travels, races, and other musings

Disembarkation I woke up at 7 AM, showered, got everyone else up and we all finished getting ready and packing. We got ready somehow in record time and had some time to chill before breakfast. I feel like this was our least stressful disembarkation morning in memory. I think we're getting the hang of it. I think it helps to hang on to one regular suitcase to put everything we have left into. We used to try to stuff things into little bags and stuff and it was a mess. We just leave the suitcase outside the restaurant. It works fine.  We ate breakfast at Lumiere's and then tried to find a bathroom that didn't have a mile long line. We finished up, joined the line to disembark, which was growing shorter by the moment and went to find our other suitcase before proceeding to border control and out the door. Then we bypassed the insanely long line for people waiting for a parking lot shuttle and walked the one minute walk to our car in the express lot. Worth. Every. Penny.  Final...

Embarkation We seem to like cruising in January. To be honest, it's nice to get away after all the craziness of the holidays. And our anniversary is in January so we get to celebrate with a little vacation. In fact, we've already booked for our anniversary for next year!  As for this one, we decided to push the easy button and sail out of Galveston once again. Even though the itineraries aren't usually super compelling, we decided to give Progreso a try since we'd never been there and we found some interesting looking excursions we thought we could do. And we haven't been on the Magic in over five years so it seemed like time.  We left the house around 8:30 in the morning. We had originally intended to leave earlier. You never know what the traffic will be like, especially through Houston. We made good time though, even with two stops for bathrooms, snacks and gas (so we wouldn’t have to get any on the way home). We arrived at the port at 12:30. Last time we paid to...

Disembarkation and Final Thoughts I don’t have too much to say about our last day on board. We has asked our head server if we could possibly attend second breakfast (if you don’t say that in your hobbit voice, I’ll be a little disappointed) and he said he would squeeze us in. When I woke up, we were still coming into Galveston. Eventually everyone had to get up. We all got ready, packed the last of our things into our backpacks and went to Triton’s at 8:10. The atrium was a complete mess. People were everywhere. Triton’s wasn’t ready and people were waiting for their luggage tag to be called. What a crazy mess! Eventually we were directed to the side door of Triton’s and our head server got us a table with another serving team. They were fabulous and breakfast was hot and tasty. We finished up, said goodbye to our usual serving team and wished them well. By then the atrium had cleared out and our luggage tag had already been called so we disembarked. We got our suitcases easily and th...

At Sea I woke up before everyone else (we had gained an hour so I got a good night sleep) and quietly escaped up to the gym on deck 10. I was going to be teaching BODYPUMP the next day so I went through all my tracks and did the full workout. Lunges are really hard on a moving ship! Are you wondering about my phone? It was working! Hooray! After workout, Emmaline and Roger met me at Cabanas and the folks there just had to deal with stinky, sweaty me! We went back to the room and I showered and we started to pack things up. I got one suitcase packed with our dressy clothes, pirate costumes and other stuff we wouldn’t be needing. At 10, Emmaline went to Edge while Roger and I went to “Brainteasers Trivia” in the Crown and Finn Pub. It was really hard. It wasn’t so much trivia as riddles and trick questions. We did terrible but it was still fun. After that, it was time to learn to draw Daisy. We came a few minutes early and Gus was drawing Marie who I adore so I tried my hand at it. I did...

Cozumel Strap in, this is a long one. Oh, Cozumel. What a day. I’m sure it will be funny in a few years, but this whole day was a comedy of errors. Now, I’m normally a pretty positive person and if you’ve read any of our previous adventures, you know we’ve had great fun and I don’t usually complain… But I’m getting ahead of myself. I woke up early again. My plan was to sleep in, but I woke up around 6:30 and after laying in the dark for awhile, I finally got up around 7:15, tossed on my clothes from the day before (that I had stashed in the bathroom for just such an eventuality) and quietly slipped out to grab some fruit and a warm drink on deck 9. I took the forward elevators all the way to 9 and then traversed the deck all the way aft. This was a huge mistake. It was absolutely pouring and there was water everywhere. By the time I reached Daisy’s, my feet were drenched and my shoes sodden. I found a slightly dry-ish spot to eat my fruit and hot cocoa and watched some funnel vision an...

At Sea I put my running clothes in the bathroom the night before so I could change and slip out. I’m always up before my family, even though I slept all the way until 7:30 (though, remembering that we lost an hour it was really 6:30 so close to my normal at home wake-up). By 7:45 I was up on deck 4 running some laps. It was really quiet up there. Usually there are a number of people walking or running, but this time I only encountered one other passenger (many crew members were bustling around). I did three miles (9 laps) and finished up around 8:15 and went up to deck 9 for some fruit at Daisy’s while I waited for Roger and Emmaline to wake up. They were up by 8:30 and we all went to Cabana’s for some cold breakfast. *grumble*  We went back to the room and I showered and we got organized for our day. At 10 Emmaline went to Edge to see what the activities for the day would be. Edge was a little strange in that none of the activities were loaded into the Navigator app making plannin...

Embarkation Day We finally get back to the thing we love - cruising with the mouse! Our last cruise was on the Wonder in January 2020 so we were excited to be back on board. Despite living in Austin, TX this was our first sailing out of Galveston. We always looked at the itineraries before but just weren’t that excited by any of them. When DCL resumed sailing and things were looking a little better in terms of the virus and once our whole family was fully vaccinated, we decided to take a look at just about anything that would GET US BACK ON A SHIP. The itinerary was definitely not that exciting, but we were ready for a vacation and we have a lot of cruise credit from cancelled cruises so we booked it. Four nights with two sea days and one day in Cozumel. We woke up, got ourselves ready and finished packing and hit the road about 7:45 AM. There was only a small amount of traffic and one wrong turn that cost us a little time (I’m so terrible at all those highway interchanges in Houston) ...