cruisecruisecruise!
So we booked a cruise last night! 11-day Western Caribbean cruise on Celebrity Cruise Lines' Constellation, in mid-November. (Yes, we know it's still hurricane season then...) We've booked a cabin with a *huge* balcony -- nearly 200 sq. ft.! Apparently, the aft cabins (same price as regular cabins in the same class) have verandahs that are over 4 times the size they're supposed to be. The cruise leaves from New Jersey, so we won't even need to deal with airfare, as it's only 200 miles from us. Faster to drive than to spend two hours dealing with aiport security, half an hour sitting on the runway, etc, and when we get back we can just hop in the car and drive ourselves home. Plus we can take whatever configuration of luggage we can fit in the car, and not worry about fitting it into an overhead bin. :-)
We'll be visiting Key West (Florida), Cozumel (Mexico), Costa Maya (Mexico), Cojo Rios (Jamaica), and Labadee, Hispaniola (a privately-owned island in Haiti), plus a total of four at-sea days.
Shari and I cruised once before, an Alaskan cruise for our honeymoon in July '04, and absolutely loved it. Definitely want to go up there again, but there are other places to see first. We figure we can do a vacation like this about once every two or three years, and we want to travel as many places as we can before we've got kids to think about. Australia is probably our next destination, sometime in 2008. Always wanted to go there, and we had started to plan that trip for this year, but we had to give up on that one for now.
We'd actually decided a while back that we had no interest in a Caribbean cruise -- "what's there to do but lie around in the sun all day?" Strangely, that doesn't sound too bad any more -- 11 days of stress-free away-from-work vacation doing absolutely nothing unless we feel like it. We want to see the Mayan ruins, and we might even learn to scuba dive this summer so we can do that on the cruise as well. But that's all fun stuff. No pressure, no commitment. Our lives tend to be so crazy these days, and it really sounds good to just relax in the sun for days on end.
We'll be visiting Key West (Florida), Cozumel (Mexico), Costa Maya (Mexico), Cojo Rios (Jamaica), and Labadee, Hispaniola (a privately-owned island in Haiti), plus a total of four at-sea days.
Shari and I cruised once before, an Alaskan cruise for our honeymoon in July '04, and absolutely loved it. Definitely want to go up there again, but there are other places to see first. We figure we can do a vacation like this about once every two or three years, and we want to travel as many places as we can before we've got kids to think about. Australia is probably our next destination, sometime in 2008. Always wanted to go there, and we had started to plan that trip for this year, but we had to give up on that one for now.
We'd actually decided a while back that we had no interest in a Caribbean cruise -- "what's there to do but lie around in the sun all day?" Strangely, that doesn't sound too bad any more -- 11 days of stress-free away-from-work vacation doing absolutely nothing unless we feel like it. We want to see the Mayan ruins, and we might even learn to scuba dive this summer so we can do that on the cruise as well. But that's all fun stuff. No pressure, no commitment. Our lives tend to be so crazy these days, and it really sounds good to just relax in the sun for days on end.