles and wipe them clean, but I didn’t think of it at the time.

We followed Glenn back to the starting point and onto the swim platform to remove our gear.  Based on the time stamps from my photos, we were swimming for exactly 30 minutes.  Given the sparse and murky conditions, I thought that was the perfect amount of time and I was ready to finish up (especially since my goggles were too foggy to see anything at the end anyway).  Overall, I loved the idea of Snuba.  It had all of the benefits of scuba diving with going as low to the ocean floor as you want, without the stress of taking the class and learning the skills.  I wouldn’t hesitate to book a Snuba tour again in the future, but hopefully it would be somewhere with better visibility and marine life.

Glenn led us back across the bridge and up the stairs to the classroom where we could retrieve our bags and towels to dry off.  He said we could purchase the photos he took from the gift shop in a few minutes.  It was now 2:15pm, so the tour lasted exactly the hour and 15 minutes that was advertised.  We tipped Glenn and thanked him for a fun and memorable tour, then went back down the stairs in search of a bathroom to change into dry clothes.  We stopped in the gift shop to look at the photos Glenn took, but decided against buying them since they weren’t much different than the ones I took on my camera.

We considered going back to Coki Beach, but we were tired and hungry and thought it sounded more fun to just go back to the ship for a “free” lunch and to make use of our drink package.  We walked out to the front parking lot and found where the taxi drivers were hanging around.  We asked if we could get a taxi back to the cruise port, and they pointed us to an open-air taxi that already had a few people inside.  We climbed in, and then waited for 20 minutes until all the other seats were filled.  The ride back cost the same $14 per person, but it only took us 15 minutes (versus the 45 minutes it took us to get to the beach!).  On the way, we saw a beautiful view overlooking the bay, and we could see all 3 of the ships in St. Thomas today (the third ship is at the other port in the distance on the far right of the photo)…

The taxi dropped us off on the street with all the stores, so we had to walk all the way back to our ship.  

I am sure they do this in hopes that we will go shopping, but we didn’t really want any souvenirs, so we just headed back to the ship.  At least the walk was easy and there was a sidewalk the whole way.

We were back onboard around 3:30pm and went straight up to the Lido pool bar for a drink.  As soon as we entered the pool area, we ran into my sister in law and my niece.  It was really amazing how many times we ran into my family unexpectedly during this cruise, especially considering there were over 4000 passengers on board!  I ordered a Captain’s Bounty, with Bacardi Spiced rum, Bacardi Limon rum, Malibu coconut rum, Kraken Black Spiced rum, lemon, pineapple, and coca cola.  I had avoided this drink earlier in the cruise fearing it would be too strong, but I actually really liked it and ordered it several times throughout the rest of the cruise.  We took our drinks over to where my brother was sitting near the pool, and chatted with them for an hour.  I was starving, so I grabbed a slice of pizza for a late lunch, not wanting to eat so much that I’d spoil my dinner.

I love how they have this glass floor area extending out over the side of the ship.  I assume people with a fear of heights aren’t as fond of it, but I always thought it was fun to check out the view of what was down below.

At some point I texted my mom to let her know we were back on board and find out how the day went with Ian.  She said they had a great day and Ian did a ton of walking to and from the cable cars, so he was napping now.  When planning our day, I didn’t know what time Jason and I would be back on the ship, so we planned that my parents would take Ian to dinner at the buffet and drop him at camp before they went to dinner at the suites dining room.  Now that we were back early, I double checked that she was still okay with that plan, and she was, so Jason and I decided we would use our night of freedom to have dinner at O’Malley’s Pub.  We went back to the cabin at 4:20pm for quick showers and to get changed for the evening, being extra careful not to wake Ian in the process!

Mission accomplished, we got down to O’Malley’s just before 5pm, when the musicians were scheduled to start their set.  We noticed the pub gets very crowded when they are performing, so we purposely got there a little early in hopes we could snag a table, and it worked!  The duo was performing from 5-7pm, so we settled in for the show.  

We weren’t quite ready to eat dinner yet, so we started with a round of drinks.  Continuing to work my way down the special cocktails list, I ordered the Lucky Charm, with Meili vodka, St. Germain Liqueur, melon, lime, and lemon seltzer.

We were seated in one of the booths along the windows.  They had a partition from the top of the booth all the way up to the ceiling, making the table feel very private and cozy.  I really loved the decor of the partition and the decanters used as light fixtures.

We really enjoyed listening to the O’Malley’s Duo.  They played a mix of traditional Irish music and modern music by Irish singers.  The pub filled in soon after they started playing, and most people stayed for their whole 2 hour set, so we were glad we came early enough to get a seat or we wouldn’t have been able to eat dinner here.

Around 5:30pm, we decided we’d better order our dinner so we would have time to finish eating before we needed to reunite with Ian at 7pm.  Neither of us were particularly hungry after our late lunch, so we decided to share one of our casual dining meals.  We already planned to share a meal at Gigi’s later in the week, so this was a good use for that one extra meal.  Jason ordered the Irish Onion soup and I ordered the drunken mussels, and we asked the waiter if he could bring both out at the same time.

Unfortunately, this is where things took a turn for the worse.  Service was incredibly slow and our food took 45 minutes to be served.  When it finally did come out, we were disappointed to see that both dishes were about half the size that they were last year.  

Last year, the soup was served in a large bowl with several pieces of cheese layered across the top, versus this year it was just a small cup with one single piece of cheese. 

My mussels were also literally half the portion size of last year.  This year, there was just a thin layer of mussels at the bottom of the pot.  Everything still tasted good, it was just disappointing to see the obvious cutbacks.

They brought out our food at 6:15pm, and we had to meet up with the rest of my family at the theater by 7pm, so we felt very rushed to eat.  The waiter apologized, and we asked if he could bring out our desert ASAP.  It would be fine if the dessert sat on the table until we were ready to eat it, but at least then we knew it wouldn’t come so late that we had to skip it.  Sure enough, it came out about 3 minutes later.

For dessert, we shared a slice of the six-layer Guinness chocolate cake.  Last year, we had a brownie for dessert that was so dry it was inedible, but this cake was moist and delicious.  Funny enough, we noticed they removed that brownie from the dessert options.  I actually just looked back at my photos from last year’s cruise and that is the only change on the whole menu!  I’m not sure if that change is just an Enchanted thing or if it is fleet-wide, but we weren’t surprised to see it no longer offered.  

We finished our meal just a few minutes before 7pm, so I texted my brother to ask where they were seated in the theater and let him know we were on our way.  We found them with seconds to spare before the lights dimmed to start the show.  Tonight’s show was a magician named Jamie Raven, and we thought Ian would enjoy the performance so we kept him with us instead of sending him to camp after dinner.  

Jamie was really more of a comedian than a magician as he only did a few tricks over the course of his 45-minute long show.  He spent half the act talking about how he got 2nd place on Britain’s Got Talent, but we honestly didn’t understand why considering how little magic he actually did in the show.  At one point, he picked out a child from the audience to help with his act.  The little boy he picked was seated in the front row, so perhaps that’s why he picked him, but it was obvious that the child was very shy and uncomfortable with participating, and he didn’t respond to any of Jamie’s questions so Jamie had to keep prompting him.  This went on and on for about 15 minutes.  What Jamie should have done was to realize the kid was uncomfortable, thank him for his help, then pick a different child for the rest of the bit.  It was just incredibly awkward to watch since that poor boy looked miserable being the center of attention.  On the bright side, Ian and my niece and nephew all loved the show and had a great time clapping and cheering from their seats.

After the show ended, we went down to the Piazza for something called “Princess Pops.”  We weren’t really sure what to expect, but apparently this is a very new activity and the Enchanted was only the 2nd ship in Princess’ fleet to have this.  It was half show/performance as the production show dancers performed for a few songs, and half dance party as we were encouraged to dance to the fun pop songs from the last 4 decades.  We had so much fun watching the dances and singing along, and the kids loved getting to dance with all the adults.

I went over to Good Spirits to pick up one of my favorite drinks on the ship: Vanilla Sky, with vanilla vodka, triple sec, fresh pineapple, orgeat syrup, lime, and agave.  It is part of the special menu themed for different countries that is only offered after 4pm.

When I returned to the group, I found Ian sitting on his cousin, who was sitting on my brother.  It made me so happy to see them getting along so well!

Shortly after that, Ian started getting cranky, so we took that as our cue to head back to the cabin and get ready for bed.

Today’s drinks total:  14

Up next: New Year’s Eve in Dominica

Given that we went to bed at midnight last night, I was surprised to hear Ian declare at 7:25am that he was done sleeping.  So much for sleeping in on the sea day!  Jason’s plan was to do a long run on a treadmill in the gym, so he went off to do that while I got Ian dressed and took him up to the buffet for breakfast.  I guess most other passengers slept in this morning because it was not too crowded when we arrived at 8:30am and we had no problem getting a table by the window.  I forgot to take a photo, but I had lox and cream cheese on a croissant, a hard boiled egg, and some fruit, and Ian had a waffle.  I did manage to take a photo of my breakfast dessert: a cinnamon bun with delicious cream cheese frosting!

After breakfast, I dropped Ian at camp at 9:30am, then I went to the Piazza for the fruit and vegetables carving demo.  Honestly, it was a little boring because the lady hosting the event from the activities team didn’t want to distract the people working with sharp knives (for obvious reasons!), so she couldn’t interview them or ask any questions.  We basically just watched them work and then had an opportunity to come closer to see the finished product at the end.  I will say it was impressive that they created such intricate designs in such a short time!  I think they spent about 15 minutes carving the fruit and vegetables, and each of the 3 people made two creations.

