Our Cruise

Warning - EXTREMELY long post with LOTS of picture!

Okay, I posted last week about what Roman did 2 weeks ago, I never mentioned what we did. So for those of you who don't know where we were. . .here's the story!

Our friend Rebekah said that if she had to turn 30 she wanted to turn 30 somewhere cool. Well, I turned 30, so we went somewhere cool, actually warm, it was lovely. We went on a Southern Caribbean cruise. We went to St Thomas, St Martin, Antigua, St Lucia, and Barbados.

We left Friday night and flew from Salt Lake to LA to Chicago to San Juan. After 15 hours of travel we finally arrived in San Juan. We were so tired!! The cruise left that night.
Sunday we were in St Thomas and we wanted to have a nice relaxing day so we just took a shuttle to the beach and went snorkeling. We talked to some people sitting near us and they said they would watch our things as we went out snorkeling. It was a nice time we got back to our towels and our bag was gone. We started freaking out a little, okay a lot. We looked everywhere for it but it was gone. We talked to a waitress that was working on the beach and she started asking the locals about it and finally called the police for us. About an hour later we were still waiting for the police and the waitress told us there were two other people who had their bags stolen. She took us to talk to one of the others. They started looking everywhere for the bags. They found our bag, it was empty though. He asked what was in it and kept going back where he found the bag to look. Thankfully he found the gum wrapper that I had hidden our id and credit cards in. As funny as Spencer thought it was that I put them in he was thankful when we found them. In the end they recovered everything except our phones, ipod, my pants, Spencer's shoes, the cords for our camera (and cell phones and ipod) and a wallet that had pictures of Roman. That was all the excitement we could handle for one day and we went back to the cruise ship.





Monday we were in St Martin. We decided to get a taxi and take a tour of the island. St Martin is actually owned by France and Denmark. They have different languages, currencies everything. It was a beautiful island. The taxi driver didn't speak much English so we didn't get a lot of history about the island other than basics but it was a nice day.


Tuesday we were in Antigua. There were a lot of historical sites there that I had read about that I wanted to see. We found a tour and it was amazing. We found a tour that was have been $20 for 1/2 day. We said okay waited and waited and the driver kept going to find more people for the tour. Finally we staged a revolt with the other 2 couples that were waiting and found another driver that said he would take us 1/2 day for $20. After we were in the cab he said that he would do a full day for $25 each. We decided to do that instead. It was a great day. I think it was my favorite. The driver was very informative, he even showed us the prison and hospital.




Wednesday we were in St Lucia. We took a boat tour there because we were told that the roads were really windy and it would take 1 1/2 hours to get to the waterfall we wanted to see and 45 minutes by boat. The boat tour also had more stops than the island tour. We went to a harbor that is only accessable by boat (you can't drive there from anywhere else on the island), a fishing village, a volcano caldera, the Pitons, a waterfall, a botanical garden then to a beach where we went snorkeling. That beach was actually the best snorkeling we had the entire trip.


Santa was on our cruise - he was going to the orphanages and hospitals on the islands and taking Christmas to the kids! How cool is that!!!


Thursday we spent in Barbados. Again we just went to the beach to go snorkeling. It was really murky there. We were told it had been very windy the night before so the sediment had been stirred up. We were able to see some sea turtles there though and we had a nice day relaxing at the beach.




Friday was our last day and it was spent at sea. In my opinion it was the perfect day to spend at sea. We were tired and it was nice to have a day to just relax, read, nap, and think about going home.

These are the people that we had dinner with and our waiters.



Saturday we had until 4:00 in the afternoon so we spent the day in Old San Juan. Again beautiful island. I loved walking around there. It was one of those places that pictures do not do justice.



We were complaining how hot we were in San Juan. It was around 90 degrees at 2:00 in the afternoon. By 10:00 that night when we got home we were wishing for the warm weather. It was snowing!

That's our trip in a nutshell. It was such an amazing week, I am glad that we did it, but I am also glad that we are taking Roman with us when Spencer turns 30. I don't think I could handle an entire week away from him again!