The cruise post
Jan. 25th, 2011 08:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elabyI finally wrote up a post all about what we did on our cruise to Grand Cayman and Cozumel! Beware, I go into copious amounts of random detail XD
Day One
We woke up at the crack of early on December 31. We already had our luggage packed and most of it put into the car, so we just got ready and brought the last couple of bags down. The stars were still out and it was about 17 degrees. We got to the train station around 6:20 and got on the train to Boston at 6:45. On the train ride down, I watched the sun come up and Caitirin started knitting a sock. It was cool looking out at the woods in the snow, because there were tracks everywhere. We went through a couple of train stations and arrived at North Station at around 8:15, where we would take the T to Logan Airport.
We didn't have too much trouble hauling our luggage through the T stations (one big suitcase, two small duffels, and two backpacks), but when we got to the Blue Line station, the trains were delayed! We didn't have to wait long for them to start up again, though. We got to the airport by 9:20 and checked our luggage and got through security in less than a half an hour, I think. Then we had breakfast at one of the food courts in the terminal (Sbarro's has a surprising number of vegetarian options!), and commenced waiting to get on our flight.
Our first flight was uneventful, as far as I remember. We got to North Carolina where we would catch a connecting flight and had lunch at the airport, in a food court where there were giant mobiles of flying vehicles hanging from the ceiling. Both Caitirin and I had lo mein noodles and Caitirin had sushi. I also had some ridiculously good loaded nachos, very fresh and restaurant-quality. Then we got on our flight to Tampa. There was an honest-to-god little yappy dog on our flight! I had no idea you could bring dogs on planes, but there was one on our flight back too. That one didn't yap the whole time, fortunately.
We got to Tampa and, miraculously, ran right into Caitirin's mum, dad, and brother as we were all coming out of the terminal to go to the baggage claim! We thought they'd be a few hours later than us, but they weren't. We got our luggage and went to our hotel, which was very nice. There was going to be some huge football game in Tampa on New Year's Day, and everybody else who was at the hotel was a football fan.
Caitirin and I put on skirts and sandals, since it was really nice and warm in Tampa (not 17 degrees *laughs*), and we all went to try to find dinner. It being New Year's Eve, the first place we went we got laughed at when we asked if they had any open reservations. So we went to Five Guys Burgers and Fries, which I've never been to, but it was fabulous. I don't eat hamburgers at restaurants very often, but theirs was really good, nice and well done. I had mine with pickles, mayonnaise, and mushrooms :3 They also had hand-cut fries, which were delicious. After dinner, we walked around a little. Tampa is full of palm trees! :D So we took pictures. There was an ice-skating rink that we watched for a while, and then we discovered this awesome playground outside of the Tampa Children's Museum. It had this contraption - like a skeleton of a dome, with these blobby plastic nodes on each pole that light up. There are a bunch of games you can play on it, all involving running around and slapping the lights when they turn a particular color. It was so much fun! I also climbed on top of this big stone half-sphere, and amused Caitirin's mother with my scrambling. Then we went back to the hotel room and Caitirin and I watched the Food Network until midnight :3 We could see the very tips of fireworks over the buildings, and we could also see some reflected in one of the glass-sided skyscrapers. It was pretty cool.
Day Two
The next day, New Year's Day 2011, we had breakfast at the hotel and then Caitirin and her mother and I went on a fruitless search for a drug store. The only CVS anywhere near was closed e_e But I did find some cool acorns! They were small and bullet-shaped, and the ones we have up here in NH are bigger and squatter. The guy who shuttled us to the cruise ship stopped at a Walgreen's for us, so it was all good.
When we got to the port, we gave our luggage to the people loading stuff onto the ship and went through security/customs/whatever. That didn't take too long, but there were masses of people there! Then we got onto the ship :3
Our ship, the Carnival Inspiration, was bigger than I could fathom. There were twelve decks, the three lowest of which were not accessible to guests. Inside, the seventh through twelfth floors opened into this huge atrium, topped by a glass dome. It was all decorated up for Christmas. There were two glass elevators that took you up and down those open floors. Other internal elevators ran to every floor. We wandered around for a while, mostly out on deck. The Lido Deck, deck 10, had a pool (smallish), a huge patio area around the pool, and several bars all outside, and the main buffet-style cafeteria inside. We had some lunch at the cafeteria and sat outside on the back deck. Caitirin's dad bought us some kind of pink alcoholic beverage to share :3 It was very rummy!
Once they let us into our rooms, we went down to check ours out. It was quite big (I imagine, for a room on a ship), and it had a full-sized window. The shower drain was bubbling and gurgling and smelling of sulfur, though, so we had our steward come and check it out. He rinsed it out and couldn't find anything wrong, and it didn't do anything else once we were underway, so we assume it was just the pipes being flushed or something.