Two men with top hats:

A penguin with palm trees:

A happy face (with an impressive number of teeth!), and some tropical trees:

Two birds on the left, and two fish on the right:

I left the Piazza around 10:30am and went back up to the buffet for a little bite to eat.  I settled on a slice of chocolate and vanilla marbled pound cake and brought it out to the Lido pool area where I ran into my sister in law.  We sat at a table and chatted for a bit, and then my mom and brother found us using the Medallion app.  I really do love that feature on Princess ships, and found it even more helpful on this cruise with 8 other people who I wanted to keep track of.  Instead of always texting each other to ask where someone was, I could just check in the app and find out for myself!  We hung out together around the pool until 11:45am when we left to pick up the kids at camp (my niece and nephew were up there too).  

Jason and I had arranged to meet up at the Amalfi dining room for lunch, so after I got Ian at camp, I took him downstairs and got a table for the 3 of us.  At first, they wanted to seat us in the middle of a banquet at the front of the dining room, but Ian wanted to sit near a window, so they switched us to a table all the way in the back of the dining room with a great view of the wake.  Ian was thrilled, and a happy Ian is always better than the alternative, so it was a win win!

As soon as we sat down, I ordered food for Ian.  He wanted spaghetti and meatballs, so I ordered him the kids pasta with red sauce plus the Mediterranean beef and pork meatballs from the adult menu.  I held off on ordering my food until Jason joined us a few minutes later, but I asked the waiter to just bring out Ian’s food whenever it was ready.  This is the face of a boy who loved his lunch:

At some point, Jason joined us and we ordered our meals.  I ordered the fried calamari appetizer, the adult mac and cheese (with no paprika!), and the double chocolate tart for dessert.  

I wished I had held off on that mid-morning snack because this was a huge lunch and everything was delicious.  I did manage to finish all of the calamari (because I would never let any calamari go to waste!), but I only ate half the mac and cheese and half the dessert, and gave the rest to Jason.

After lunch, Jason took Ian back to the cabin so they both could take a nap.  I saw that arts and crafts was scheduled for 2pm, so I texted the group to see if anyone else wanted to join.  Today’s craft was making paper flowers, and my mom and my niece both wanted to do it too.  I had nothing else going on, so I went down to the Santorini dining room a little early to save us a table, and then my brother, niece, and mom joined me when they were ready.  Two ladies from the activities staff showed up right at 2pm, but then they needed to hand out the supplies and make their sample flowers.  We hadn’t started the project yet by 2:20pm, and my brother and I started getting antsy.  We had planned to do the craft quickly, then go over to O’Malley’s Pub for the Musical Spoons activity at 2:30pm.  We decided it just made more sense for us to skip making the paper flowers, so we left my mom and my niece to make their flowers and we went over to the pub to get seats for Musical Spoons.  

Looking back at the paper copy of the Patter, I don’t see Musical Spoons listed, so this must have been a last-minute addition to the activities on the app.  I’m so glad we noticed it because it was one of the most fun things we did on the ship!  When we got to O’Malley’s, the two musicians who played there each night were talking to one of the activities staff.  No other passengers were there, so we clarified that we were at the right place, and they said we were and that we should pick a table and order a drink!  You don’t have to tell me twice!!  I really liked the specialty cocktails on the O’Malley’s menu, so my plan was to work my way down the list throughout the cruise.  I started with the Raspberry-ing, made with Absolut Raspberry, Orange Liqueur, Cranberry, and Lime.

Once most of the tables were full, they handed out our musical “spoons”.  I thought we would actually be using real spoons like from the dining room, but these were wood instruments.  They explained that originally, the working-class Irish people played real spoons because that’s all that they had access to, but that these instruments were more commonly used nowadays because they are easier to use.

The singer from the duo explained the two kinds of beats common to Irish music (4/4 and 3/6, if I recall correctly), and he taught us how to use our spoons to tap along to the beat.  Once we were all comfortable with that, the banjo player played a melody and we were tasked with guessing which beat it was and playing along with him.  They did this for several songs and the class lasted about 30 minutes.  

My brother and I had so much fun and we asked if it would be offered again later in the cruise so we could bring the kids.  They said the activities director was trying to schedule a second class but they didn’t know for sure if or when it would happen.  We kept checking all week, but never saw it on the schedule again.  

Just as the class was wrapping up, my mom and niece came over to join us after finishing their paper flowers.  My mom said the instructions were hard to follow, and that she only knew what to do because she has made paper flowers before.  My 8-year-old niece found it frustrating and needed a lot of help to complete her flower.  I don’t think the activity was intended to be self-taught, but maybe the girls leading the class just didn’t know how to make the flowers correctly.  My mom ended up helping my niece make her flower, and they both kept them on display in their cabins for the rest of the cruise.

I checked in with Jason at 3pm when we finished Musical Spoons and he said that Ian was still napping.  It took Ian a while to settle down and fall asleep, so we didn’t want to wake him until he slept a little longer.  I snuck back into the cabin to shower and get ready for formal night, and that gave Jason some time to leave the cabin and explore the ship.  

Ian woke up around 5pm, giving us just enough time to change him into his formal night outfit.  Prior to the cruise, my parents, brother, and I all talked about some coordinated outfits we could wear to take group photos during the cruise.  We decided tonight we would all wear blue for the first formal night, which was easy for my family since we wore these exact outfits on our Alaska cruise this summer.  When we took a photo outside the dining room that night, someone walked down the stairs right as we took the photo, so I knew I wanted a re-do tonight.

Then we took a photo with the whole group.  I didn’t realize it at the time, but Ian was totally off center and he should have gone next to my niece to balance it out.  I’m sure there’s some new AI photo editor that could fix the problem… seems like a project for another day!

The lighting outside the dining room was really harsh so it was hard to capture a good photo, but we tried again in a different spot…

Once we were all satisfied with our photo, my parents left to eat dinner in the suites section of the Capri dining room, and my brother’s family and my family entered the Amalfi dining room.  We told the hostess it would only be 7 of us at dinner tonight, and she said it was fine if we still sat at our usual table.  The waiters removed 2 of the chairs and now we had plenty of space to pull in our chairs and avoid bumping elbows with our neighbor.

Escargots is always my favorite appetizer on a cruise, so I was thrilled to see it on tonight’s menu. 

I also ordered the beef carpaccio appetizer.

I tried something a little out of my norm and ordered the halibut entree.  I think Jason and I intended to share the spinach ricotta ravioli, but when the entrees came to the table, we realized neither of us ordered it!  Oops!  That’s okay, we still had plenty of food and left with stuffed bellies.

When we all finished eating our entrees, we decided to skip dessert in the dining room because the adults were already full, and we knew we could grab something for the kids much faster if we just went upstairs to the buffet.  We ended up getting some soft serve ice cream for Ian, and he gobbled it up before I even had a chance to take a photo.

I left Jason to watch Ian finish his ice cream and take him to camp when they opened at 7.  I went down to deck 7 to the Bellini Bar for a Bellini Classico with Absolut Citron, Prosecco, and peach puree. 

I took my drink to-go and I brought it to Princess Live to get seats for the 7pm Broadway showtunes trivia.  We had to divide and conquer because I didn’t want to miss the first question from trivia while dropping Ian at camp, but as it turned out, trivia started a few minutes late and Jason arrived with time to spare.

This was my favorite trivia theme of the cruise as I love Broadway musicals and I had a feeling I would do pretty well.  

This was a musical trivia where they played the song and you had to write down what show it was from.  We started out really strong, but then there were a few obscure songs from musicals I thought I knew well (Mamma Mia, for one), so we only got 13 out of 21 songs correct.  The winning team somehow got all 21 songs correct, which left us questioning if they cheated.  There’s no prizes for winning (at least as far as I could see), so I’m not sure why they would be motivated to cheat, and maybe they really did know all of the songs.  Either way, we had fun playing along.

After trivia ended, we had some time before the next activity so Jason went to the bar to get us a few drinks.  My parents texted that they finished dinner and asked what we were doing.  I told them we were waiting for the next activity at Princess Live, so they came to join us.

The 8pm activity was a game show called Yes/No.  

We didn’t know what to expect, but this game turned out to be very funny.  The concept was that volunteers went on stage and were questioned by the cruise director for 3 minutes.  The only rule was they couldn’t say the words yes or no (including in foreign languages).  It sounded easy, but some people got out in as little as 15 seconds.  Some people did pretty well and lasted over 2 minutes, but either way, it was a lot of fun.  I wish we had known what the game entailed because we totally would have signed up my dad to play without telling him, and then watched him squirm as they called his name to go on stage.  What a missed opportunity!!

We left the Yes/No game a few minutes early to have time to walk up to the theater and get seats for the 9pm show.  Tonight’s show featured rock and roll singer Stephanie Hodgdon.  She was a fantastic performer and all of us enjoyed the show, including my parents!

The show ended at 9:50pm, so we had to run across deck 7 to the aft elevators to get to camp and pick up Ian before 10pm.  It was worth the extra effort though because attending the late show allowed us to make better use of our evening on the ship and maximize the number of activities we did.  After that, we all went back to the cabin to rest up for tomorrow.

Today’s drinks total: 15

Up next: St. Thomas

Do you want to know something crazy?  With all of my cruises and all of the port stops I have made along the way, I have never been to a cruise line’s private island.  For whatever reason, none of my cruises have stopped at private islands, and I’ve never even been to the Bahamas before.  I was really looking forward to seeing what it was like, especially knowing that Princess honors their drink packages on their private island!  With all of the expensive excursions we had booked for the rest of the cruise, it was nice knowing that today could be totally free (or at least totally covered by our cruise fare).  

