My Mother's 60th Birthday

I am close to my mother. This year, she turns 60. She is throwing herself a birthday party and I am throwing her a cruise.

Perhaps, not me exactly, but it worked out that way.

After my last cruise, which was also my first cruise, I was hooked. My husband and I signed up for another in January.

As I have stated, my goal is to travel occasionally. More often would be better. However, I need to get away from work and home with some type of regularity. I'm tired of living my life in an endless cycle of work and home and work and home. My goal was one vacation a year with plans for at least two. Maybe, I would start to take an occasional weekend trip as well.

Well, my big vacation for this year was a trip to Hong Kong. Last week, that was canceled. I was upset but not devastated. I didn't want to go to Hong Kong with the passion that I wanted to go to Japan. However, I wanted to go. I'd been reading and watching shows about it.

The time that I had taken off of work started the week after my mother's birthday. With enough money to travel to Asia in my pocket, I decided to see if my mother wanted to take a birthday cruise with me instead.

She said she did.

So I wound up booking us on a cruise. Two months after my last one and two months before my one with my husband. It is both rediculious and exillerating at the same time. I can't make this to much of a habit or I will be in the poor house. However, the next four months will be filled with a lot of personal activities.

Jet Skis, Sand and Water

We tried the grill area for lunch this time. I said, “don’t eat to much” and my husband said, “Okay.” I got Mongolian for both of us and he ran off to get a hot dog for himself and a burger for me.

Once I had the Mongolian in hand I found him at a table with hot dogs, burgers and fries. I plunked down the Mongolian and said, “I thought we were not going to get super full?”

“Whoops.”

Lunch was okay. The burgers are pretty good. Not the best thing ever put on a bun, but nice and flavorful if thin. I don’t mind them thin. I take off half of the bun anyway, plus I understand the concept of mass market food and money management. They are going to be just enough and not more. I’ve had Michelin star burgers before and its a different environment and a different comparison. (I still dream about those Michelin star burgers as well, wow) The hot dogs I don’t care for but the husband really enjoys. The fries are super tasty. The Mongolian was not so much. It needed more sauce in my opinion. It wasn’t bad just not great. I will try it again on my next cruise but I did not eat it again on that one. There were better meals available on the ship.

Fuller then we meant to be, we went to change and rest for a little bit before we went to use the jet skis. We had gotten little water wallets. They are plastic with a clamp and a rubber seal. They had stayed dry for our snorkeling and we wore them around our necks to carry our sail and sign cards. We added our photo IDs to the mix. Our swimming clothing looks more like tops and shorts. Its easier then carrying bags for cover ups and such things. On our feet we wore our Vibram Five Fingers. They are all I wear these days and they are excellent beach shoes. My pair for the day were bright blue and yellow and got a lot of attention during the day.

We went and found the Jet Ski place. The off Carnival excursion is a bit more... rugged. We paid, they called the guy to expect them and put a pink band on the husbands wrist with the reservation number. Everyone assumed that we were Jet Sking for the husband and that I might not want to do it with him. I didn’t tell them it was the reverse.

Our cab fare to Paradise Beach was included. Our cab fair back was not.

From Bahamas - 2011

We avoided hawkers for jet skis, beach chairs, umbrellas, water, beer, para sailing and everything else. We found our place and after a brief argument about who was riding and the fact that we wanted to ride double we went out on the jet skis.

From Bahamas - 2011

The husband just wanted to ride. I did a ten minute learn to use the jet ski with its owner and then released us. I will say that for two heavier people, it wallowed a bit. He enjoyed himself. I had fun but I learned that I don’t like having a passenger. I am a motorcycle rider and I refuse to have a passenger on my bike. Now I am even more sure that I will never allow someone to ride behind me on my bike. There is no warm ocean to catch us if we go over. Because he is not a strong swimmer I fretted about him the entire time. We had life vests but I still worried. Then, a strong wave came as I was turning around and off we went.

I was frantic about my husband. I surfaced and found he was right beside me, giggling and holding onto the side of the jet ski with his life vest doing its job. The water was so warm the fall itself wasn’t a shock. Also, the flavor of the water was different from the snorkeling in Freeport. It was not as bitty and nasty saline.

The jet skis owner came and rescued us. The husband went back in and I finished riding around. I will list Jet Skis as a lot of fun. Next time we will each ride our own. I tipped the young man that had been so informative and we laughed over our unexpected plunge into the water.

Now he has a story to tell about how I dumped him in the Ocean.

Sand Sand Everywhere

From Bahamas - 2011

We decided to stay on the beach and play in the water.

From Bahamas - 2011

My idea of beach and ocean is not pleasant. It was limited to Ocean City, Maryland on the east cost. The sand is dirty and full of trash. People like to use drugs on the beach as well and there is a constant worry about strings along with the trash. The water is normally very cold and a murky color. The sand is full of shells and trash and you begin to fear for what you might have stepped on. There are also plenty of jelly fish to top things off.