At 4:30 the ship launched! We went up to the deck to watch, and went past several workyards and big oil tanks and various things on the banks on the way out of Tampa. There was a neat little hook-shaped quay thing filled with boats that we went past. Then we were in the open ocean :3
We wandered about and explored the boat for a while, attended a safety exercise where you learned where the lifeboats were, and went to dinner. The dining room was big and ballroom-like, with nice tablecloths. Since there were five of us, we rotated who got to sit on the outside to chairs and who had to squish three on the booth side of the table each night. For those who are interested, here's what I had for dinner all of the nights we were there:
- Spiced pumpkin and root vegetable pot pie (pretty good, not fabulous)
- Eggplant and zucchini (okay)
- Turkey (pretty good, not fabulous; creative sides, though)
- Black bean burritos (pretty good, not fabulous)
- Indian curry, chick peas, spinach with cheese cubes (awesome - but with naan that was much more like a biscuit than any naan I've ever had)
The food at the dining room wasn't terribly impressive. We liked the cafeteria better *laughs*
There was stuff going on all the time - trivia games to watch, events, contests, stuff like that. Either that night or the next night we saw a show called "Shout!" in the Paris Lounge theatre. It was full of 50's, 60's, and 70's pop music numbers and was staged wonderfully. An employee, Arthur, who led the safety exercise and was fabulous, was one of the dancers, and he was brilliant.
Day Three
Day three was a day at sea. It was so wonderfully warm the entire time - around 80 - so we decided to lay out and get some sun. There were no chairs to be found anywhere XD We wandered the decks all morning looking for somewhere to sit, then went to a Beatles name-that-tune trivia thing using the classical orchestrations of the songs. We ALMOST won! 24 out of 25! Curse you, If I Fell.
In the afternoon, we found somewhere to sit in the sun and read until dinner. That was the formal night, so we dressed all up, and we went to a comedy show afterward (the grown-up R-rated version).
You know how comedians bring people up on stage? Yeah. Well, this one picked on me ^^;;; I'm told I didn't turn red or act like a moron or anything, which is good. Gallantly, Caitirin told me later that she was trying to figure out how she could save me from my fear of being the center of attention, but anything she thought of (like grabbing me and running away) would only make him pick on us more. And I was fine :) My actor training kicked in, apparently.
The comedian was a magician, sort of, and he brought me up to do a card trick. He asked everyone he brought up who they were with and what they did, etc., and when I said I was with my wife and her family, he made all kinds of jokes about how we were going to make the people in the front row uncomfortable (he had been picking on them for being from the south earlier). His shtick was comprised mostly of sex jokes, and although I couldn't really understand what he was saying because I was right next to him and the microphone kind of garbled him, at one point he turned to me and said "It's because of guys like me that you have a wife, isn't it?" And I said, "... yep." And the audience laaaaughed.
That was my brush with fame. People recognized me later on the trip because they'd seen me XD
Day Four
This was our day in Grand Cayman! We got up early since we had to leave for our excursion at 7:45, had breakfast, and gathered in the Paris Lounge while the ship anchored. It's too shallow near the island to get an enormous ship like that into port, so we took a little ferry thing - there's a name for it, I can't remember - onto shore. We just had to show our cruise ID cards so they would know who left and who came back.
Holy cow, guys, the water was so BLUE. At this point it was a deep vibrant navy blue. When we got off the ferry thing, we walked up the dock to the port area, where there was a huge market, and a tour guide led us to a bus. Our bus driver, Dennis, was hilarious and awesome and told us all about the island. He pointed out the important landmarks as we went by (the Ritz Carlton, where Bill Gates owns the eighth floor; the governor's house; the graveyard along the beach, where the only topsoil is; St. Matthew's College) and told us a little bit about what we'd be doing on our excursion. We were going to Stingray City, a sandbar out in the North Sound where we could swim with stingrays :3
He let us off at a harbor where we got on a catamaran (I want one now, omg) that took us out through the mangroves and into the Sound. The water here was beyond belief - so blue it was turquoise, and so clear it was like glass. The Sound only gets about 8 feet deep, they told us, and you could see straight to the bottom no matter where you were. When the sun hit the water, it was this brilliant blue-green.
The people operating the catamaran and guiding us on the swim were really awesome :) There was an English guy who captained it (Les), an Australian guy who was leading the swim (Andrew), and an American or Canadian woman who was the photographer (Lou). Lou was very nice to me, since I was a little bit nervous about the water, and she told me all about the stingrays and about some idiotic people who had been on other excursions with them *laughs* Andrew was adorable in that gangly Bill-and-Ted I-spend-all-my-free-time-surfing-and-getting-drunk kind of way. He wasn't at all stupid, though XD Just groovy. We sat on the trampoline material at the front and watched the water the whole way out. It was unbelievably beautiful.
When we got out to the sandbar, they lowered a ladder into the water. We could see the stingrays swimming all around. They're so pretty, and the females are quite big! Some were more than three feet across. The water was gorgeous and warm, and totally clear, so clear it looked just light greyish or white when you were in it because of the sand underneath. The stingrays were ridiculously friendly - they'd come up to you and brush you with their flappy fin things, and bump up against you like a cat that wants you to pet it. On top, they're grey, and they feel a teeny bit rough, like velvet rubbed the wrong way. Underneath they're white and smooth as anything. We petted them and rubbed them and cooed at them (well, I did) and Lou took pictures of us holding them. If you held out your arms underwater they'd just swim into them and hang out with you a minute before swimming off. They've been coming to the sandbar for years (they live out in the barrier reef some distance away - we could see waves breaking on it) and when people noticed that they didn't run away, they started feeding them fish and interacting with them, and now it's a giant tourist attraction. Lou told us that they found one of the stingrays with a big chunk out of her fin once, and she stayed in the middle of the sandbar for three weeks until she had healed - didn't return to the reef at all - because they know it's so safe there. The people who run the excursions know lots of the individual rays and introduced us to a bunch of them (not Lou's favorite, though, sadly).