My vision for today was that each cabin in our group would get off the ship at their leisure and we’d magically find each other in some central spot on the island (hopefully with the assistance of the Medallion location tracker if it worked ashore).  A slight wrench in the plans came when I realized that Princess Cay does not have a pier for the ships to tie up and dock at, so we would need to take a tender to shore.  My parents’ suite included priority access to the tenders whenever they wanted to go ashore.  We doubted we would be allowed to mooch off their perks, especially since they were likely to be the last of the 3 cabins to be ready to go ashore with them being relatively late risers.  My brother and I decided our families would meet up and take the tender together so the kids could play on the beach, and my parents would join us when they were ready.

Despite his 9pm bedtime, Ian woke us up at 7am this morning.  I considered telling him to go back to sleep, but instead I just got up, got both of us dressed, and took him upstairs to the buffet for breakfast while Jason slept in a little later.  I have sort of figured out the logistics of managing taking Ian to the buffet when it’s just the two of us:  I take 2 empty plates and keep them stacked together, and put all of our food onto one plate, then when we sit down at the table, I divide it up into separate plates.  This would have been a lot easier to manage if Princess didn’t use such extremely heavy plates though!  I understand they want them to be durable, but plastic plates are durable and weigh a fraction of what these ceramic plates weighed!

We grabbed a table next to the window to admire the view while we ate.  In the distance, I noticed a cruise ship docked at an island.  It was only 8am at this point, and we weren’t due to arrive at Princess Cays for another hour, so I assumed it was a ship from a different cruise line docked at a private island adjacent to Princess Cays.  

One of the waiters stopped at our table to ask if we wanted coffee, water, or juice, and I asked him about that ship.  He said it was another Princess ship at Princess Cay.  That didn’t sound correct to me because firstly, that ship was docked and I already knew Princess Cay does not have a dock, and secondly, I had looked up the cruise ship schedule for all of our ports and this was the one time I knew we would not have any other ships in port with us.  

As we got closer, I saw the ship had 2 red funnels, which meant it definitely was not a Princess ship.  When we were sailing past it, I could clearly see the Mickey heads on the 2 funnels, so now I knew it was a Disney ship and they were docked at their own private island!  Whew!  I hoped that meant that my research was correct and we would have Princess Cay all to ourselves today.

When we finished eating, we went up to deck 17 for a better view of the Disney ship.

While we were up there, Jason texted me that he was awake, so we met him back down in the buffet.  We ran into my brother’s family, so we all sat together while they ate breakfast.  My brother did not want to deal with waiting in line for tender tickets, so he wanted to stay on the ship a little longer and get off when the initial rush died down.  I didn’t see any purpose in twiddling my thumbs on the ship, so I said I would get tender tickets for my cabin, and we would go ashore first and find seats for the group, then my brother planned to find us a little later.

As instructed on the information left in our cabin, we went down to the Sushi Bar on Deck 6 to get tickets for the tender.  Only 1 person from each group had to be there to get however many tickets they needed, so Jason took Ian back to the cabin to grab our beach bags.  When I got to deck 6, there was already a line of people extending from the sushi bar down to the mid-ship elevators, but it moved quickly.  I watched as they handed the last tickets for tender 5 to the person in front of me, and then gave me 3 tickets to tender 6.  They instructed me to wait in the Piazza on deck 5 until they called my tender number, so I went downstairs to find some empty chairs and texted Jason where he should meet me.  

As it played out, we did not have to wait very long so it was a good thing that Jason and Ian were quick to find me!  Ten minutes later, there was an announcement over the loudspeaker that we were safely anchored in the bay and tickets numbered 1 through 6 could proceed down to deck 4 to board the awaiting tenders.  I wasn’t expecting them to call 6 tenders all at once!  We were already sitting right near the mid-ship elevators, so we grabbed our bags, walked down the mid-ship stairs one level, and boarded what must have been the first tender of the day because we happened to be sitting at the right spot.  

Last night, Cruise Director Tee said the tender ride would take 25 to 30 minutes, so we found seats inside the boat, prioritizing shade over getting a good photo of the ship.  It took a few minutes for the tender to fill up, and then we were on our way.

I’m not sure what kind of clock Tee uses, but that tender ride took exactly 8 minutes!  I should have known it wouldn’t take that long because I could see we were anchored very close to the island.  Maybe he meant it would take up to 30 minutes from the time you stepped foot on the tender until you got off at the island?!  

Once we were off the tender, we turned left and started walking, hoping to find a map or something to guide us to where we should go.  We never saw a map, but we did find an information desk.  I asked if there was an area that was good for children to play, and she said to just keep walking and we would eventually see the playground on our right.  Since we had never been here before, we thought that was vague.  We didn’t want to get lost, but as we started walking, we realized why she was so vague.  There is basically one long sidewalk that spans the width of the beach, so you really can’t get lost!  We started walking in search of a place to set up camp for the day.

As we walked, we saw tons of lounge chairs on our left side lining the beach, and then we found the children’s play area on the right side where the lady said it would be.  There was a small swimming pool with a few lounge chairs with umbrellas, but there weren’t very many of them and it looked like those were meant for parents whose kids were actively swimming at that time.

Next to the pool, there was a large playground that looked like a lot of fun for the kids and we decided we would come back here later in the day when my brother’s family joined us so Ian would have kids to play with.

There was also a separate shaded area with adirondack chairs and giant foam pieces to build and play with.  Ian actually had those same blue foam pieces at his daycare from when he was younger, so he was familiar with them.

We decided not to set up camp at the play area, and kept walking along the path to find our perfect spot for the day.  We wanted to get further down, away from where the tenders drop you off, in hopes it wouldn’t be as crowded.  We saw the place where they would serve lunch later in the day.  Just behind that were lots of big picnic tables under shade structures, which created a shadow over the nearby loungers.  This seemed like a good spot for us, but what sealed the deal was when we saw the lagoon!  The beach in this area was protected by a jetty, and that created a lagoon with very calm water.  It was perfect for the kids to play and swim, and we could easily see them from the nearby lounge chairs.

When we arrived, there was hardly anyone in this section of the island, and it really felt like we had our own private beach.   We found 5 lounge chairs in the shade, so we reserved those plus one of the picnic tables right next to the loungers, and decided this would be our spot for the day.  The Coconut Beach Bar was right next to our chairs, so I texted this photo to my brother and parents so they would know where to find us.

Once we were all set up, I left Jason and Ian to play on the beach while I walked around a little further into the island to make sure we really did find the best possible spot and that there wasn’t something better that we hadn’t seen yet.

After I passed a few more tents with picnic tables for lunch, I got to a section of beach with cabanas and sunbeds that were available to rent through the shore excursions desk.

That seemed like the end of the island, so I turned around to retrace my steps in the opposite direction.

On my way back, I noticed this 3 story lookout tower and made a mental note that I wanted to come back here later in the day with all the kids.  I knew they would love climbing up all those stairs, and even though I personally wasn’t as thrilled about climbing the stairs, I hoped the views from the top would be worth it.

When I made it back to our lounge chairs, I was happy to see there was still hardly anyone in this section of the beach.

A few minutes later, my brother texted that he was on the tender.  I wasn’t sure how we would all communicate on the island, so it was a nice surprise to see that our Princess wifi worked and we could text through iMessage like we had been doing on the ship.  The medallions worked for making purchases, but not for the location feature, so I told my brother where to go to find us when he got ashore, and a few minutes later, he found us.  

Around that time, I noticed the crew arrived to set up at Coconuts Beach Bar, so as soon as they were done, I went over and used my medallion to get a strawberry daiquiri.  NOW I feel like I’m on vacation at a tropical beach!

There was only one thing missing… a straw!  The crew said there are no straws on the island, which made it very challenging to drink this frozen drink.  I wish I had known and I would have brought a straw from the ship, or just ordered a beer instead.  

We spent the next few hours relaxing on the beach while the kids played in the water.  I was really nervous about how Ian would get along with his cousins because he hasn’t seen them since he was 9 months old.  Luckily, they got along great and Ian loved playing with them any chance he got.

At one point, my brother came over with a coconut that had fallen from one of the palm trees.  He cracked a little hole in the top and everyone tasted some of the water.

As the morning went on, a few more people joined us in our section of the beach, but it really never felt crowded.  It was lucky that we were the only ship in port today because I imagine it would be a different situation with more than one ship here.

Around 11:15am, I  noticed that some people had plates of food at the nearby picnic tables.  We walked over to the food pavilion buffet, conveniently located right behind our seats.  

They must have just opened a few minutes earlier, so there was no line yet.  There were 2 sides to the buffet which both had the same options…  BBQ chicken, grilled chicken breast, grilled fish, pork ribs, hot dogs, and hamburgers, plus a bunch of toppings.

I got a hotdog and cheeseburger for myself.  It was my mission to get Ian to try hotdogs and hamburgers on this cruise.  There’s really no reason he wouldn’t like them aside from his stubbornness against trying new foods.  Much to my dismay, he rejected both options and asked for a sandwich made from a hamburger bun with a few slices of American cheese.  At least he was eating something with a little protein!

Just as we were sitting down to eat lunch, my mom texted to say she and my dad arrived on the island.  I’m not really sure what they did all morning, but at least they finally joined us.  My dad was wearing his custom Pop shirt with pictures of the 3 grandkids, so I had to get a photo of them all together!

After lunch, the kids were eager to climb the lookout tower, so Jason and I took them over there.

As expected, the kids all ran up the stairs like they thought an ice cream truck was waiting for them at the top.  When I finally got up there, I was treated to a beautiful view of the beach.

While I was busy taking my photos, the kids must have lost interest in the views because they had already started climbing down the stairs.  I sent Jason to run after them while I finished soaking up the views, then made my way back down.  When I got to the bottom, my niece and nephew were busy picking flowers off one of the bushes.

Never one to be left out, Ian wanted a photo with me too.  I tried to get one of him with his cousins, but he just wanted one with his mommy.

