travels, races, and other musings

Final Thoughts A friend warned me that longer cruises can turn out to be addictive and asked me if we felt like that was the case. I have to say, honestly, I’m not sure that’s going to be the case for us. We really were ready to get back to our home, cats, normal eating, and our own beds by the end. It was a great trip and we had a great time, but I didn’t find I liked it way way more than a 7-night. I actually feel like a 7-night is just about perfect.  Now, we do have a 10-night booked for next year and we had a discussion about that. I think it will be fine, but I’m not sure I could do something like a transatlantic or longer Panama Canal cruise. I miss stuff like tacos and my cats. I think the other thing that played into this feeling was the fact that we had four port days in a row which was pretty intense. I think next year it will help that our schedule is a little more broken up. The max we have in a row is three port days.  Things I did like about the longer cruise we...

Saturday July 30 - Disembarkation and Orlando The theme for the morning ended up being “hurry up and wait.” The Fantasy pulled into Port Canaveral around 6:30 AM and the ship was cleared at around 7:30. We got ourselves up and dressed and finished packing the last of our things before one last meal with our wonderful servers.  We said goodbye and made a final bathroom break before heading for the gangway. We tapped our cards one last time, moved into the gangway and stopped. And waited. And waited. Then we saw someone being taken off in a stretcher from the medical center on deck 1 into a waiting ambulance. I hope they are okay. It seems that they had halted everyone until that was sorted out. They were probably trying to avoid any type of congestion outside the port until the ambulance was away. It was about a 20 minute wait (there was a surprising lack of urgency so that makes me hopeful that it wasn’t too terribly serious). Finally we were moving again and retrieved our luggage ...

Friday July 29 - Castaway Cay We were originally scheduled for 9:30-4:45 at Castaway Cay, but then the night before they said we would arrive at 10 AM (with no explanation) but then we didn’t actually end up being cleared to get off the ship until 10:30 so they said we could stay ashore until 5:30. All the early excursions before 10:30 were canceled and that was that. (We didn’t have one of those excursions.) It didn’t matter to us, this was our 5th time to CC ( 2014 , 2015 , 2017 , 2022 ) and we aren’t as crazy about it as many are. (Blasphemy, I know.) So we woke up later than usual and had a leisurely breakfast. At 10:15 Emmaline and I went to Animation Class in D Lounge (drawing) and Roger watched some TV (he watched a lot of cricket). This was actually the first time we went to one of the animation classes on this sailing, which is funny because we did a ton of them back in November on the Wonder. We drew the Genie with a fair amount of success considering we were told he’s a more...

 Thursday July 28 - Sea Day The last of our three sea days dawned sunny and beautiful. We really had fantastic weather the whole cruise. Roger and I were both up early at 7:00 which was unusual. Emmaline slept on and we slipped out to deck 4. It was busy, but didn’t seem quite as busy as the first two sea days. I did the same workout as before with my easy/sprint laps with some bodyweight strength in between. We finished up and went back to the room to retrieve Emmaline. While she took her sweet time getting up, Roger got showered and we all went to breakfast at Cabana’s. I showered after breakfast. Sorry to the people of Cabana’s.  On our way back from breakfast we stopped by the open house at the Oceaneer Club where Dr. Strange was meeting and then we checked out some of the new stuff that had been installed since Emmaline had been there. She was never a huge fan of the younger kid clubs. I think the age ranges were just too vast and it’s often really chaotic. She much prefe...

Wednesday July 27 St. Thomas I was excited for our first time in St. Thomas. We had a slightly later start this morning as our excursion was later in the morning. We took our time getting up and ate breakfast outside at Cabana’s. We got off the ship around 9:15 and easily found a taxi. The taxis in St. Thomas are huge open sided buses with benches across. We felt sort of silly just the three of us on this crazy taxi bus. It was about a 15 minute ride from the port to where we needed to meet for our excursion and we found our guide easily once we got there.  Our guide, Patrick, loaded us up into the back of his jeep and we set off, which was sort of sketch and scary, but we all lived. We arrived at our first stop, a beautiful little beach that wasn’t very busy at all. I looked it up on Google Maps when we got home and it’s called Brewer’s Bay Beach. First we walked around and he showed us some of the plant life around the area, both native and non-native. Next, we went fishing. For ...

Tuesday July 26 Antigua This is the second of the two ports that we had been to previously (well, not counting Castaway Cay) and we were more than happy to return to this one. Last time through (January 2020), we had an incredible day with Adventure Antigua on their “Eco Tour” so I didn’t hesitate to go straight back to their website and see what other tours they offered. Their “Adventure Islands” tour looked great with minimal repetition so we booked it and recommended it to others on our Facebook meet group. We had so many people book it on my recommendation that they had to add another boat! I thought they actually handled the two boats of people really well (I had been worried we might be too many people). We got up and got ready and met on the dock right on time. Like before, we sailed out around the island for about an hour and one of the three guides onboard pointed out different interesting things along the way. We arrived at Lavisount Island at around 10 AM where they have a ...

Monday July 25 - Dominica Strap in, I took a lot of photos in Dominica! We were all excited for Dominica. It was the first time for DCL in this port and nobody was really sure what to expect. We had originally booked a canyoning (repelling down waterfalls) tour. We did something similar in Costa Rica (before Emmaline was born) and it was pretty amazing. But then Emmaline broke her ankle 4 weeks before the cruise so we scrapped that idea. By then, all the DCL excursions were full (though we don’t normally do ship-sponsored tours) and all of the private companies I could find reviews for on Trip Advisor were completely booked up. So I was Googling and I found a little taxi and tour service with no reviews on Google or Trip Advisor and one little review blurb on their website. But they had a tour that looked good that we could customize to do what we wanted and I emailed them and had a good vibe so we took a chance. This is unlike me. I like well-vetted companies or guides with lots of 5-...