After a while, I went back up on the catamaran and got snorkel masks for Caitirin and I, and we took tons of pictures with our disposable underwater cameras. Most of them that I took were just of the point-and-shoot-and-hope-something-is-in-the-frame variety *laughs* I kept hyperventilating when I put my face in the water with the mask, because I guess I couldn't believe I could actually breath underwater so I was trying to get all the air I could? It was SO cool, though, to be able to see underwater. I wore contacts :3
We had to leave eventually, even though I could've stayed for hours, and even though Caitirin and I forgot our towels on the ship we dried off in the warm air really quickly. The boat ride back was just as gorgeous. Back at Georgetown, where we got off the cruise ship, we still had quite a bit of time until we sailed, so we walked around and looked in the shops. The cruise people lost Caitirin's mum's suitcase when they took it back at Tampa, so she didn't have her bathing suits or toiletries or her formal clothes or anything - giant pain in the neck for her, that was - so she shopped for a bathing suit. I got a couple of really nice necklaces (one made of teeny shells, one with a pewter stingray :3 I was still deep in love at that point) and a dress! I never buy myself clothes, but this was a really pretty black and white sun dress with an intricate mandala-type design, and I loved it. Caitirin urged me to just get it, so I did :3 Then we went to lunch aaat... Rackham's! That was it. It was outside on a jetty under a wooden pavilion, and I had stir fry vegetables and a ton of fried appetizer things. It was really super good. Caitirin's brother - who turns 21 in February - bought his very first (three) legal alcoholic drinks there *laughs*
Then it was back on the ship. We waited in an extremely long line to get back onto the ferry thing (long in length, luckily not in time) and it was quite hot. Tender, that's what the ferry thing was called! Anyway, back on the ship we took showers and napped for a while and went to dinner. I think this was the night when they finally found Caitirin's mom's luggage. About time!
Day Five
We arrived at Cozumel the next morning around 11. It was nice having a late start, so we could sleep late and have a leisurely breakfast :) We were going on the Ruins of Tulum tour, so we got off the ship at the dock at Cozumel and went right to a ferry that would take us to the mainland (the Yucatan Peninsula - I think we were in the state of Quintana Roo). It was pretty hot by then, and the ferry ride was really nice because we sat outside and had the spray on us the whole time. The beach on the Mexican coast was beautiful and white-sanded and full of people. We got right onto our tour bus, which was very comfortable but sadly had windows that were hard to see out of.
Luckily, though, our tour guide was AWESOME and talked to us the whole way. His name was Angel, and listening to him was like listening to an extremely personable college professor - he was very friendly and funny, but at the same time it was easy to tell how much the history of this area meant to him and how important it was to him that we got a thorough basis for understanding the culture. He was local, and his grandfather came from Spain while his grandmother was Maya. He grew up speaking the Maya language, so it was really cool to hear him tell us little details about place names and things like that. The way he explained things to us was like he knew we could never grasp everything about the culture in an hour bus ride plus 45 minutes at the site, so he was trying to give us all of the important building blocks we'd need to do research later. I feel like I should have taken notes XD
On the way to the site, we stopped at an extremely nice gift shop. It was really more like an art museum or a cultural center where you could buy the exhibits. Angel explained to us that the reason the Spanish thought Maya cities were made out of gold was because they used a lot of a particular kind of obsidian that, if you carve it right, flashes golden in the light. One story was that the Spanish took all of the ornaments and carvings from the outside of a temple, thinking it was gold, and then when they got it back to their ship at night and showed their leader, it was all just black rocks XD I got a small disk-shaped rounded piece, and it's absolutely gorgeous. All of the stuff at that center was made by local artists, and Angel explained how long it took them to carve the obsidian. I also got a necklace for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
coastal_spirit there too :3 It was carved flowers and beads made from some kind of dark brown wood. I wish we could have stayed longer, but we only had like 20 minutes to look around.
Tulum was only about 10 minutes away. The bus dropped us off a half-mile (I think?) from the site, where there was a huge market. Most of the stores opened out into these connected courtyards where people in costumes were performing. When we got there, Angel told us about a family-owned shop in the market that sells custom silver necklaces with people's names in the Maya written language - he said it comes from a tradition where people would have a stone tablet made with their child's name on it when they were born, then they'd give it to the child when he or she turned seven, and then the child would exchange it with their spouse when they got married. People do the same thing with the necklaces now (he had his wife's and his son's). The artisans made them right there while people were taking the tour, so Caitirin and I (and her parents) ordered one each :3 I think my necklace (or rather, Caitirin's, since we exchanged them) is my favorite thing I bought the whole time.
