cruise recap
Apr. 25th, 2010 08:12 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
swingchickieso, i won't bore you guys with 500 photos and minute-by-minute replays of every single thing we did on the cruise. to be honest, it could really be summed up this way: we ate a lot. we drank a lot. we slept by the pool a lot. but there were some awesome highlights that i want to capture for my own memories, so
makin' friends and meetin' people
* since it was![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
xtingu's birthday on our sailaway day, jack and i brought party hats for all of us to wear. talk about an icebreaker -- we met so many passengers and crew members because everyone wanted to know what the hats were for. the maitre'd even recognized jill later and had a birthday cake delivered to our table for her at dinner.
* our tablemates at dinner, michele and dawn, couldn't have been more awesome. they were best friends from grade school who lived in separate states now and decided to take a cruise to spend quality time together. we hung out with them several times outside of dinnertime, and they actually chose to stay with us even though they saw some of our childish (but really freakin' funny) antics. which brings me to:
* photobombing. good lord, half the people on that ship now have vacation photos where we're making crazy faces behind them. by the end of the trip, we were in hysterics every time the opportunity arose.
* tanya. this gal gave us more entertainment than we could have hoped for. we first encountered her at karaoke night, tipsy as hell and having a ball. she danced around in front of everyone, she sang along with each person who got up on stage, she grabbed the butts of the girls who did an En Vogue song. and all of it was punctuated with her signature "woo-hoooooo!!!!" for the rest of the cruise, we'd hear that whoop and our necks would snap around to look for her. every night was a new game of "let's see how much i can drink" for er, and i have to say i'm impressed that she held up as well as she did.
* i ran into 2 people i know on the ship! one was a guy from work who i did a project with a few years ago... the other was especially wacky. when we were getting back on the ship after our day in jamaica, we went through security and then a guy stopped me as i was getting my bag:
guy: excuse me, do you live in boston?
me: i used to...
guy: have you ever heard of the Company Theater?
me: why, yes...
guy: were we in Footloose together???
turns out matt (who had been a teen at the time) remembered me from a show we were in together 10 years ago. totally crazy! now he's performing on the ship, he does 3 shows a week as one of their singers.
(yes, i am sunburnt and fuzzy-haired from swimming all day. more on that later.)
jamaica
honestly, our day in jamaica goes down in my book as one of the top 10 days in my life so far. no lie. i had hired a private tour guide, because i really didn't want to be shuttled by the cruise line to some common activity that 2,000 other people were doing. all i had told the guy (his name was Peat) was that we didn't want to go where everyone else goes, we'd be happy even just driving around and seeing stuff, and that we wanted to have lunch at a place called Scotchies, which jack had heard has the best jerk on the island.
our guide for the day was Peat's son (who called himself "Re-Peat", har har) and our driver was Clifton... 2 super-nice guys who ended every sentence with "yah mon". they spent the first hour or so driving us all up and down the winding hills of ocho rios, a crazy hair-raising thrill ride with no street signs, no posted speed limits, ginormous potholes everywhere, and 2-lane roads only wide enough to fit 1 car.
view of our ship from up in the hills
everywhere we drove, people were jumping out in front of the car, doing things hoping to get tips from us. one boy actually dove out and started doing backflips down the hill in front of us as we drove. when we drove through fern gully, "fern man" jumped out from the side of the road, and we decided to get a shot:
hot breakfast!
after we drove around for a while, our guides went off the beaten path and drove us down a dirt road to a place called they called the "blue hole". it's a little lagoon that mostly locals go to, to swim or just hang out. the water was this crazy aqua blue, and there were several little waterfalls and caves that you could swim around. honestly, it was paradise. and for most of the time, we were the only people there! for about 1/2 hour there was another woman and her 2 boys... other than that, we had the entire place to ourselves. we spent the rest of the morning just floating in the blue water, soaking in the sunshine. i almost wanted to cry when we left. here are some pix and video:
shot from up above -- to get in the water, you either have to dive off of one of the water falls or climb all the way down the slippery rocks. there were 2 local guys, Omar and his younger brother, there to help us down the rocks for tips.
hi,xtingu and mrlich!
video of the scenery from above, after we got out of the water... that's omar throwing something in the beginning.