The beaches and the water in the Caribbean are nothing like that. The beaches are clean if you take away the cans and bottles of drink everywhere. People tuck them into the sand to go play in the water. This is not the best idea that they have ever had. The cans get filled with sand. Beyond this, and the occasional bottle in the water it is very clean. I think people are surprised at how quickly the tide comes in and they get their things stolen from them.

The water is warm. It is warm like a bath is warm. At only a few degrees below your body temperature the feeling is blissful. There is no cold shock to it. Also, it is very, very clear. This helps make things a little bit nicer in an already nice day.

We were already wet from the jet skis. It was a simple matter of going, “Wanna play in the water?” and Tim saying, “Yeah.” We trotted down to the water and plunged in. The water is a lot of fun. Swells come in and the undertow happily drags you out. You can go about fifty feet out before the grounds shifts down a bit more rapidly and you are free swimming. There is a swim line to separate the swimmers from the people on jet skis.

We swam, we played in the waves, we made use of our under water cameras and took photographs of our toe shoes. My Vibram Five Finger’s are an excellent water shoe. You can dig in like you do with yor foot without the discomfort of shells or weird things on your feet.

From Bahamas - 2011

There is also a lot of free floating seaweed in the water. So I took an underwater photo of seaweed on the surface.

From Bahamas - 2011

A group of young men got in a little bit away fro us. I do not think that they expected the water to be as violent as it was. They swam, they splashed around, and one lost his sunglasses after an especially large wave came in and smashed all of us under.

When he realized he had lost his sunglasses he started to panic. It seems that they where a six hundred dollar pair. They all start looking but none are to be found. They asked us if we had seen them and we said no.

I looked. About two waves later I saw them. I lunged for them as the wave hit and got them only to loose them again. A few frantic grabs and I surfaced with a handful of sand and a pair of expensive sunglasses. I waved him down and handed them over. He thanked me profusely and said that if he had a hundred dollar bill he’d give it to me. That made me laugh.

We played for a while longer.

From Bahamas - 2011

It was easy to get dragged around the beach in unexpected directions. We played in the waves and played in the surf and finally, when standing was becoming to much work dragged ourselves out of the water and headed back to the ships.

The Kodak Playsport is a good little camera

From Bahamas - 2011

Heading to Port Canaveral

It was about ten when we left. We stopped at CVS along the way to get some drinks. On the ship, soda costs extra. Or you can buy a soda card. Well, for a 4 day cruise a 30 dollar soda card for each of us seemed excessive. You can bring up to 12 nonalcoholic beverages on board. You can also bring a bottle of wine or champagne each. I grabbed a selection of drinks for the two of us and hopped back into the car.

I’ll say that Florida’s roads are well marked. However, I would expect there to be more signs that say CRUISE SHIPS THIS WAY then there were. We did not see any signage until we were three miles away on the road that leads to the ports. A bit after the signs we start to see the ships sitting at port. They loom up over the trees and they are enormous.

From

The Disney Dream has the red stacks and the Royal Caribbean Freedom of the Seas is the other. My ship, the Carnival Sensation, is smaller and tucked behind them.
The Hertz place was right past the ships. We had barely stopped weaving all over the road as we ogled the cruise ships and then Hertz place appeared. It was not even a mile past the ships. We parked and started walking towards the building. Two employees approached us and asked if we had our mileage. We gave it, they grabbed the keys and told us to hop on the shuttle and enjoy our trip. We blinked and bam, we are on the shuttle and on our way.

That is what we had been looking for. Organization and coordination.
The driver for Hertz was fantastic. He gave some facts about each ship docked. The Disney Dream was at dock with the Royal Caribbean Freedom of the Seas and the Carnival Sensation. The Sensation is the smallest of the ships by far.

We got dropped off. I did not have to pay the porter for my bag. He did not ask and I did not give. We will see if our bags make it. We printed our luggage tags out in color. I then folded them as instructed and taped them up with clear packaging tape. Then, we stapled them all around the edges and in the center. It will take some effort to remove them. We also have luggage straps around the bags and nothing valuable inside of them.

At the terminal, we have VIP boarding. It means a super short line and a direct walk to the ship. I kept managing to get into the wrong lines. There are signs and the signs have arrows. There is normally a path by the sign. Yet, it is the next path over that I am supposed to take. How, I am supposed to know this I am not sure. Don’t walked by the sign, pick the unlabeled lane one line over instead.
I then got yelled at for taking a photo graph as we walked up the steps to get to the gang way.

The first glimpse of the ship was neon.