We walked up to the ruins (well, most of the buildings are still standing so they're more like abandoned than ruined) and got more history and culture from Angel. The amount he managed to cram into 45 minutes was really amazing. Tulum was a sacred walled site of about five acres, I think, and most people who lived there lived outside of the walls. The educated religious elite lived inside, but they didn't live in any of the stone buildings (because they would have all died of the heat. It was way too hot for us and it was winter - Angel was wearing long sleeves and pants). People lived in houses made of wood, so they're not there anymore. Tulum was apparently (according to my crappy internet research) at its height between the 1200s-1400s, but the Maya civilization was around from 2,000 B.C. on. It's called Tulum, Angel said, from the Maya word for swamp, because when the Spanish came, they asked the Maya people where they were, and they told them "in the swamp (obviously, seeing as you're standing in two feet of mud)". The name that the Maya used for Tulum was "Zama", or "Dawn", because many of the temples there are arranged particularly to showcase the dawn. All of the temples have east-west doors. One of them had a little hole in the opposite wall from the west door, and when the sun rises on the winter solstice, it comes through like a starburst. He had pictures :3
We unfortunately didn't have much time there, and I was a little disappointed because there was a beach and this was our only other chance to swim in the (blue blue blue!) ocean. But I wanted to run around the site and take pictures more, so that's what we did. Poor Caitirin got seriously overheated and sat in the shade while I ran around with the camera. It was really awfully hot O_o Remind me to go back in January and not, like, August *New Englander*
The buildings were really well-preserved for the most part (you don't get to go in any) and had lots of cool relief carvings on them, but there wasn't really any explanation about what anything was. I think it's because they don't know - most Mayan texts were destroyed by the Spanish (I think there are only three left that people know about), which, needless to say, sucks. But it did mean that I got to see everything I wanted to see even though we only had a little time. We walked back to the market and bought some stuff from the shops. The shopkeepers will come out and grab you from the road like "I have this thing I know you want to buy! Come on, come on!" And I CAN NEVER SAY NO -_-;; Caitirin had to haggle for me because I fail at that too. I got a very nice shell necklace, but I had to save my money for the silver one I'd ordered so I couldn't get anything else.
When we got back to the main market, we picked up our necklaces and had about 10 minutes before the bus left. Angel said we could bring food on the bus, and we were starving, since it was around 3 or 4 and we hadn't had any lunch. Caitirin and I got chicken quesadillas from Senor Frosty's, where Angel recommended the fish tacos as genuine local food, and they were seriously the best food I had on the entire trip. HOMG. I mean, I don't even usually eat meat that we don't make at home, even chicken, but this was incredibly good. It had two chicken quesadillas with avocado slices on top, black beans, and rice. NOM. I want more now XD
Amusing story time! So Caitirin's brother was super-excited about this excursion because he could buy alcohol legally in Mexico. He bought a margarita at Senor Frosty's which he swore had no actual margarita mix in it and was just tequila and ice, and then had two beers on the bus, so he was very talkative on the way home and told us all about how much he loved us XD But anyway, he's a big fan of the Denver Broncos, and while we were ordering food he saw that one of the shops at the market had a lot of football merchandise. He asked the staff if they had anything with the Broncos logo, but nobody could find anything, so he finally told one guy that if he could find something Broncos for him, he'd give the guy his watch. A few minutes later the guy came out with this bright orange Broncos poncho XD Caitirin's brother, a man of his word, traded the guy his watch for the poncho. It made the best conversation piece for the rest of the trip *laughs*
The bus ride and ferry ride back were nice and relaxing. On the ferry, we got to watch the sun go down, without it being hidden behind low clouds for the first time on the trip. It was amazing, one of those this-world-is-so-beautiful-I-can't-believe-it moments. People applauded when it finally vanished below the horizon.
Day Six
Day Six was our last day at sea. We generally just relaxed, and packed. We did go see another show in the evening - this time it was Latin-themed, but it was sort of Las Vegas instead of Broadway. Lots and lots of sequins and feathers. It wasn't as good as the first show, but it was still fun, and the music was great, not to mention the fascinating costumes!
Day Seven
On the last day of our trip, we docked at Tampa sometime early in the morning. They wouldn't let us out until 9:00, and we had a plane to catch at 12:30, so we made sure we had passes to leave early. We got out about 9:15, went back through customs at the port authority, collected our luggage, and walked across the street to a parking garage where we were supposed to pick up a shuttle to the airport (Caitirin's parents had arranged for it. They're so wonderful!). There were like a dozen other shuttles there, even from the same company, but ours didn't show up e_e So 40 minutes later one of the other shuttles took us. We got to the airport in plenty of time, though, and had a short ride to Georgia, where we hung out for three or so hours before getting on our flight to Boston. The last flight was probably the nicest, mostly because the guy who sat in the end seat of our three-seat row got up after we got to cruising altitude and took his laptop to the back where he worked the whole time *laughs* He was very friendly, and it was relaxing not to be boxed in.
We got into Boston at around 7:00, got our luggage by 7:20 (missing the 7:10 bus, d'oh) and caught the 8:10 bus home, arriving back home at 10:00. My parents had picked up our car from the train station, washed it, filled it with gas, and parked it at the bus station for us ;_; They're the BEST EVER.
Holycrap it felt so cold XD It was like 20 degrees, so it should've felt balmy for New Hampshire in January! But our blood had thinned in only a week, and I was freezing. The kitties were happy to see us :3
As an afterward, I scoff at my past self's bemoaning of 17-degree temperature. 17 degrees is a heat wave. I've seen enough of -10 for this year, just the same.
Day One
We woke up at the crack of early on December 31. We already had our luggage packed and most of it put into the car, so we just got ready and brought the last couple of bags down. The stars were still out and it was about 17 degrees. We got to the train station around 6:20 and got on the train to Boston at 6:45. On the train ride down, I watched the sun come up and Caitirin started knitting a sock. It was cool looking out at the woods in the snow, because there were tracks everywhere. We went through a couple of train stations and arrived at North Station at around 8:15, where we would take the T to Logan Airport.
