Cruisin!

What a week! We just returned from our Caribbean Cruise and we had a pretty sweet time! Although it was a very fun time, it was also very crazy and random due to some unexpected events and freakin weird people on the boat! So here is a run down of all the fun/exciting/random things that happened this vacation/honeymoon.

Sunday: Well I had planned on getting up at the crack of dawn (aka 5:30 am, crazy I know) to get showered and ready for the day because I hate traveling and feeling all gross and nasty. We had planned on leaving Provo around 6:15 that morning to go to the airport, and we woke up at 6:30, what a way to start the vacation! We scrambled around the apartment for 15 minutes or so, managed to brush our teeth and throw on some clothes before we left for SLC. We got there in time, thanks to Jared’s crazy driving (crazy for him, we were only going like 80 mph the whole time, which I average regularly on that stretch of road, but if you know my hubby at all, you’ll know that he drives like a grandpa! Ha) We got on the plane and headed to Florida. Upon arrival in Ft. Lauderdale, we walked off the plane and were hit by gusts of wind/water, the humidity is out of control there!! We felt like we were drinking water with each breath! When we got to our hotel, we decided to order some pizza and just hang out for a while before going to sleep.

Monday: The day of our cruise had finally arrived! We hopped on the shuttle that took us to the Port and when we got there, it was basically mayhem. People were walking all over and we couldn’t figure out where the heck to go to check our bags and such. With the help of the “friendly” crew members (the one lady we talked to was kinda impatient) we were able to figure out where to check our bags. We waited in line to get our Sea Passes (basically your ID on the cruise that you can use to charge any purchases or whatever you want) and they had managed to lose my name on the list! We didn’t know what was going on, we had booked my cruise under Stacie Musso, instead of Gibbons but we figured that wouldn’t have made any difference. . . well luckily they got it figured out after a couple of minutes and we were able to get through security. After that we waited in line to get through customs, at some point Jared had put our passports in one of the random compartments in our carry on bag, so when they lady asked us for our passports, we both started freaking out because we thought we had lost them! Jared eventually found then in the bag and we were able to get on the boat, yes!! Since neither of us had been on a cruise before we were like little kids when we first got on the ship. We explored all of the decks and then went and ate some lunch at the buffet. After that we found our stateroom, and then went to the pool. After getting sufficiently fried by the sun, we got cleaned up for dinner. We were the first people to get there from our table, and about five minutes later, the most motly crew of Florida Hillbillies showed up and sat down with us. Jared and I had to try really hard not to laugh at them because they were so dang wasted it was bad. They had the most hillbillie accent you could ever imagine, and between all the cuss words, random laughter, and crude remarks they were just freakin weird! They couldn’t figure out which fork to use (well neither could we, but we didn’t let our ignorance show!) the one girl, who was especially hammered, kept asking the bread boy for “regular bread” which ended up being sourdough bread. They were straight up wacked out and we had a good laugh after we got back to our room. Later that night as we were unpacking, we realized that I had left my nice formal dress at the hotel! Bad news. . . but we couldn’t do anything about it at that point, so we just went to the opening show at the theater, and then called it a night.

The first picture of our trip!

Tuesday: We arrived at Key West, and since we had no plans, we walked around the island a little bit. We found ourselves a beach and we hung out there for a little while. Once we got sick of that, we cruised around the shops trying to find some sort of dress that would work for our formal dinner that night, since mine was 400 miles away at the hotel. After searching around for a while, I finally gave up hope of being able to find something modest enough to wear with G’s, so I just got a cute green sun dress sort of a deal, and decided I would be scandalous for the night. That night at dinner we were surprised to see our favorite hillbillies there again, since they had vowed to only eat at the buffet because they wanted “real food” and not the fancy stuff from the dining hall. They were considerably more mellow, probably still hung over from the previous day, so dinner less entertaining, but better overall. They served some dang good food there, and we were just happy to not see any prices next to the entrees, because it dishes like, Atlantic Salmon, Aged Prime Rib, Roasted Duck, Lobster Tail, and Sea Bass, we figured it wouldn’t have been very cheap. After dinner we went to the “Royal Caribbean Singers and Dancers” show. It was pretty good, nothing like the BYU Ballroom dancers though. After that we went to bed.

