Yes, kids, I'm back. For those of you that forgot, I went on a 7-day cruise to the Caribbean with my girlfriend. I actually ended up being away from TNL a tad longer than I originally intended, but some problems arose with my job upon my return that made things a tad difficult. However, things have been resolved and everything's cool now. Well, sorta, but I think I'll cover that in another thread.
Anyway, we cruised to St. Thomas, St. Martin, and an island that the cruise line owned (Princess). First off, if any of you are considering taking a vacation, nothing gives you more value for your money than a cruise. When my gf first approached me with the idea of a cruise, I was not interested at all. I figured that you just sat in a deck chair and did nothing. Man, was I wrong. I did some research and talked to some friends that had gone on one and found out that there's no shortage of things to do. Plus, there were various excursions that you’d sign up to do on each island that you stopped at. In the end, I was sold, and on Sunday June 22nd, caught a plane down to Florida where the ship was setting sail.
Now, this ship, the Grand Princess, is the biggest friggin' moving thing I've ever seen. It's the size of three football fields, for christ's sake. It's basically a building laid on it's side. There were a great many crew members and passengers but the ship was so big that it never felt crowded in the least. The interesting thing is that, while the passengers were mostly American, the crew hailed from all over the world- it said their country of origin on their nametag. I met people from England, Wales, South Africa, Germany, Italy, Romania, Mexico, Philippines, Australia, etc. We set sail on Sunday evening, were at sea on Monday and Tuesday, hit St. Thomas on Wednesday, St. Martin on Thursday, at sea on Friday, the Princess island on Saturday, and back to Florida on Sunday.
Mostly families or couples, but there were plenty of sweet young girls wandering around at all times in bikinis. Lots of eye candy. :D
As for things to do while we were at sea, the list included:
Three huge swimming pools
One wave pool
A full gym (weights, machines, cardio, aerobics studio that included Yoga, Spin classes, etc)
Miniature Golf course
Golf simulator
A nightclub- a pretty cool one, at that. Good DJ and a younger crowd around our age (20’s).
Several full-sized theaters (movies, shows, comedians)
Basketball and paddle tennis court (on the deck, netted to keep the balls in)
24-hour all you can eat buffet
24-hour room service
A spa (get your hair cut, facials, special treatments, etc)
Water volleyball
A Library
An Arcade (They had some decent machines there, but nothing too new. My gf and I spent over $20 trying to beat House of the Dead together- shit that last boss is a cheap bitch. They also had the original DOA, the Jurassic Park game, some Namco skiing and hang gliding games, some Sega racing games, Tekken 3, air hockey, as well as many others)
A game room (board games)
Various lounges and bars everywhere
Two 5-star dining main dining halls, plus several other various themed restaurants (Mexican, Italian)
Hot tubs
Saunas (I don’t get these- who’d want to sit in a hot, steamy room for any length of time?)
String quartets or a piano player in the main atrium most of the time
Bars EVERYWHERE
Jazz club
Plus, there were tons of different classes and activities that were actually very cool and interesting. I tried yoga for the first time (on a beach, no less) and it was very relaxing. Most everything on the ship was covered, except for booze, which you charged to your room card (so you only needed cash on the islands, all of which accepted U.S. currency).
Man, it was cool having the feeling of having your ass kissed for the entire cruise by the staff and crew. They do anything and everything to make you feel like some rich bastard. The dining halls were great- you had to dress up to use them (and there were 2 formal nights where you had to wear a suit), so the slobs still had the 24-hour buffet to go to (that buffet came in handy at 4AM after a drunken night at the club). But the dining hall was basically a 5-star restaurant- very elegant, hell, even the waiters had little metal utensils just for brushing off the crumbs from your tablecloth. :) And you could order anything you wanted from the menu (different theme each night- French, etc.) and as much as you want. Want to order all of the Entrees? Go right a head. Don't like it? Don't worry about it! With all the food available at all times (the pools had burger and pizza stands there too), I'm shocked I actually managed to lose a few pounds on the cruise, but that's only because we were so active.
St. Thomas- man, what a beautiful island. And hilly. Seriously, San Francisco has nothing on this place. Car engines must blow up after a year. But this was where I got my first taste of scuba diving. We hit the dock in St. Thomas at 7AM and took a bus to the bay where we were scheduled to dive. After an initial on-land instruction we were helped on with our gear and brought to the shore to practice in shallow water. The tank and weight belt and everything weighs a ton but it’s weightless in the water. Afterwards, we went with an instructor (4 divers to an instructor) and swam for about 40 minutes, to a depth of 30 feet around a reef. Let me tell you, once you get used to it, there’s nothing more exciting and relaxing then scuba diving. It’s really, really freaky at first- after all, you can suddenly breathe under water. It just feels very wrong. They, you have to get used to breathing with a respirator, which it very different from breathing on dry land- you have to concentrate a bit more. Take in a deep breath, then blow it all out. If you don’t make sure you blow it all out, you won’t be able to take in enough air. It’s just a slow, controlled process, but it’s amazing. I brought an underwater disposable camera and took some nice shots. My gf tried really hard, but she got a little too freaked out by it and decided to go snorkeling instead (to her credit, she did try really hard, and I can understand being freaked out by it- if you’re a tad claustrophobic like she can be, you wouldn’t like it- several people declined to dive for that reason). After the dive, we had an hour and a half to kill on the beach, so I did some snorkeling too. Damn, that water is crystal clear and blue in a way you’ve never seen before. Afterwards, we just wandered around the island.
St. Martin was nice too, though I was a bit more impressed by St. Thomas. We did a mountain bike tour on St. Martin in the morning. We went all over- streets, countryside, even off-road (almost fell a few times). That was damn fun. Afterwards, we took a water taxi from the ship and did some shopping, then hung at the beach. At this point my gf was getting very annoyed with the native women asking her if she wanted her hair braided every 20 seconds, to the point that she wanted to shave her head so hat they would leave her alone. :)
Overall, the Caribbean is beautiful. Nice, warm, confortable tempature, no humidity. Niiice. It sucked stepping onto deck when we were almost home and hitting that disgusting wall of U.S. east coast humidity. Ugh.
Next day, we went to the Princess island. We were none too impressed. This was back closer to Florida, so the waters had lost that clear, blue quality. Plus, there were signs everywhere that said: “Sea lice: swim at your own risk”. :wtf: Needless to say, we went back to the ship and hung in the wave pool.
Overall, we had a great time. 7 days was pretty much the perfect length for the trip- not too long, not too short. I would have liked to have spent a bit more time in port (We got to St. Thomas and St. Martin at 7AM but had to be back on the ship by 5PM), but otherwise the trip went way beyond my expectations. Great food, some cool entertainment, lots of drinking (not a big drinker usually, but what the hell, it was vacation), being waited on hand and foot and some amazing experiences (scuba diving owns you). We kept busy the entire time and didn’t waste a second. Greatly recommended.
Within the next day or two I’ll post some pics. :D