We didn't have too much trouble hauling our luggage through the T stations (one big suitcase, two small duffels, and two backpacks), but when we got to the Blue Line station, the trains were delayed! We didn't have to wait long for them to start up again, though. We got to the airport by 9:20 and checked our luggage and got through security in less than a half an hour, I think. Then we had breakfast at one of the food courts in the terminal (Sbarro's has a surprising number of vegetarian options!), and commenced waiting to get on our flight.
Our first flight was uneventful, as far as I remember. We got to North Carolina where we would catch a connecting flight and had lunch at the airport, in a food court where there were giant mobiles of flying vehicles hanging from the ceiling. Both Caitirin and I had lo mein noodles and Caitirin had sushi. I also had some ridiculously good loaded nachos, very fresh and restaurant-quality. Then we got on our flight to Tampa. There was an honest-to-god little yappy dog on our flight! I had no idea you could bring dogs on planes, but there was one on our flight back too. That one didn't yap the whole time, fortunately.
We got to Tampa and, miraculously, ran right into Caitirin's mum, dad, and brother as we were all coming out of the terminal to go to the baggage claim! We thought they'd be a few hours later than us, but they weren't. We got our luggage and went to our hotel, which was very nice. There was going to be some huge football game in Tampa on New Year's Day, and everybody else who was at the hotel was a football fan.
Caitirin and I put on skirts and sandals, since it was really nice and warm in Tampa (not 17 degrees *laughs*), and we all went to try to find dinner. It being New Year's Eve, the first place we went we got laughed at when we asked if they had any open reservations. So we went to Five Guys Burgers and Fries, which I've never been to, but it was fabulous. I don't eat hamburgers at restaurants very often, but theirs was really good, nice and well done. I had mine with pickles, mayonnaise, and mushrooms :3 They also had hand-cut fries, which were delicious. After dinner, we walked around a little. Tampa is full of palm trees! :D So we took pictures. There was an ice-skating rink that we watched for a while, and then we discovered this awesome playground outside of the Tampa Children's Museum. It had this contraption - like a skeleton of a dome, with these blobby plastic nodes on each pole that light up. There are a bunch of games you can play on it, all involving running around and slapping the lights when they turn a particular color. It was so much fun! I also climbed on top of this big stone half-sphere, and amused Caitirin's mother with my scrambling. Then we went back to the hotel room and Caitirin and I watched the Food Network until midnight :3 We could see the very tips of fireworks over the buildings, and we could also see some reflected in one of the glass-sided skyscrapers. It was pretty cool.
Day Two
The next day, New Year's Day 2011, we had breakfast at the hotel and then Caitirin and her mother and I went on a fruitless search for a drug store. The only CVS anywhere near was closed e_e But I did find some cool acorns! They were small and bullet-shaped, and the ones we have up here in NH are bigger and squatter. The guy who shuttled us to the cruise ship stopped at a Walgreen's for us, so it was all good.
When we got to the port, we gave our luggage to the people loading stuff onto the ship and went through security/customs/whatever. That didn't take too long, but there were masses of people there! Then we got onto the ship :3
Our ship, the Carnival Inspiration, was bigger than I could fathom. There were twelve decks, the three lowest of which were not accessible to guests. Inside, the seventh through twelfth floors opened into this huge atrium, topped by a glass dome. It was all decorated up for Christmas. There were two glass elevators that took you up and down those open floors. Other internal elevators ran to every floor. We wandered around for a while, mostly out on deck. The Lido Deck, deck 10, had a pool (smallish), a huge patio area around the pool, and several bars all outside, and the main buffet-style cafeteria inside. We had some lunch at the cafeteria and sat outside on the back deck. Caitirin's dad bought us some kind of pink alcoholic beverage to share :3 It was very rummy!
Once they let us into our rooms, we went down to check ours out. It was quite big (I imagine, for a room on a ship), and it had a full-sized window. The shower drain was bubbling and gurgling and smelling of sulfur, though, so we had our steward come and check it out. He rinsed it out and couldn't find anything wrong, and it didn't do anything else once we were underway, so we assume it was just the pipes being flushed or something.
At 4:30 the ship launched! We went up to the deck to watch, and went past several workyards and big oil tanks and various things on the banks on the way out of Tampa. There was a neat little hook-shaped quay thing filled with boats that we went past. Then we were in the open ocean :3
We wandered about and explored the boat for a while, attended a safety exercise where you learned where the lifeboats were, and went to dinner. The dining room was big and ballroom-like, with nice tablecloths. Since there were five of us, we rotated who got to sit on the outside to chairs and who had to squish three on the booth side of the table each night. For those who are interested, here's what I had for dinner all of the nights we were there:
- Spiced pumpkin and root vegetable pot pie (pretty good, not fabulous)
- Eggplant and zucchini (okay)
- Turkey (pretty good, not fabulous; creative sides, though)
- Black bean burritos (pretty good, not fabulous)
- Indian curry, chick peas, spinach with cheese cubes (awesome - but with naan that was much more like a biscuit than any naan I've ever had)
The food at the dining room wasn't terribly impressive. We liked the cafeteria better *laughs*
There was stuff going on all the time - trivia games to watch, events, contests, stuff like that. Either that night or the next night we saw a show called "Shout!" in the Paris Lounge theatre. It was full of 50's, 60's, and 70's pop music numbers and was staged wonderfully. An employee, Arthur, who led the safety exercise and was fabulous, was one of the dancers, and he was brilliant.