(funny story for the philly peeps: as we were walking back up the hill after swimming, jack lost his footing and slipped. he got back up and shouted down to our guides, "i'm okay!" to which they automatically replied, "HOT BREAKFAAAAST!!!!" i almost peed myself, i was laughing so hard.)
we'd worked up quite an appetitie from all that swimming, so we headed to scotchies for lunch. YUM. we had a feast -- amazing slow-cooked jerk chicken and pork, festival (a deep-fried cornbread), roasted breadfruit, roasted yams, and plenty of red stripe to wash it down. it was a very simple place, but gorgeous... you ordered your food at one hut, picked it up at another, and then the rest of the property was a web of little huts with picnic tables where you just opened your tinfoil packets of food and chowed down. we gorged ourselves, and it came out to about $24 for 4 of us, including beer. amazing.
jill and matt with clifton and "re-peat" at the entrance
the scotch bonnet pepper hot sauce... "hot hot hot" was right. tasted great, didn't feel so great the next day.
a couple of the little eating huts
the employees got a kick out of the post-lunch travel hoop tryout
other random stuff we did:
several nights at the martini bar. oof. those suckers were STRONG, even the foo-foo ones. (BTW, we're blue in this shot because the blue LEDS were on... the whole bar is white, and the lighting changes color.)
laid by the pool.
ate a lot of sushi. we had a late dinner seating, so for several nights we grabbed sushi and had soosh and drinks at the "sunset bar", an outdoor bar at the very back of the boat that hardly anyone used. beautiful view!
soosh
the bar
got a photo on the last night of us with our table mates and valentin, our very eager and still-learning-english assistant waiter from macedonia. we loved this staircase in the main dining room, it was like something out of an old hollywood musical movie set:
so, that's the highlights. you can see the rest of the photos here if you'd like, there are a bunch. after the ship got back into port, we all grabbed lunch in south beach and then jack and i spent another day in miami just lounging by the pool and burning ourselves to a crisp. :) had drinks on our last evening with a former Y-100 co-worker who lived 2 blocks from our hotel, and then dragged ourselves to the airport at 6:30am (while people were still coming home from their all-night south beach parties, i might add).
makin' friends and meetin' people
* since it was
xtingu's birthday on our sailaway day, jack and i brought party hats for all of us to wear. talk about an icebreaker -- we met so many passengers and crew members because everyone wanted to know what the hats were for. the maitre'd even recognized jill later and had a birthday cake delivered to our table for her at dinner. * our tablemates at dinner, michele and dawn, couldn't have been more awesome. they were best friends from grade school who lived in separate states now and decided to take a cruise to spend quality time together. we hung out with them several times outside of dinnertime, and they actually chose to stay with us even though they saw some of our childish (but really freakin' funny) antics. which brings me to:
* photobombing. good lord, half the people on that ship now have vacation photos where we're making crazy faces behind them. by the end of the trip, we were in hysterics every time the opportunity arose.
* tanya. this gal gave us more entertainment than we could have hoped for. we first encountered her at karaoke night, tipsy as hell and having a ball. she danced around in front of everyone, she sang along with each person who got up on stage, she grabbed the butts of the girls who did an En Vogue song. and all of it was punctuated with her signature "woo-hoooooo!!!!" for the rest of the cruise, we'd hear that whoop and our necks would snap around to look for her. every night was a new game of "let's see how much i can drink" for er, and i have to say i'm impressed that she held up as well as she did.
* i ran into 2 people i know on the ship! one was a guy from work who i did a project with a few years ago... the other was especially wacky. when we were getting back on the ship after our day in jamaica, we went through security and then a guy stopped me as i was getting my bag:
guy: excuse me, do you live in boston?
me: i used to...
guy: have you ever heard of the Company Theater?
me: why, yes...
guy: were we in Footloose together???
turns out matt (who had been a teen at the time) remembered me from a show we were in together 10 years ago. totally crazy! now he's performing on the ship, he does 3 shows a week as one of their singers.
