Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Our Caribbean Cruise


We left Houston at 11:50 a.m. on Saturday to board the cruise ship in Galveston by 2:30 p.m. No problem right? It should have taken ONE HOUR. We sat on I-45 at a stand still for over an hour. Thank God that my brother-in-law Matt agreed to drop us off and knew Houston traffic - he hopped on a side road and went out into some woods and thanks to the handy GPS ended up on I-45 again a few miles up the road and it was MOVING. I was calling Carnival Cruise Lines and asking when the last possible second was that we could board. We ended up checking in at exactly 2:30........and the adventure begins.

I started getting seasick the next day - our "fun day at sea" and stayed that way most of the day and into the night. The water in the swimming pools was splashing out onto the deck because the boat was moving so much. The weather and wind slowed us down so much that we arrived in Cozumel, Mexico 2 hours late. When we got there though - it was so worth it......


The beaches were so beautiful......and I took so many pictures of the water. The pictures don't even do it justice. I could have sat in this spot and looked at the water for hours, BUT we only had until 6 to be back on the ship so we did some sight-seeing.


I just thought this was really cool. I dragged Jason to the museum (really - I'm THAT person) and when we were coming out I noticed that every single car parked around was so colorful just like everything else there. They also were decorating the streets for a huge festival the following week.

The next day we woke up in Progresso and we REALLY liked it there. It wasn't as big of a tourist area as Cozumel and we were completely relaxed. We found a little restaurant with huts on the beach and ate great food, drank Mexican beer, and shopped. It was great - all the people selling things just came to you - all you had to do was sit there. (pretty cool I think)
These are our friends Arnold and Joanne. Joanne is an occupational therapist that I work with and we were going to post this in our office to rub it in that we had such a great day while everyone else was working, but I guess that wouldn't be too nice.
Over 5 days - we had one smooth day and 1 smooth night. Other than that - LOTS of people were seasick including myself. The grand finale is that on the very last night at 3:00 in the morning.......our a/c unit in the room shut off which immediately woke me up. I woke Jason up and we heard all this commotion in the hallway. He opened the door to look and then asked "why do all those people have lifejackets on?" WHAT!!!! Just before I had a full blown panic attack - the ship captain came on the overhead speaker and said that they had extinguished a fire a couple of floors below us and our wing was one place where people were evacuated to.
Needless to say - we're not recommending any cruises, but we definitely want to go back to Mexico at some point........in an airplane.