Day Three
Day three was a day at sea. It was so wonderfully warm the entire time - around 80 - so we decided to lay out and get some sun. There were no chairs to be found anywhere XD We wandered the decks all morning looking for somewhere to sit, then went to a Beatles name-that-tune trivia thing using the classical orchestrations of the songs. We ALMOST won! 24 out of 25! Curse you, If I Fell.
In the afternoon, we found somewhere to sit in the sun and read until dinner. That was the formal night, so we dressed all up, and we went to a comedy show afterward (the grown-up R-rated version).
You know how comedians bring people up on stage? Yeah. Well, this one picked on me ^^;;; I'm told I didn't turn red or act like a moron or anything, which is good. Gallantly, Caitirin told me later that she was trying to figure out how she could save me from my fear of being the center of attention, but anything she thought of (like grabbing me and running away) would only make him pick on us more. And I was fine :) My actor training kicked in, apparently.
The comedian was a magician, sort of, and he brought me up to do a card trick. He asked everyone he brought up who they were with and what they did, etc., and when I said I was with my wife and her family, he made all kinds of jokes about how we were going to make the people in the front row uncomfortable (he had been picking on them for being from the south earlier). His shtick was comprised mostly of sex jokes, and although I couldn't really understand what he was saying because I was right next to him and the microphone kind of garbled him, at one point he turned to me and said "It's because of guys like me that you have a wife, isn't it?" And I said, "... yep." And the audience laaaaughed.
That was my brush with fame. People recognized me later on the trip because they'd seen me XD
Day Four
This was our day in Grand Cayman! We got up early since we had to leave for our excursion at 7:45, had breakfast, and gathered in the Paris Lounge while the ship anchored. It's too shallow near the island to get an enormous ship like that into port, so we took a little ferry thing - there's a name for it, I can't remember - onto shore. We just had to show our cruise ID cards so they would know who left and who came back.
Holy cow, guys, the water was so BLUE. At this point it was a deep vibrant navy blue. When we got off the ferry thing, we walked up the dock to the port area, where there was a huge market, and a tour guide led us to a bus. Our bus driver, Dennis, was hilarious and awesome and told us all about the island. He pointed out the important landmarks as we went by (the Ritz Carlton, where Bill Gates owns the eighth floor; the governor's house; the graveyard along the beach, where the only topsoil is; St. Matthew's College) and told us a little bit about what we'd be doing on our excursion. We were going to Stingray City, a sandbar out in the North Sound where we could swim with stingrays :3
He let us off at a harbor where we got on a catamaran (I want one now, omg) that took us out through the mangroves and into the Sound. The water here was beyond belief - so blue it was turquoise, and so clear it was like glass. The Sound only gets about 8 feet deep, they told us, and you could see straight to the bottom no matter where you were. When the sun hit the water, it was this brilliant blue-green.
The people operating the catamaran and guiding us on the swim were really awesome :) There was an English guy who captained it (Les), an Australian guy who was leading the swim (Andrew), and an American or Canadian woman who was the photographer (Lou). Lou was very nice to me, since I was a little bit nervous about the water, and she told me all about the stingrays and about some idiotic people who had been on other excursions with them *laughs* Andrew was adorable in that gangly Bill-and-Ted I-spend-all-my-free-time-surfing-and-getting-drunk kind of way. He wasn't at all stupid, though XD Just groovy. We sat on the trampoline material at the front and watched the water the whole way out. It was unbelievably beautiful.
When we got out to the sandbar, they lowered a ladder into the water. We could see the stingrays swimming all around. They're so pretty, and the females are quite big! Some were more than three feet across. The water was gorgeous and warm, and totally clear, so clear it looked just light greyish or white when you were in it because of the sand underneath. The stingrays were ridiculously friendly - they'd come up to you and brush you with their flappy fin things, and bump up against you like a cat that wants you to pet it. On top, they're grey, and they feel a teeny bit rough, like velvet rubbed the wrong way. Underneath they're white and smooth as anything. We petted them and rubbed them and cooed at them (well, I did) and Lou took pictures of us holding them. If you held out your arms underwater they'd just swim into them and hang out with you a minute before swimming off. They've been coming to the sandbar for years (they live out in the barrier reef some distance away - we could see waves breaking on it) and when people noticed that they didn't run away, they started feeding them fish and interacting with them, and now it's a giant tourist attraction. Lou told us that they found one of the stingrays with a big chunk out of her fin once, and she stayed in the middle of the sandbar for three weeks until she had healed - didn't return to the reef at all - because they know it's so safe there. The people who run the excursions know lots of the individual rays and introduced us to a bunch of them (not Lou's favorite, though, sadly).