(yes, i am sunburnt and fuzzy-haired from swimming all day. more on that later.)
jamaica
honestly, our day in jamaica goes down in my book as one of the top 10 days in my life so far. no lie. i had hired a private tour guide, because i really didn't want to be shuttled by the cruise line to some common activity that 2,000 other people were doing. all i had told the guy (his name was Peat) was that we didn't want to go where everyone else goes, we'd be happy even just driving around and seeing stuff, and that we wanted to have lunch at a place called Scotchies, which jack had heard has the best jerk on the island.
our guide for the day was Peat's son (who called himself "Re-Peat", har har) and our driver was Clifton... 2 super-nice guys who ended every sentence with "yah mon". they spent the first hour or so driving us all up and down the winding hills of ocho rios, a crazy hair-raising thrill ride with no street signs, no posted speed limits, ginormous potholes everywhere, and 2-lane roads only wide enough to fit 1 car.
view of our ship from up in the hills
everywhere we drove, people were jumping out in front of the car, doing things hoping to get tips from us. one boy actually dove out and started doing backflips down the hill in front of us as we drove. when we drove through fern gully, "fern man" jumped out from the side of the road, and we decided to get a shot:
hot breakfast!
after we drove around for a while, our guides went off the beaten path and drove us down a dirt road to a place called they called the "blue hole". it's a little lagoon that mostly locals go to, to swim or just hang out. the water was this crazy aqua blue, and there were several little waterfalls and caves that you could swim around. honestly, it was paradise. and for most of the time, we were the only people there! for about 1/2 hour there was another woman and her 2 boys... other than that, we had the entire place to ourselves. we spent the rest of the morning just floating in the blue water, soaking in the sunshine. i almost wanted to cry when we left. here are some pix and video:
shot from up above -- to get in the water, you either have to dive off of one of the water falls or climb all the way down the slippery rocks. there were 2 local guys, Omar and his younger brother, there to help us down the rocks for tips.
hi,
xtingu and mrlich!video of the scenery from above, after we got out of the water... that's omar throwing something in the beginning.
(funny story for the philly peeps: as we were walking back up the hill after swimming, jack lost his footing and slipped. he got back up and shouted down to our guides, "i'm okay!" to which they automatically replied, "HOT BREAKFAAAAST!!!!" i almost peed myself, i was laughing so hard.)
we'd worked up quite an appetitie from all that swimming, so we headed to scotchies for lunch. YUM. we had a feast -- amazing slow-cooked jerk chicken and pork, festival (a deep-fried cornbread), roasted breadfruit, roasted yams, and plenty of red stripe to wash it down. it was a very simple place, but gorgeous... you ordered your food at one hut, picked it up at another, and then the rest of the property was a web of little huts with picnic tables where you just opened your tinfoil packets of food and chowed down. we gorged ourselves, and it came out to about $24 for 4 of us, including beer. amazing.
jill and matt with clifton and "re-peat" at the entrance
the scotch bonnet pepper hot sauce... "hot hot hot" was right. tasted great, didn't feel so great the next day.
a couple of the little eating huts
the employees got a kick out of the post-lunch travel hoop tryout
other random stuff we did:
several nights at the martini bar. oof. those suckers were STRONG, even the foo-foo ones. (BTW, we're blue in this shot because the blue LEDS were on... the whole bar is white, and the lighting changes color.)
laid by the pool.
ate a lot of sushi. we had a late dinner seating, so for several nights we grabbed sushi and had soosh and drinks at the "sunset bar", an outdoor bar at the very back of the boat that hardly anyone used. beautiful view!
soosh
the bar
got a photo on the last night of us with our table mates and valentin, our very eager and still-learning-english assistant waiter from macedonia. we loved this staircase in the main dining room, it was like something out of an old hollywood musical movie set:
so, that's the highlights. you can see the rest of the photos here if you'd like, there are a bunch. after the ship got back into port, we all grabbed lunch in south beach and then jack and i spent another day in miami just lounging by the pool and burning ourselves to a crisp. :) had drinks on our last evening with a former Y-100 co-worker who lived 2 blocks from our hotel, and then dragged ourselves to the airport at 6:30am (while people were still coming home from their all-night south beach parties, i might add).
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no subject
Date: 2010-04-25 01:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-04-25 01:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-04-25 02:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-04-25 09:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-04-25 09:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-04-25 11:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-04-26 03:15 am (UTC)I added captions and stuff in case you're interested. :)
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Date: 2010-04-26 03:34 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-04-26 03:34 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-04-26 04:19 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-04-26 01:32 am (UTC)Sounds like you had an amazing time!
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Date: 2010-04-27 02:15 am (UTC)trip looks amazing!
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Date: 2010-04-28 12:12 am (UTC)