By the time we got back to our lounge chairs, my brother and SIL were finished eating lunch, so we all decided to head over to the kids play area for a little while.  Since that was halfway back towards the cruise ship tenders, and we knew we wanted to head back to the ship early to avoid waiting in long tender lines, we decided to pack up our belongings and vacate our lounge chairs.  It was now 12:30pm and we noticed the beach was much more crowded than earlier in the day.  Every time we stood up from a lounge chair to grab a drink at the bar or grab something for lunch, someone came over to ask if we were leaving and if they could take our lounger.  We constantly had to keep defending our turf, so it just made sense to give up the chairs at this point since we didn’t think we’d come back to this area of the beach.

We all went over to the kids area and watched them play on the playground and splash in the kiddie pool for a little while.  Around 1:15pm, the kids were getting tired, so we decided to take that as our cue to pack up and head back to the tenders.  That proved to be a great decision because there was no line at all and we walked right up to the security x-rays and then immediately onto a tender which was already half-full.

It’s nice that they provide shade in case people do have to wind up and down the corrals at the end of the day.

We sat upstairs on the tender so I could try to take some photos on the ride back.  We had a great view of the other side of the island.  I never thought to walk over there (the side to the right of the tender docks), but it looked like a nice calm section of the beach.

As we left the dock, I could see a glimpse of the rest of the beach.  Princess Cays was such a beautiful island, and I was so happy we got to spend a few hours there.

I tried to get a good photo of the ship, but we were moving into the sun so the ship was in silhouette until we got close enough that the ship could block the sun, and by then we were too close to capture the whole ship in my photo.  Oh well!

We all thought it was funny that we had to scan our medallions and go through security with x-rays when leaving the island, prior to boarding the tender… and then do it all over again when we exited the tender and got off the ship.  Did they think we collected contraband from a passing boat during that 5 minute journey?  Or perhaps someone hopped onto the moving tender to sneak onboard?  I guess they can never be too safe!

Once we got through security, Jason took Ian up to the cabin to take a shower, and I went straight up to the Lido pool bar to grab us some drinks to bring back to the cabin.  This time, I got myself an Elderflower and Meyer Lemon Spritz with St. Germain Elderflower Liqueur, fresh citrus, mint, prosecco, and meyer lemon club soda.

After their showers, Jason and Ian took a nap while I took my shower.  In an effort to avoid waking them up, I went into my parents’ cabin to blow dry my hair, and then I spent some time relaxing outside on their balcony.  So remember how we had sailed past the Disney cruise ship earlier this morning and I assumed they were docked at their own private island?  Well yes, that was technically true, but it wasn’t really their own island.  They were at the southern end of the same island as Princess Cays, Eleuthera in the Bahamas.  The Disney section is called Lookout Cay, and Princess Cays is located just a short distance up the shore.  If you had a car, I’m sure you could easily drive from one area to the other.  I actually just looked up Eleuthera on Google Maps and the island is much bigger than I realized.  There are several resorts throughout the island, so really Lookout Cay and Princess Cay is just a private beach, not actually a private island.  The more you know!

While we were sitting on the balcony, we could see the Disney ship still docked at their pier.  

That looked like a verrrrrry long pier!  I just looked it up and according to Google, it is a half mile long!  We could see that they had a tram running back and forth so the passengers didn’t have to walk.  

Just before our 5:20pm reservation, all 9 of us met outside the deck 6 elevators to enter the Amalfi dining room together.  Now that our cabins were linked, they had no trouble assigning us to the same table where we sat last night.

I ordered the fried mushrooms and the crab seafood cocktail appetizers, followed by the pork belly entree.  Everything was served at the appropriate temperatures and tasted delicious.

Unfortunately, service was incredibly slow tonight.  My appetizers were served at 5:55pm (35 minutes after we were seated), and my entree was served at 6:20pm.  None of us wanted to wait around to order our desserts and wait for them to be served, and my brother was eager to head to the theater for the 7pm production show, so we all opted to skip dessert and grab something later from the buffet if we wanted it.

We dropped off Ian at camp when they opened at 7pm.  On last year’s cruise, the shows were at 7:30pm and 9:30pm, so it worked out perfectly to drop Ian at camp when they opened at 7pm, and then have 30 minutes to walk from deck 17 aft to deck 6 or 7 forward to the theater, with time to spare to grab a drink from one of the bars along the way.  This year, the shows were at 7pm and 9pm, so it was impossible for us to catch the start of the 7pm show.  I wish the camp coordinated their timing better with the evening shows because we weren’t the only parents facing this dilemma.  We had a similar issue on our Carnival cruise this summer, but they accommodated us by letting us drop off Ian a few minutes early, plus the camp was at the forward elevators, so it was an easy journey straight down to get to the theater.  On this cruise, we had to walk the entire length of the ship to get from camp to the theater, so in the end, we decided it was easier to watch the 9pm shows most nights, even if that meant we couldn’t sit with my brother’s family.  

Tonight, there was a 7:15pm comedy show in the Vista Lounge, so that worked out well with our logistics.  We took the aft elevators straight down from camp at deck 17 to the Vista Lounge on deck 7, and found seats for us and my parents.  We even had a few minutes to spare so Jason could grab us some drinks before the show started.  Tonight’s comedian was Brandon Vestal, and Jason and I both found his dry, subdued jokes very funny.  I kept looking over at my parents and I could tell they didn’t find it funny at all.  I guess everyone has the right to their own opinions!

After the comedy show, I went up to the Bellini Bar for a Tropical Bellini, with Bacardi Superior, Prosecco, agave, and lime, while Jason got us seats in Princess Live for the 8pm trivia game.

The trivia game was sort of like Jeopardy style, with 5 categories, and each category had 5 different questions.  I forgot to write down the categories in my notes, but it was definitely tricky and I think we only knew a few of the answers.  It was fun to play along, but we left a little early to find seats in the theater for the 9pm production show.  

Tonight’s show was Spotlight Bar, which was our favorite show from last year’s cruise.  We enjoyed it just as much this year!  It was set in a local neighborhood bar from opening to closing time one night, and the patrons visiting the bar sang familiar pop songs to share stories about their lives.  I really enjoyed the song choices and choreography.  It featured “Brave” and “She Used To Be Mine” by Sara Bareilles, “Havana” by Camila Cabello, “Don’t You Worry ‘Bout A Thing” by Stevie Wonder, and “When I Was Your Man” by Bruno Mars.  There were 2 songs that I found particularly entertaining.  They sang “Old Town Road” by Lil Nas X, and the choreography featured the male dancers dressed like cowboys, dancing a country line dance on top of the restaurant tables.  I also really enjoyed when they sang “Haven’t Met You Yet” by Michael Buble because it was from the perspective of a girl meeting a bunch of first dates from a dating app.  Each man acted out a stereotypically bad first date behavior, until the last guy came out and was a perfect gentleman.  They stayed together for the rest of the show, and as the patrons left the bar at the end of the night, that couple left together.  It was very clever, and I appreciated the creativity.

I tried to take photos throughout the show, but the 5x zoom on my iPhone was no match for how far back we were sitting in the theater.

The show ended at 9:45pm, giving us just enough time to walk across the ship once again and take the aft elevators up to deck 17 to pick up Ian from camp before they closed at 10pm.  We all went back to the cabin to get ready for bed.  There was a paper on our bed reminding us to set our clocks ahead one hour tonight, so by the time we got ready for bed, we went to sleep around midnight on the new time.  Conveniently, tomorrow would be a sea day when we had no need to wake up early!

Today’s drinks total:  22

Up next: our first sea day

Saturday, December 27 ~ Embarkation Day

As has become my norm, I didn’t get much sleep on the night before Embarkation Day.  Usually that is my own fault as the excitement of our upcoming cruise makes it hard for me to relax and fall asleep.  This time around, it was actually Ian’s fault that I didn’t get much sleep because he kept waking us up to ask questions about the cruise… Does the cruise ship have a theater?  Are we going on any small boats, and do they have a theater?  Does our cabin have curtains?  Are there curtains on the small boats?  Clearly he was very excited for the cruise and couldn’t sleep with all the questions on his mind.  He woke us up at 10pm, 10:45pm, and 11:30pm, but we didn’t hear from him after that so I assume he finally fell asleep for the night.

My alarm went off at 6:30am, and I immediately jumped out of bed to get ready for the day.  Who cares that I didn’t get enough sleep last night?  We have a cruise ship to drive to!  I turned off my alarm and before anything else, I checked Cruise Mapper to locate the Enchanted Princess.  Just as expected, she was docked in Port Everglades, but annoyingly, she was deep into the port at Pier 21 instead of the more convenient Pier 2.

Today would be a very busy day at Port Everglades with 6 cruise ships doing turn-arounds, including some megaships, and all of them were transitioning from their Christmas cruise to their New Year’s cruise so it was likely that they were all sailing at their maximum passenger capacity.  Fingers crossed that we don’t get stuck in a ton of traffic!

I got dressed, ate a quick breakfast, and Jason woke up around 7am and did the same.  Not surprisingly, after all of his questions last night, Ian slept later this morning than he did all week.  While we waited for him to wake up, we finished the rest of our packing and loaded our luggage into the car.  Ian finally rolled out of bed around 8am, so we got him dressed and strapped into his car seat and let him eat his breakfast in the car.