After a while, I went back up on the catamaran and got snorkel masks for Caitirin and I, and we took tons of pictures with our disposable underwater cameras. Most of them that I took were just of the point-and-shoot-and-hope-something-is-in-the-frame variety *laughs* I kept hyperventilating when I put my face in the water with the mask, because I guess I couldn't believe I could actually breath underwater so I was trying to get all the air I could? It was SO cool, though, to be able to see underwater. I wore contacts :3
We had to leave eventually, even though I could've stayed for hours, and even though Caitirin and I forgot our towels on the ship we dried off in the warm air really quickly. The boat ride back was just as gorgeous. Back at Georgetown, where we got off the cruise ship, we still had quite a bit of time until we sailed, so we walked around and looked in the shops. The cruise people lost Caitirin's mum's suitcase when they took it back at Tampa, so she didn't have her bathing suits or toiletries or her formal clothes or anything - giant pain in the neck for her, that was - so she shopped for a bathing suit. I got a couple of really nice necklaces (one made of teeny shells, one with a pewter stingray :3 I was still deep in love at that point) and a dress! I never buy myself clothes, but this was a really pretty black and white sun dress with an intricate mandala-type design, and I loved it. Caitirin urged me to just get it, so I did :3 Then we went to lunch aaat... Rackham's! That was it. It was outside on a jetty under a wooden pavilion, and I had stir fry vegetables and a ton of fried appetizer things. It was really super good. Caitirin's brother - who turns 21 in February - bought his very first (three) legal alcoholic drinks there *laughs*
Then it was back on the ship. We waited in an extremely long line to get back onto the ferry thing (long in length, luckily not in time) and it was quite hot. Tender, that's what the ferry thing was called! Anyway, back on the ship we took showers and napped for a while and went to dinner. I think this was the night when they finally found Caitirin's mom's luggage. About time!
Day Five
We arrived at Cozumel the next morning around 11. It was nice having a late start, so we could sleep late and have a leisurely breakfast :) We were going on the Ruins of Tulum tour, so we got off the ship at the dock at Cozumel and went right to a ferry that would take us to the mainland (the Yucatan Peninsula - I think we were in the state of Quintana Roo). It was pretty hot by then, and the ferry ride was really nice because we sat outside and had the spray on us the whole time. The beach on the Mexican coast was beautiful and white-sanded and full of people. We got right onto our tour bus, which was very comfortable but sadly had windows that were hard to see out of.
Luckily, though, our tour guide was AWESOME and talked to us the whole way. His name was Angel, and listening to him was like listening to an extremely personable college professor - he was very friendly and funny, but at the same time it was easy to tell how much the history of this area meant to him and how important it was to him that we got a thorough basis for understanding the culture. He was local, and his grandfather came from Spain while his grandmother was Maya. He grew up speaking the Maya language, so it was really cool to hear him tell us little details about place names and things like that. The way he explained things to us was like he knew we could never grasp everything about the culture in an hour bus ride plus 45 minutes at the site, so he was trying to give us all of the important building blocks we'd need to do research later. I feel like I should have taken notes XD
On the way to the site, we stopped at an extremely nice gift shop. It was really more like an art museum or a cultural center where you could buy the exhibits. Angel explained to us that the reason the Spanish thought Maya cities were made out of gold was because they used a lot of a particular kind of obsidian that, if you carve it right, flashes golden in the light. One story was that the Spanish took all of the ornaments and carvings from the outside of a temple, thinking it was gold, and then when they got it back to their ship at night and showed their leader, it was all just black rocks XD I got a small disk-shaped rounded piece, and it's absolutely gorgeous. All of the stuff at that center was made by local artists, and Angel explained how long it took them to carve the obsidian. I also got a necklace for
coastal_spirit there too :3 It was carved flowers and beads made from some kind of dark brown wood. I wish we could have stayed longer, but we only had like 20 minutes to look around.Tulum was only about 10 minutes away. The bus dropped us off a half-mile (I think?) from the site, where there was a huge market. Most of the stores opened out into these connected courtyards where people in costumes were performing. When we got there, Angel told us about a family-owned shop in the market that sells custom silver necklaces with people's names in the Maya written language - he said it comes from a tradition where people would have a stone tablet made with their child's name on it when they were born, then they'd give it to the child when he or she turned seven, and then the child would exchange it with their spouse when they got married. People do the same thing with the necklaces now (he had his wife's and his son's). The artisans made them right there while people were taking the tour, so Caitirin and I (and her parents) ordered one each :3 I think my necklace (or rather, Caitirin's, since we exchanged them) is my favorite thing I bought the whole time.