From Bahamas - 2011

It was hard not to stop and stare around us. While boarding a ship is not an accomplishment, it felt like it at that moment.

Residence Inn Marriott Melbourne

From Bahamas - 2011

I slept poorly on that rock hard bed. It was awful. I woke up about every thirty minutes. I’d love to say that it was excitement, but it was misery.
We woke up sore and grumpy. I called the airport shuttle to inquire about the shuttle schedule to the port. I was told that they had one shuttle scheduled to go to the port and that it left around noon. We are supposed to be boarded by 1430hrs. That is not much time considering the distance from the airport to the cruise lines was about an hour.

We went and got breakfast. Coffee was needed by the husband. We where both a bit hungry and tired. It worked out for us. They had a real breakfast, much to my surprise. Often times, the breakfast offered by a hotel is some old bagels and dry pastries. They had eggs, sausage, potatoes, waffles, cereal, oatmeal, and juices. They also had coffee. At one point, I looked around and realized that I was the only adult not drinking coffee. I felt strange. It did not help that someone had switched the television to an evangelist Sunday morning service. I learned that God can read text messages and knows when you use his name in vain. I guess all of those comic strips of them using computers in heaven are true.

We started making a plan B. Plan B evolved as I did some reading and discovered that there was a car rental right by the pier. I asked my husband to see if we could move the drop off. He was tired and grumpy about our sudden lack of premade plans. When he called Hertz they said “Sure, and your rate is the same.” That means the 63 dollars we were paying to rent the car from the previous day covered us dropping off at the pier. They also had a shuttle to the cruise terminal.

This was becoming a better situation. Finding the actual addresses to GPS coordinate ourselves was a little bit harder. People have been cruising for longer then there has been an internet. Some of these established agencies are not online yet. This makes finding simple bits of information hard. Everyone wants to route us to the airport as their home base.

Yet, we found the address, packed up, and headed out.

At checkout the receptionist asks, “How was your stay?”

Tim looked at her and said, “It sucked. The bed was horrible. It was incredibly hard.”

“We hear that a lot,” she chirped. “People either love them or hate them.”

“I hated it,” he snarled. “It was awful.”

“Sorry about that! So, here is your bill,” she checked us out. “Oh yes! The night clerk said that you all were taking a limo from Black Diamond?”

“No. We thought the hotel had a shuttle. We rented a car.“ Tim glared and we left.

We will write a poor review for that hotel. TripAdvisor.Com and I will have a talk.

From

Residence Inn Marriott in Melbourne, Florida: Do not stay here unless you like hard beds and shady dealings

A quick bit about the upcoming cruise

Last month I looked at my husband and said, "We need to go on vacation."

"I agree," he told me. "Where? Vegas?"

"Maybe? I don't know. I want to do something. I need to get away from my job."

"Think they will let you go?"

"I've taken two days of leave this year and they where both in February. They better let me leave."

He looked skeptical. I couldn't blame him. Last year, when planning our Tokyo trip my boss had told me that two days in the middle of my trip might not be approved because of staffing issues. I said that I couldn't exactly fly from Tokyo back home for two days and fly back.

Conversations like that tire me out. I have co-workers that hand the boss a schedule of leave at the beginning of the year. It seems reasonable to give two or three months notice to take time off but these co-workers leave me feeling as if I do everything at the last minute.

I didn't care. I wanted to go on vacation and I was going to stomp my feet and have a tantrum if that is what it took.

Vacations where never part of my childhood. I had planned to make them part of my adulthood. Life had a habit of inserting itself into that equation and destroying my plans. This year, I wanted to go somewhere and do something new.

Our first thought wasn't new. It was to take a trip to Vegas as my husband had suggested. We really enjoyed Vegas when we went there to get married in 2007. What we were looking for was a stop gap before we went to England. My husband travels extensively for work and I have decide to start tagging along to expand my own horizons. Originally, we were going to go to England in October. Now, we were perhaps not going anywhere until the spring and I needed and wanted a break. This led to a frantic discussion and a random search on Expedia.com.

The thought was that we could do a cheap trip to Vegas for a few days. We had been to Vegas four years before to get married. We had enjoyed it and I wanted to stay atthe Venetian this time.

However, I saw an advert for cruises and I decided to see how much a cruise to Carrabian would be.

79 dollars a night!

What?

I did some more searching and sure enough, a full cruise could be as low as 70 odd dollars a night for the interior state rooms. Rooms and prices went up as the room quality went up. However, the prices were reasonable.

After a few hours of frantic searching we decided to book a cruise on Carnival to the Bahamas on the Sensation for 4 nights. And why the hell not, we went with the Grand Suite and an extended balcony while we where at it.

The frantic searching also included some visits to Cruise Critic for reviews of the cruise line, the boat, the rooms, and everything else.

It feels like a good decision.