A side note about our medallions… When we booked the cruise, we purchased the Plus Package for Jason and myself, which includes free shipping of your medallions prior to the cruise.  When we did this last year, we were unsure how they would handle Ian’s medallion because he did not have the package, but he was in our cabin.  Luckily, they just lumped him together with us and shipped all 3 medallions together before our cruise.  Armed with that knowledge, we had no worries that all 3 medallions would ship together for this year’s cruise, but we were faced with a different dilemma.  Princess claims to ship their medallions 2-3 weeks before the sail date, but I have heard people mention that they didn’t receive theirs until the week prior to sailing.  Our dilemma was that we were flying to my parents’ house in Florida one week prior to sailing, and we were worried the medallions would arrive in Phoenix after we left.  Our solution was to ship our medallions to my parents’ house where we were confident we could receive them before the cruise.  After entering the shipping address and completing my order (which did indeed include Ian’s medallion for free), the confirmation indicated that it would ship to the cruise port and we could pick it up on embarkation day.  Wait, what?!  I canceled the order and did it again, making extra sure that I clicked “ship to home” and entered my parents’ address, and once again, the confirmation said it would be shipped to the port.  At that point, I decided to just let it be and hope for the best.  If it shipped to my parents’ house, then great, that would be more convenient.  If it ended up shipping to the port, then that just meant we would need to wait in an extra line to retrieve it, but it’s not like that would cancel our cruise or anything.  Sure enough, 2 weeks before our sail date (and 1 week before we left Phoenix), all 3 of our medallions were delivered to my parents’ house.  Whew!  

Princess’ medallions are the exact same size as Apple’s AirTags, so last year I bought 3 velcro bracelet AirTag holders in different colors to identify who is who.  They were still in good condition so we reused them this year.  Everyone donned their bracelets prior to climbing in the car, and we were all ready to go for our 2-hour drive to Ft. Lauderdale.

We finally left my parents house at 8:25am.  Luckily, there was no traffic and we were in Ft. Lauderdale by 10am.  We stopped at a gas station to fill up the tank, and pulled into the car rental drop-off location at 10:10am.  Budget has an office in the Ft. Lauderdale airport, but we opted to use the location closer to the cruise port.

It was crazy chaotic when we arrived, and we feared we would be waiting for hours to get on the free shuttle to the port.  We considered just taking an Uber, but when we walked over to where all the people were standing, we realized they were all waiting to pick up their rental cars.  We asked around and there was only one other family waiting for the shuttle to the port!  Perfect!  Literally one minute later, the shuttle pulled up, and a shocking number of people got off given the size of the bus.  We all got on and picked our seats, then a bunch of other people got on after us.  The driver kept loading on people and luggage until even the center aisle was filled with people standing.  I probably shouldn’t have been surprised given how many people got off when the shuttle arrived, but I did have to protect myself from the man standing over me when we went around turns as he lost his balance and nearly sat on my head!  

There were people from 5 of the 6 ships in port on our shuttle, and just our luck, we were dropped off last, but we were still thankful to avoid all the traffic around the port.  Our original plan was to drop off big bags at the ship first, then return the rental car and only have our carry-on bags with us on the shuttle.  We decided against it, thinking it would be much faster to only go to the port once, even if it meant schlepping our checked bags a little further.  We were glad we kept the big bags with us because we didn’t have to carry them at all!  Someone at Budget helped us get them on and off the shuttle, and the porters at the port were waiting right where the shuttle dropped us off to take them from us.  My brother drove to the port to drop off my SIL, niece, nephew, and all the luggage, and he said the traffic was horrible.  I think the car rental shuttle had access to a different entrance to the port because we did see lots of cars sitting in traffic, but we just zipped right on through, hopping from one ship to the next until we were finally dropped off at the Enchanted at 10:45am.

After handing off our checked bags to the porters, we were happy to see that the lines for security were relatively short, and it moved quickly because there were about 5 lanes open.  We took the elevator upstairs and there was no line at all for both the blue and green lanes at check in.  There were plenty of agents at both counters, so I have a feeling the lines were kept under control even during the inevitable rush a few hours later.  Our agent scanned our passports and told us we could board straight away!

I promise Jason and Ian were excited, despite looking like they were being dragged to slaughter in this photo!

We stepped aboard at 11:04am, exactly 20 minutes after getting out of the car rental shuttle.  That makes 3 cruises in a row for us having super easy and fast boarding experiences!  We went straight up to the cabin to see if it was ready, and we saw our steward in the hallway.  She said she was done cleaning our room and we could leave our carry-on bags inside if we wanted.  That was much appreciated as now we were more mobile to explore the ship.  Before we had a chance to mess up the cabin, I snapped a few photos.  It was identical to the cabin we had last year on the Discovery, so there weren’t any surprises.

Open closet, with shelves and a safe behind the narrow door in the middle, and the bathroom behind the door on the right:

Our bed, with nightstands on either side, each with a shelf, 2 drawers, and a lamp with a USB charging port:

The desk, minifridge, coffee table, and love seat were at the back of the cabin.  We asked Ian to lay down on the loveseat and he was still short enough to fit comfortably!  That was a huge relief because if we had to open up the pull-out couch, it would block our access to the balcony door while he was asleep.  When we saw our steward again, we asked her to just put a sheet on top of the cushions and not to open up the full bed for Ian, and she said that was no problem.

I loved how many outlets they had in our cabin.  In addition to the USB ports in each nightstand lamp, there were 5 other outlets on the desk, including 2 US ports and 3 international ports.  I always travel with my international travel adaptor so I could have used the other ports, but I never needed them.  I do wish they could have mounted the phone to the wall, as there was so little counter space in the cabin and the phone took up valuable real estate.

Another view of the cabin:

The typical pile of paperwork was waiting for us on the desk…

Muster instructions:

Today’s patter:

Information about the medallion:

Daily dinner themes in the buffet:

Information for guests with children on board:

We also spoke to our steward about opening up the door between our balcony and my parents’ balcony.  She said that was no problem and she would take care of it later this afternoon.

Even though our steward said the cabin was ready and we could take our time in there, we wanted to check a few more things off our to-do list while the ship was fairly empty.  Since our cabin was all the way aft, we took the aft elevators up to deck 17 to register Ian at camp.  I had already done his pre-registration online when checking in for the cruise, so I just had to make sure all the information they had was correct.  I made sure that all 6 adults in our group were listed to sign Ian in and out of camp, and then we were all set.  This is the only opportunity for parents to see the inside of the camp room, so I took a quick look around.  It was basically the same space as the camp on Discovery Princess, but I was thrilled to see they had trucks for Ian to play with.  Those who read last year’s review will remember that they did not have one single toy in any of the camp rooms that had wheels (cars, trucks, etc.).  

We also made sure to show Ian the bathroom so he would know where to go when needed.  It was great that they had a child-sized toilet in the bathroom in this room for camp as it’s for kids 3 to 7 years old.  The room for kids 8 to 12 years old only had a normal adult-sized toilet, and he was in that room on the port days, so the staff had to bring him over to the younger kids room if he needed to go potty.

When we were ready to leave camp, we had to practically drag Ian out of the room, so that was a good sign for him agreeing to go to camp during the cruise.  We took the stairs down one level to deck 16 so we could get our first drinks of the cruise from the Wake View Bar.  I opted for an Ultimate Cooler, with Tito’s vodka, watermelon, passion fruit, and cranberry, and it was the perfect way to kick off this cruise!

They had a few special drinks themed for the New Year’s Eve cruise, but they were all priced above the $15 limit of the Plus Package.  I probably could have gotten one and just paid the $3 difference, but I felt like there were enough options that did fall under the $15 limit so there was no reason to spend extra money for these drinks.

We took our drinks to go and spent some time walking around the outer decks.  I haven’t cruised out of Florida since 2018, and I must say that I really missed these incredible views on Embarkation Day.  The cloud-less bright blue sky, the boats zipping around in the ocean, tons of cruise ships docked all around us, and a backdrop of beaches and condos dotting the horizon.  There was just so much to see!

We have a tradition of taking a photo with the life ring on Embarkation Day.  We have done it on every cruise we have taken, so of course, we had to take our photo today too.  At first, Ian didn’t want to be in the photo, so Jason and I just asked someone walking by to take one of the two of us.

Of course, seeing us take our photo made Ian want to take one too.  He wouldn’t let us take a photo with all 3 of us together, but he did agree to be in one on his own, so that’s better than nothing!

We ended our walk with a view overlooking the mid-ship Sky Pool.  It was now just after 12 noon, and still didn’t seem very busy on board.

None of us were particularly hungry, but we decided to get a light lunch before the buffet got too crowded.  I must have been in a seafood mood because I got an assortment of calamari, shrimp, scallops, and mussels, a pre-made smoked salmon sandwich, and some balsamic mushrooms to say I ate a vegetable.  It was actually really funny when I got the smoked salmon sandwich because everyone who noticed it literally oohed and ahhed out loud when they saw it in the buffet.

Once we were all seated and eating, I tried to order drinks to be delivered to our table, but the Princess app wouldn’t let us.  I’m not sure if these changes are fleet-wide or specific to the Enchanted, but we were limited on which locations we were allowed to order drinks to.  Last year, we loved that we could order drinks on the app and have them brought to wherever we were sitting, but on this cruise, that feature only worked in certain places around the ship.  This was what the app said when I tried to order drinks in the buffet:

We ended up flagging down a roaming waiter and ordered a margarita and an aperol spritz.  He brought it back to our table fairly quickly, but as I noticed was a trend throughout the ship, my drink wasn’t mixed at all.  Of course, I didn’t realize it before taking a sip.  Aperol without the spritz is very bitter, and I immediately realized the issue and mixed the drink with the cardboard straw.

We used the app to watch the muster video while we ate, then went down to the Vista Lounge to check in at our station when we finished lunch.  Easy peasy!

Around that time, my parents texted me that they were onboard.  They left Port St. Lucie way later than we did, and I had no idea where they were or when they would get onboard, so it was nice knowing they finally made it.  While we were walking around and exploring the ship, my brother’s family was eating lunch, and they finished before we were ready to start eating.  We tracked them down near the mid-ship pool, so we texted my parents to meet us there so we could all take a photo together.  My mom bought everyone these matching shirts, so we had to get one group photo before we all got changed for dinner.