We walked up to the ruins (well, most of the buildings are still standing so they're more like abandoned than ruined) and got more history and culture from Angel. The amount he managed to cram into 45 minutes was really amazing. Tulum was a sacred walled site of about five acres, I think, and most people who lived there lived outside of the walls. The educated religious elite lived inside, but they didn't live in any of the stone buildings (because they would have all died of the heat. It was way too hot for us and it was winter - Angel was wearing long sleeves and pants). People lived in houses made of wood, so they're not there anymore. Tulum was apparently (according to my crappy internet research) at its height between the 1200s-1400s, but the Maya civilization was around from 2,000 B.C. on. It's called Tulum, Angel said, from the Maya word for swamp, because when the Spanish came, they asked the Maya people where they were, and they told them "in the swamp (obviously, seeing as you're standing in two feet of mud)". The name that the Maya used for Tulum was "Zama", or "Dawn", because many of the temples there are arranged particularly to showcase the dawn. All of the temples have east-west doors. One of them had a little hole in the opposite wall from the west door, and when the sun rises on the winter solstice, it comes through like a starburst. He had pictures :3
We unfortunately didn't have much time there, and I was a little disappointed because there was a beach and this was our only other chance to swim in the (blue blue blue!) ocean. But I wanted to run around the site and take pictures more, so that's what we did. Poor Caitirin got seriously overheated and sat in the shade while I ran around with the camera. It was really awfully hot O_o Remind me to go back in January and not, like, August *New Englander*
The buildings were really well-preserved for the most part (you don't get to go in any) and had lots of cool relief carvings on them, but there wasn't really any explanation about what anything was. I think it's because they don't know - most Mayan texts were destroyed by the Spanish (I think there are only three left that people know about), which, needless to say, sucks. But it did mean that I got to see everything I wanted to see even though we only had a little time. We walked back to the market and bought some stuff from the shops. The shopkeepers will come out and grab you from the road like "I have this thing I know you want to buy! Come on, come on!" And I CAN NEVER SAY NO -_-;; Caitirin had to haggle for me because I fail at that too. I got a very nice shell necklace, but I had to save my money for the silver one I'd ordered so I couldn't get anything else.
When we got back to the main market, we picked up our necklaces and had about 10 minutes before the bus left. Angel said we could bring food on the bus, and we were starving, since it was around 3 or 4 and we hadn't had any lunch. Caitirin and I got chicken quesadillas from Senor Frosty's, where Angel recommended the fish tacos as genuine local food, and they were seriously the best food I had on the entire trip. HOMG. I mean, I don't even usually eat meat that we don't make at home, even chicken, but this was incredibly good. It had two chicken quesadillas with avocado slices on top, black beans, and rice. NOM. I want more now XD
Amusing story time! So Caitirin's brother was super-excited about this excursion because he could buy alcohol legally in Mexico. He bought a margarita at Senor Frosty's which he swore had no actual margarita mix in it and was just tequila and ice, and then had two beers on the bus, so he was very talkative on the way home and told us all about how much he loved us XD But anyway, he's a big fan of the Denver Broncos, and while we were ordering food he saw that one of the shops at the market had a lot of football merchandise. He asked the staff if they had anything with the Broncos logo, but nobody could find anything, so he finally told one guy that if he could find something Broncos for him, he'd give the guy his watch. A few minutes later the guy came out with this bright orange Broncos poncho XD Caitirin's brother, a man of his word, traded the guy his watch for the poncho. It made the best conversation piece for the rest of the trip *laughs*
The bus ride and ferry ride back were nice and relaxing. On the ferry, we got to watch the sun go down, without it being hidden behind low clouds for the first time on the trip. It was amazing, one of those this-world-is-so-beautiful-I-can't-believe-it moments. People applauded when it finally vanished below the horizon.
Day Six
Day Six was our last day at sea. We generally just relaxed, and packed. We did go see another show in the evening - this time it was Latin-themed, but it was sort of Las Vegas instead of Broadway. Lots and lots of sequins and feathers. It wasn't as good as the first show, but it was still fun, and the music was great, not to mention the fascinating costumes!
Day Seven
On the last day of our trip, we docked at Tampa sometime early in the morning. They wouldn't let us out until 9:00, and we had a plane to catch at 12:30, so we made sure we had passes to leave early. We got out about 9:15, went back through customs at the port authority, collected our luggage, and walked across the street to a parking garage where we were supposed to pick up a shuttle to the airport (Caitirin's parents had arranged for it. They're so wonderful!). There were like a dozen other shuttles there, even from the same company, but ours didn't show up e_e So 40 minutes later one of the other shuttles took us. We got to the airport in plenty of time, though, and had a short ride to Georgia, where we hung out for three or so hours before getting on our flight to Boston. The last flight was probably the nicest, mostly because the guy who sat in the end seat of our three-seat row got up after we got to cruising altitude and took his laptop to the back where he worked the whole time *laughs* He was very friendly, and it was relaxing not to be boxed in.
We got into Boston at around 7:00, got our luggage by 7:20 (missing the 7:10 bus, d'oh) and caught the 8:10 bus home, arriving back home at 10:00. My parents had picked up our car from the train station, washed it, filled it with gas, and parked it at the bus station for us ;_; They're the BEST EVER.
Holycrap it felt so cold XD It was like 20 degrees, so it should've felt balmy for New Hampshire in January! But our blood had thinned in only a week, and I was freezing. The kitties were happy to see us :3
As an afterward, I scoff at my past self's bemoaning of 17-degree temperature. 17 degrees is a heat wave. I've seen enough of -10 for this year, just the same.
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Date: 2011-01-26 03:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-26 09:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-26 05:31 am (UTC)Also, add the lost books of the Maya to the long list omeone needs to explore and recreate someday. A Mayan writer or artist, I hope. Thinking about stories like that getting destroyed, I cringe. But I went to an exhibit hre of Jerry Pinkney's watercolors, and they're almost photographic, detailed and vibrant, scenes like Harriet Tubman as a child and Ghanaian slaves just brought on shore in Rio de Janero, gazing around with fierce curiosity... photographs no one took. So sometimes people rescue at least some of what is lost.
What an amazing trip it sounds like! So glad you guys had some time to get away and rest. *hug*
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Date: 2011-01-26 10:16 pm (UTC)