In front of cool tree

Formal Night

Sunset from the top deck

Wednesday: We docked at the Port in Cozumel, and decided that we wanted to rent a scooter to take around the island for the whole day. Now we had taken out 65 dollars from the ATM on the ship, and figured there was no way we were going to spend that much money during the day. Well the scooter alone cost us 55 dollars which was kind of a rip off, but we couldn’t do anything about it. So we had 10 bucks left for the rest of the day, but the guy who rented us the scooter told us that we could go see some Mayan Ruins on the island for 5 dollars a piece, perfect! We jumped onto the scooter and started out for the Ruins, but about 5 minutes later our scooter up and dies on us! Lame! The guy came and switched us out, so we started heading towards the Ruins again. When we got there, we come to find out that it cost 6.75 a person, so we were outta luck. Jared tried to talk them down, but these people are like normal Mexican people who you can barter with, they were strict about their prices. So there went our grand plans for seeing some Mayan Ruins, since it would have taken too long to go to Tulum, which is on the main peninsula. Instead we ended up cruising around the other side of the island where we found our own little private beach! We played in the water for a while, and just enjoyed the sun and the beautiful sand. On our way back around to the other side of the island, we stopped at a little beach Playa Palancar (or something like that) and we ended up meeting this really cool LDS lady there. She owned a little gift stand and Jared started talking to her in Spanish and it came out that he learned to speak Spanish on his mission for the church and she told him that she was a member. She was really nice, and I know Jared had a fun time chatting with her, and I bought a few little bracelets from her. By the time we got back to the ship that day, we were both sunburned pretty bad on our shoulders and legs from riding the scooter all day. We had dinner and just went back to our room because we were both so tired. I went to try on one of the bracelets I had gotten from our LDS friend, and of course it freakin breaks!! I was pretty sad, but I couldn’t be mad because she was such a nice lady. Jared assured me that we can fix it, so I’ll be excited for when I can wear it, because its pretty cute.

At our private beach!

Some cool bay thingy

Cruisin on our scooter!

Thursday: This was they day we were both looking forward to because we were going on a cave tubing excursion! We got up that morning and hooked up with the rest of the people who were going on the same little trip. We got onto a bus in Belize and our tour guides took us up into the jungle or rainforest. The ride was pretty cool because they took us around town and through most of the country, its so tiny only about 70 miles across. They also told us a little bit about the background and other random details about the country, so now we are both Beliezian experts! Once we got to the tubing place, we hiked through the jungle for about 30 minutes before we got to the place where we would start tubing. We all got onto our tubes and linked our legs together and started for the treacherous cave of doom! Haha just kidding, it was pretty cool, but the supposed “rapids” they told us about were really just little tiny ripples in the water, nothing like the Grand Canyon or anything! Now here’s a funny story, about halfway down this lady from another group totally went headlong into a freakin tree in the middle of the river! She fell off her tube, good thing she had her life jacket, or else she would have drown in the 4 feet deep water! Her guide grabbed her tube and held it out for her to get back on. She totally does like a back flop onto her tube and just about falls off the back of her tube! It was freakin hilarious! Most of the people on this excursion thought they were all hardcore and stuff since they were going on “jungle trek” but really most of them were rich lazy people who kept asking “Are we there yet” every five minutes! After floating down the river for a ways, we got to the end where they had a rope swing and a little cliff, so Jared and I took advantage of both, and put on a water adventure show for the people in our group. Later that night we totally crashed and went to bed early.

The beginning of our cave tube adventure

Our sweet head lamps!

Towards the end of our tubing

Friday: This day was spent at sea, and since we were both feeling the pain of our sunburns, we just laid low and enjoyed some of the activities on the ship. First up was the Men’s Bellyflop Contest, where a man who was 300 pounds took home the gold and left the pool several inches more shallow than before. After that was the Mr. Enchantment of the Seas contest, where seven dudes who thought they were sexy competed for the title. Most of them were drunk, so it proved to be some cheap entertainment. After that we got ready for dinner and afterwards went to the closing show. It ended up being a Magic Show, which was pretty cool. We saw lots of body parts being cut in half and such!

Well that’s about it. A pretty fun and crazy week. Oh I forgot to mention our awesome stateroom attendant named Gerry. He was this really cool guy from the St. Vincent Islands! Every night he made us these cool towel animal thingys that he put on our bed. We ended up talking to him for a few minutes and asked him about his family. He has two little girls and wife at home who he only gets to see like 3 or 4 months out of the year when he isn’t working on a ship. He told us that the family is the most important institution or something that sounded straight out of the Proclamation to the World, so we asked him if he was Mormon. He said that he’d met some of our missionaries in St. Vincent and had had some good conversations with them. He was just a really cool dude, and we liked him a lot!

Some of the towel thingers

that our stateroom attendant left us