After the group photo, my mom mentioned that she saw our checked luggage had been delivered.  Jason, Ian, and I went back to the cabin so the boys could change into bathing suits.  I told Jason to spend a few hours at the pool with Ian so he could swim with his cousins, and I could have the cabin empty to spend some time unpacking.  It took me over 2 hours, but I succeeded in unpacking all of our stuff just in time for sail away at 3pm.  I texted Jason to come back down to the cabin so we could watch sail away from my parents’ balcony, but he didn’t see the message because he was still in the pool with Ian.  When I felt the ship was moving, I stepped out onto our balcony.  On a normal cruise when I am only cruising with the people in my one cabin, this balcony would be amazing.  It was significantly deeper than the standard balcony we had last year, including a big table to eat meals outside, and both chairs included foot stools.

I noticed the steward had finished opening up the door to my parents’ balcony, so I walked over and found them basking in the sun.

Their balcony was really huge.  I was able to capture all of it when I zoomed out with the 0.5 camera on my iPhone.  If you look on the far left, you can see the door to my balcony just beyond the chair.  With all of this space, it was a shame there was only seating for 5 people on their balcony.  There was more than enough space for a few more loungers, or even a bigger dining table with more chairs.  

I took a peek inside because I wanted to see my parents’ cabin.  It was a Penthouse Suite, which was the second largest cabin on the ship (only the Sky Suite was bigger).  This was by far the largest cabin I have ever seen on a cruise ship!  There was a large living room with a full-sized couch, a desk, and a separate counter and shelves near the minifridge.

Entering into the bedroom, there were 2 large closets with doors.  I know some people like the open closets in the regular cabins, but I really wish they had doors like this to hide all the clutter.

Continuing into the bedroom, there was a large vanity desk area, and the nightstands had 3 drawers (instead of 2 drawers plus a shelf like in our cabin).

Their bathroom was enormous, with one sink, a large stall shower, and a large garden bathtub in one room, and a toilet and second sink in a separate room.

I stepped back outside onto the balcony to watch as we sailed away from Port Everglades.

The boys came back from swimming around that time to take showers and get changed for dinner.  The group decided we should change out of the matching t-shirts and all dress a little nicer for our first dinner together in the dining room.  After we were dressed, I took one more peak outside and was greeted with this beautiful sunset.

For those unfamiliar, there are 3 dining rooms on the ship.  The Santorini dining room has traditional dining with an early 5pm seating and a late 7:30pm seating.  We considered that, but the group thought 5pm was too early to be ready for dinner on port days, and we all agreed 7:30pm was way too late to eat dinner, especially with 3 kids in our group.  The Capri dining room was for non-reservation walk-ups, where you would arrive whenever you wanted to eat and be seated when a table was available.  With our large group, we feared that would leave us waiting for a table every night, so that was immediately vetoed.  That left us with the Amalfi dining room, where you could make reservations in advance for whatever time you wanted.  The reservations were offered in 20 minute increments starting at 5pm, so we all discussed it and agreed that 5:40pm would be ideal.  The other advantage to the Amalfi dining room was that it was located at the aft of the ship, so it was very close to all of our cabins and we could avoid walking up to the mid-ship dining room every night.

A few months before the cruise, I tried to make dinner reservations for our group of 9 using the app, but there was no availability at all for any time of day.  You don’t gain access to that feature until you make the final payment for the cruise, so this was in mid-September, still 3 months in advance.  I emailed our travel agent and she said there was nothing she could do on her end, but recommended we call Princess’ shoreside dining line for assistance.  I spoke with an agent who was extremely helpful, but she explained that all the tables for large parties were already booked by people who paid off their final payment before us.  In the end, she was able to make us a reservation for 5:20pm every night of the cruise in the Amalfi aft dining room.  That was slightly earlier than we initially hoped for, but it was better than nothing!  After she confirmed our reservation, I asked if there was any way to make our reservation at 6pm for New Year’s Eve?  My excursion wasn’t scheduled to end until 4:30pm, and then I’d still have to walk back to the ship, get up to my cabin, shower and wash my hair (since we’d be swimming in the ocean on that excursion), and get ready for a fancy New Year’s Eve on the ship.  There was absolutely no way I could do that in less than an hour (plus Jason would need time to get ready too!), so I begged her to find us something later just for that one day.  She said that she could accommodate us for a 6pm reservation that night, so that was a huge relief.  When I looked in my app, I was able to see the dinner reservations for each night of the cruise for all 9 people in our party.  My one mistake was that I did not think to take a screenshot of the reservations, so I didn’t have any proof of this conversation.  

Once we were onboard, I looked in the app and saw that our dinner reservations were for 8 people, not 9.  That’s not good!  My mom made some phone calls and made use of the special suites concierge services and found out that they changed us to a table for 8, intending to just squeeze in a 9th chair.  Apparently they didn’t have any real tables for 9, and all the tables for 10 were already booked.  This was less than ideal, but okay fine, we would make it work, even if it meant constantly kicking each other under the table and not being able to pull in our chairs all the way.  

All 9 of us met up outside the aft elevators on deck 6 and approached the hostess stand together.  The hostess made a big deal about us needing to link our cabins together to ensure we were always seated together as a group.  I’m not really sure what that was all about since we could see the reservation with all of our different cabins in our apps, but we spoke to another person at the hostess desk and she linked the reservations.  This lady was quite rude, and I honestly wish I had written down her name to comment about it in the post-cruise survey.  She kept blaming me for doing the reservations incorrectly and saying “well YOU didn’t link your cabins” and “YOU were supposed to do that so we could find you a table.”  Ummm, pardon me but I didn’t actually do anything!  I called the shoreshide dining line and that lady did all of the work on her end to book our reservations!  If you want to have an attitude with anyone, have it with that lady from your own company!  Once that was resolved, we were escorted to our table and told we could sit here at 5:20pm every night of the cruise and have the same waiters every night.  Or would we??  **Foreshadowing**

Anyway, back to tonight’s dinner…

Once we were all seated at our table, our suspicions proved true.  A table for 8 is definitely a tight squeeze with 9 chairs.  The chairs are wide, so we weren’t able to pull them all the way in to the table because the front corners were hitting the next chair over.  With no other choice, we made it work.  On the bright side, we had a wonderful waiter team at this table.  Our head waiter was Bernardo from Peru, and he was always so accommodating, especially in bringing Ian whatever he wanted for dinner, even if it wasn’t on the kids menu.  Isaac was in charge of our drinks, and he was always quick to take our orders and then offer refills as needed throughout the meal.  Tonight, I ordered a glass of sauvignon blanc for me and a cup of milk for Ian.  Ian prefers plain milk, and my nephew prefers chocolate milk, so each subsequent night, Isaac brought the boys their preferred cups of milk without us even asking.

For my appetizer, I ordered the deep-fried brie bites with cranberry jam.  It was delicious and I would have eaten that every night if given the choice!

Technically, my parents should have been eating their dinners in the section of the Capri dining room reserved for suites, and they should have had access to a special menu.  We later learned that this “special menu” was actually just one special entree in addition to the same menu everyone else was served that night.  They knew when booking their cabin that the other 3 cabins in our group were not suites, so if they wanted to eat dinner with the whole family, they would have to eat in the main dining room.  Once we got onboard, they spoke with the concierge desk and arranged to have access to the special suites entree and it would be served to them in the Amalfi dining room.  That was a great compromise, and my parents were happy the staff were so willing to accommodate them.

Tonight’s suites entree was a seafood risotto dish.  My dad wanted to order it for himself, but my mom opted for something else.  When they explained that to the manager, he said that he was able to bring two of the risotto entrees to our table, even if my mom was not going to be the second person to eat it (Hint, hint.  Nudge, nudge.  He was discretely encouraging them to share with someone else in the group.).  My dad asked if any of the rest of us wanted it and I jumped on it without blinking an eye!  To be fair, Jason and my SIL don’t eat shellfish, and my brother wasn’t interested, so it’s not like I had to battle them for the privilege.  

When the waiter placed my dish in front of me, I took it at face value.  It looked like a typical cruise ship entree portion size as I assumed it was served on a plate.  Imagine my surprise (and my dad’s surprise too!) when we realized it was a deep bowl!  As we continued eating, it felt like the dish just kept getting deeper and deeper, and it was stuffed with large scallops, shrimp, mussels, clams and calamari mixed in with the cheesy risotto.  There was sooooo much seafood stuffed in that bowl that we joked there must have been a hole at the bottom and a chef sitting under our table to refill it.  It was by far the best entree I had the entire cruise, and made me question why we don’t book our cruises in suites!  (We’ll just ignore the obvious reason… we can’t afford suites, and cheaper cabins mean we get to take more cruises.)

Happy faces with full bellies

After that ginormous entree, I wasn’t hungry at all for dessert, but I ordered the raspberry sorbet for a little something sweet.

Ian ordered vanilla ice cream from the kid’s menu for his dessert, and the waiter topped it with rainbow sprinkles.  When he finished his ice cream, he proceeded to eat all the sprinkles from the bottom of the bowl… silly kid!

After dinner, everyone else in our group went to the 7pm show in the theater, but Ian was cranky after skipping his nap and going to bed so late last night, so we decided to bring him back to the cabin to put him to bed.  While we waited for him to fall asleep, we ordered a few drinks to the cabin through the room service app.  Last year, we were able to order literally any drink offered on the ship, but this year, there was a restricted list of options.  After we placed our order, the drinks were delivered within 20 minutes.  Jason ordered a martini, and I ordered an aperol spritz (which was mixed properly this time!)

After 30 minutes, Ian was still fighting his sleep, so Jason and I decided to sit out in the hallway to limit Ian’s distractions.  I used this time to decorate the door to our cabin with New Year’s Eve decorations.  Last year, I made these decorations by gluing magnets to the back, so I had stored them away knowing I’d reuse them this year too.

I also brought these decorations that I made on my Cricut.  I designed them to be reusable for all my cruises, so the custom wording comes off and can be replaced for each cruise.  I decided to put them on the door to my parents’ cabin.  Because of the location of our cabin, we were at the very end of the hallway and no one would ever see our decorations.  Even the people with aft-facing cabins wouldn’t see our door because the hallway turned before our cabin.  The door to my parents’ suite was located at the end of the long hallway that spanned the whole length of the ship.  It had literally zero privacy and could be seen from at least the hall outside the mid-ship elevators, maybe even further if you had excellent vision.  By placing these brightly colored decorations on their door, Ian could easily spot it from far away, so he always knew where to go to get back to our cabin.  He knew that door was for Mimi and Pop, and the one with the New Year’s Eve decor was our cabin, but it was very helpful that we could see it from so far away (even though it meant my parents had less privacy with their door open.)

So remember how I switched our original booking from the aft-facing cabin to the last cabin on the port side of the ship?  As it turned out, this was a blessing in disguise.  Because the turn off to access the aft-facing cabins happened before reaching our cabin door, we ended up with our own little alcove.  We often left our deadbolt out to hold the door open so we could go back and forth between our cabin and my parents’ cabin without the loud noise of opening and closing our cabin door.  There was no way to close the cabin door quietly from the outside.  From the inside, you could turn down the handle and slowly push the door closed and it didn’t make much noise.  From the hallway side, you literally had to slam the door to make it shut all the way, and that would have woken Ian when he was asleep.  We felt fairly safe leaving the deadbolt out to hold the door open when we were sitting in my parents’ cabin since no one would ever see it.  This was our little nook, with our cabin on the right and my parents’ suite on the left…

Anyway, back to that evening… Jason and I ended up sitting on the floor of the hallway so we could chat while waiting for Ian to fall asleep.  Nearly 2 hours later, he was STILL fighting his bedtime, and he kept coming out into the hallway.

By then, it was 8:45pm and we were getting frustrated with him for not going to sleep.  Had we known he’d fight his bedtime like this, we would have put him in camp after dinner and gotten to enjoy the entertainment around the ship.  Around that time, my mom texted to see what we were up to.  When we told her, she offered to come back to the cabin to watch Ian so we could catch the 9pm show.  She needed to finish unpacking anyway, so it wasn’t a problem for her.  She said the whole group loved the show and she thought we would enjoy it, so we took her up on her offer.

My parents got back to their cabin a few minutes later, and we left to walk alllll the way forward to the theater.  We grabbed two seats at the back of the theater, and realized we hadn’t missed anything from the show because the cruise director, Tee, was still talking.  We actually took advantage of this several times during the cruise because we realized Tee talks for a few minutes before all of the shows.  The one exception was the 3 nights they had the big production cast shows, which all started promptly at 7pm and 9pm.  Tee had to introduce the specialty acts that came onboard throughout the cruise, which gave us a buffer to get to the theater on time.  More on that when we get to those nights of the cruise.

We were sitting really far back in the theater, so my apologies that these aren’t the best quality photos.  Tonight’s show was called Duo Gravity, and this was the description from the Patter:

Experience an unforgettable evening of electrifying music, awe-inspiring circus artistry, and lighthearted comedy.  This high-energy show seamlessly blends the timeless beats of rock ’n’ roll and the catchy rhythms of pop with breathtaking stunts.

After seeing the show, especially when compared to the description from the Patter, both Jason and I were underwhelmed.  We enjoyed it and were glad we had the opportunity to see it rather than spending the hour fighting with Ian, but we honestly thought it was an amateur performance.  Maybe we are just jaded from shows we’ve seen on other ships, or from watching similar acts every summer on America’s Got Talent, but we just were not that impressed with their stunts.

They started out with a juggling act…

Then, they performed a few stunts where the man lifted the woman…

Next, they picked a woman from the audience and asked her to come on stage to be their assistant with juggling.  

Then, they found two men from the audience and had them help with a unicycle act.  The funniest part of this was that the man on the left was the 16-year-old son of the man sitting next to us at the back of the theater!  We were literally in the last row of the theater, so it was funny that his son was sitting up in the front row, and watching his reaction to his son on stage was better than the act itself!

After that, the woman came back out and did some acrobatics with LED hula hoops.  

We weren’t all that impressed by her stunts, but I loved how some of my photos turned out!  The theater was dark, so the phone defaulted to a long-exposure shot.  In that time, her hula hoops moved, so the camera captured that movement, creating some really cool effects…

At the end of the show, the pair performed some more acrobatic stunts together, but this time, the woman did all the heavy lifting.  This was by far the most impressive part of the entire show, and it was really incredible to see her strength.  On America’s Got Talent, the judges are always looking for something they’ve never seen before.  I can say that in all of my prior cruises, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a woman do stunts like this!

That part alone made it worth us sitting through the whole show!  It ended at 10pm, at which point Jason and I went back to our cabin to relieve my parents from their babysitting duty.  My mom said Ian fell asleep within 5 minutes of us leaving… that kid is so manipulative with us, but he knows his Mimi means business!  

Each night of the cruise, Jason and I tallied up the drinks we each ordered that day.  It was nice being able to see our total in the app to make sure we never went over our 15 drinks limit.  There were many days when Jason ordered 12 or 14 drinks but I only had 1 or 2 on my account because the waiters always seemed to bill the drinks to Jason, even if we requested them to put it under my name.  We were careful to monitor it throughout the day and sometimes I would go order both drinks without Jason being nearby to ensure it went on my account.

Today’s drinks total:  21

Up next: Beach day at Princess Cay

Monday, December 22, 2025 ~ Drive to Port St. Lucie

We decided not to set an alarm this morning after such a long day yesterday, but I naturally woke up at 7:30am.  I quietly got dressed and ready for the day, then went downstairs to the breakfast room to check out our options.  I apologize that I forgot to take photos, but the space was large enough for the size of the hotel (a nice change from so many other hotels where I have stayed when there aren’t enough tables and people are tripping over each other trying to get their food and find a place to eat.)  They had scrambled eggs, sausage, cereal, fruit, a fridge with yogurt and milk, and my personal favorite: a make-your-own waffles station.  I made myself a waffle and gathered a few other things, then found myself a seat to eat my breakfast.  When I finished, I made a waffle for Ian and brought it back up to the room.  By the time I got back, he was awake, so I helped him get dressed and eat his waffle while Jason got ready and went downstairs for his own breakfast.  

By the time Jason came back to the room, I had finished packing up our bags and we were ready to check out of the hotel.  We left around 9am to drive down to my parents’ house in Port St. Lucie.  It was around a 2 hour drive, but we split it up by stopping at Costco in Melbourne to give Ian a chance to go potty and to pick up some necessary supplies (who are we kidding… we picked up a case of the Sam Adams seasonal beers).  We tried to get in and out as fast as possible, but the store was a madhouse with people doing last-minute Christmas shopping, so we were there for around 45 minutes from start to finish.  After that, we finished up the drive to my parents’ house, and pulled into their driveway at 11:45am.  

Jason planned to work on Monday and Tuesday this week.  His company is based in Seattle, and we live in Phoenix, so he always works remote.  What difference does it make to his company if he’s sitting in his office in our house or in the guest room at my parents’ house?  It worked out really well because with the time difference, his work day started at 9am Pacific time, which is noon Eastern time.  That gave us all morning to drive to Port St. Lucie, and he had just enough time to eat a quick lunch before hopping on his first meeting of the day at noon.

I think this is where I will stop telling the minute-by-minute story of our time in Port St. Lucie.  We spent a lot of time hanging out on my parents’ lanai, exploring their neighborhood, and giving Ian quality time with his grandparents.  Ian loved playing on the nearby playground, and watching a family of Sandhill Cranes roaming across the grass.

On Tuesday afternoon, we spent some time swimming in the pool at my parents’ community center.

On Wednesday, Jason, Ian and I drove down to Boca to have lunch with Jason’s 95-year-old uncle.  

On Friday, we spent the day with my parents in Jensen Beach, visiting the Children’s Museum of the Treasure Coast and having dinner on the water at Conchy Joe’s Seafood.  Ian had so much fun sending scarves up the wind tunnel and playing the xylophone in the outdoor music garden.

Other than that, we just spent a lot of time relaxing, chatting, and enjoying the calm before the cruise.  After we came home from dinner on Friday night, we did a load of laundry and packed up some of the items we wouldn’t need in the morning so we could get on the road that much faster for the drive down to Ft. Lauderdale.

Up next:  Embarkation Day!!

Sunday, December 21, 2025 ~ Fly to Florida

I am going to approach this review slightly differently from my typical reviews.  Usually, I would cover any pre-cruise antics in detail, as that is part of our vacation and I like to cover everything we did between leaving from and returning to our house.  This time around, things were a little different because we flew out to Florida a week before the cruise to spend extra time with my parents.  I doubt anyone wants to read a play by play of that week, so instead, I will cover today as our travel day out to Florida, then I will skip ahead to Saturday for embarkation day.  Maybe I’ll throw in a quick review of our week visiting my parents if I think of something worth sharing.

I woke up to my alarm going off at 5:30am.  That was a less-than-ideal start to my day, but I needed time to get showered and dressed before Ian woke up, and I was able to justify it by saying it was 7:30am in Florida!  Jason was in the middle of training for a race he is running at the end of January, so he went for an early long run while we were still at home.  That meant I was on my own to get Ian dressed and fed, and to finish packing all the last minute items into our luggage.  Once I was done with that, I took Ian to pick up Subway sandwiches for lunch for the plane.  I found a coupon code where we could get 2 foot longs for $13, so that was worth the extra effort on the busy morning versus paying airport prices for mediocre sandwiches.  Ian is a picky eater so I made him a peanut butter sandwich for the plane when we got home.

When Jason got home from his run, he quickly showered and finished getting ready.  I requested the Uber XL at 10:30am, and it arrived to pick us up 6 minutes later. 

Bye bye, house!  See you in 2 and a half weeks!

There was no traffic on our 30-minute drive to the airport, but we were surprised to see what looked like Air Force One parked at the small private terminal as we drove in.  The plane was just labeled with “United States of America” on the side, so we were not sure exactly which plane it was, but it was still cool to see.

Randomly, our Uber driver’s name was Matthew, which is my brother’s name.  On its own, that’s not too coincidental, but imagine my surprise when the porter working at the curb check counter was named Kevin- Jason’s brother’s name!  We each only have 1 brother, so that was really funny that the two men who helped us get to the airport shared their names.  PHX charges $3.50 per bag to check your luggage at the curb, but we thought that was well worth the price to not have to juggle the two 48-pound bags inside the terminal with our carry-on bags too.

There was literally no one at all in line when we arrived at security.  We expected that we would be able to leave our shoes on as that was the procedure when we flew to Seattle over the summer too, but we were pleasantly surprised that we were also allowed to leave everything in our bags, including the 3-1-1 bag of liquids, and our tablets.  From the time we were dropped off by our Uber to the time we were through TSA took only 15 minutes, but then we had a super long walk to our gate.  No worries though because we arrived at the airport early and had plenty of time to spare!

**0007

I sat with our bags at the gate while Jason took Ian to walk around and watch the planes taking off and landing.  It was a relief to see that our plane arrived at the gate on time when the prior flight landed, so we assumed our flight would leave on time.  Unfortunately, it did not play out that way, and we didn’t start boarding until 30 minutes after we were scheduled to start.  Jason’s frequent work trips earned him A-List status on Southwest, so we had boarding number A31-A33.  The in-bound plane came from Baltimore, so it was highly unlikely there were any through passengers (I know Southwest is notorious for connecting you in bizarre cities, but there was no way someone would fly from Baltimore to Phoenix to get to Orlando!).  We expected to see 30 people on the plane when we boarded, but at first glance, it looked like way more people were on the plane.  There were people sitting in every row halfway back through the plane!  Where did all of these people come from?!  When we looked closer, we noticed that the first 3 rows on both sides of the plane were filled with people wearing business suits.  Then we looked a little closer and noticed they all had a curly-wired ear piece in one ear… they were Secret Service agents!  What on earth were they doing flying on our Southwest flight from Phoenix to Orlando?!  We realized they must have boarded directly onto the plane from the tarmac, and not through the terminal like everyone else, so that’s why there were way more than 30 people on the plane before us, and that’s also likely why we were so delayed.

We ended up sitting in row 12 as that was the first row of 3 unoccupied seats that we could find.  The rest of the passengers boarded quickly, and the plane finally departed 30 minutes late.  We had clear skies as we flew out of Phoenix…

I even spotted the famous fountain in Fountain Hills as it was going off when we passed it!  This isn’t a great quality photo as I had to zoom in all the way on my phone, but you can see it in the middle of the lake at the center of the photo…

The rest of our flight was uneventful, which I suppose is the best kind of flight you can have.  Ian refused to nap so he watched movies on his phone, Jason read on his Kindle, and I watched a movie I had downloaded to my Netflix app on my iPad.  We landed in Orlando at 7:45pm, 35 minutes late.  While we were waiting to get off the plane, we started talking to the lady in the row behind us.  She was an off-duty Southwest flight attendant and she said Donald Trump, Jr. was on our flight!!  Wait, what?!  We definitely didn’t see him when we boarded, but we figured out that he must have been the last person to board the plane after everyone else was seated, and he sat between the Secret Service agents in the front row, so no one knew he was there.  When we landed, there were 6 or 7 black SUVs waiting at our gate, and we saw them drive away with their lights on.

We never saw him get off the plane, so he must have gotten off before the pilot took off the seatbelt sign so no one would see him.  Jason and I are still confused as to why Donald Trump, Jr. flew on Southwest.  I’m not surprised he flew on a commercial plane, but I would have thought he’d fly on an airline that at least had a first class or business section.  Maybe he was in the same predicament as us in not finding any other direct flights between Phoenix and Orlando that flew at convenient times of day!  Turning Point USA had a huge conference in Phoenix the week before our flight, so we assumed he must have been at the conference and that’s why he was in Phoenix.  So I guess now we can check off a quasi-sighting of a celebrity from our vacation to-do list!  We didn’t see him, but we know he was there, so that counts for something, right?!

We eventually made our way off the plane and down to baggage claim.  It took about 20 minutes for our checked bags to come out on the carousel after we arrived down there, so thank goodness for AirTags because at least I knew they were nearby and not forgotten in Phoenix.

Next, we took the elevator down to the car rental agencies and were greeted with a crazy long line at the Budget counter.  Jason sat with Ian on a nearby couch while I waited in line for 25 minutes for it to be my turn.  I had rented a full-size sedan, but the agent upgraded us to an SUV.  He asked if we wanted the toll pass, but I said no because we didn’t think we would need it and planned to just avoid toll roads to save some money.  The agent told me the gas tank was full and we should return the car with a full tank, or else we could pay $3 per gallon for them to fill it for us.  I said that we would return the car with a full tank.  I’m going to give you a little spoiler alert and flash forward to after we returned home from our vacation 2.5 weeks later, when I was reading all the emails I missed, and I found the receipt from when we dropped off the car in Ft. Lauderdale.  We were charged $150 more than the price I was originally quoted.  I called Budget to inquire about the discrepancy, and they said we were charged for the toll pass.  I explained that I definitely refused that service and we did not incur any tolls while we had the rental car, and after some back and forth, the lady on the phone removed the charge.  That only accounted for $79, so I asked her to review our receipt again because it was still higher than I expected.  She said we were charged a fee for filling the tank upon return, but I said we returned it full and could provide a receipt from the gas station if needed.  She said we were not charged for any gallons of gas, but that the charge was to enroll us in the program to give us the option for them to fill our tank.  Ummm, what?!  You charged me $70 for the option to put gas in the car, even if it was returned with a full tank??  I told her that I did not request to be enrolled in that service (I didn’t even know there was a fee for that service as the original agent just said we’d pay $3 per gallon for them to fill us up), and that I had told the original agent we planned to return the car with a full tank.  After a little more back and forth, the lady on the phone agreed to remove that charge, and the final total was now the same as our original quote.  The whole thing felt like such a scam, and had I not looked at my final receipt I would have been charged that extra $150.  

Anyway, back to the Orlando airport… We followed the directions into the parking garage where we found our rental SUV parked in our assigned spot.  We traveled with our little portable car seat for Ian, but the Budget agent said we were welcome to use one of their car seats if we preferred.  They had a large shed inside the parking garage with infant bucket seats, high-back booster seats, and big kid booster seats.  They were all individually wrapped in plastic as if they had been cleaned before being stored in the shed, so we took a high-backed booster seat for Ian, since that would definitely be more comfortable for him with all the driving we had planned for the week.  I installed Ian’s car seat while Jason loaded all of our luggage in the trunk, and we finally pulled out of the airport garage at 9:15pm local time.

By then, we were all starving and in desperate need of dinner.  In hindsight, we should have just found something to eat in the terminal when we first got off the plane.  We probably could have finished eating and gotten down to baggage claim just as our bags arrived, and it would have been a better use of our time.  While I waited in line for the rental car, I spent my time Googling what restaurants were nearby and still open this late on a Sunday night.  We didn’t want to spend the time at a sit-down restaurant, so we settled on Wendy’s as it was about 10 minutes from the airport and appeared to be our closest option.  We needed something fast, and knew Ian would be happy with chicken nuggets.  We ended up sharing a 20-piece box of nuggets between the 3 of us, plus Jason ordered himself a cheeseburger since he needed more calories after his long run this morning.  I was so exhausted that I completely forgot to take photos, but it was as you would expect chicken nuggets from Wendy’s to look, so I don’t think a photo would add much value anyway!

When we finished eating, we piled back in the car and drove to our hotel.  When I knew we needed to spend the night in Orlando, I booked us a hotel that was as close as possible to the airport.  In hindsight, that wasn’t quite necessary because we had to drive 10 minutes away from the airport to find a place for dinner… oops!  I searched on Booking.com and found a suite at the Country Inn and Suites by Radisson for $113 including taxes.  It had a separate bedroom for Jason and myself, and a pull out couch in the living room for Ian, at the price included breakfast in the morning.  We paid $10 additional for onsite parking, but I thought that was still a great rate.

The room was very nice and clean, and despite its close distance to the airport, it was very quiet.

This was the living room.  With Ian being so small, we just laid a sheet down across the seats on the couch and let him sleep there instead of pulling out the couch.  By the time he went to bed, he was so tired he probably could have slept on the coffee table!

This was our room with a king-sized bed, dresser, TV, and there was also a closet but I didn’t take a photo of it.

There was a kitchenette, with a minifridge, microwave, coffee maker, and ice bucket.

The bathroom was spacious and clean, and the room was plenty big enough for our needs considering we only spent 12 hours there.

By the time we got settled in the hotel and unpacked what we needed for the night, we didn’t get Ian to bed until around 11pm.  That was 9pm in Arizona, and he usually goes to bed at 7pm, so it was a long day.  Jason and I went to bed shortly after that as we were both exhausted too.