Family Cruise

We spent last week on a very fun seven day cruise to the Eastern Caribbean. We sailed on Royal Caribbean's Freedom of the Seas, with an itinerary that included stops in the Bahamas (on RC's private island, CocoCay), St. Thomas, USVI, and St. Maarten.

While this was technically my third cruise, and Scott's second, it had been well over 12 yearrs since either of us had been on a cruise ship so we both felt like this was a new family vacation experience for us. Plus it was Amelia and John's first cruise so the whole trip was quite an adventure for our family.

This trip was celebrated in honor of Scott's mom's (Candace, aka. grandmommy) 60th birthday, which she celebrated last year. Due to caring for Scott's grandmother full-time for the past five years, Candace was not able to travel extensively until this year, hence the delay in celebrating her special milestone birthday until now.

Below are the kids with their grandmother in the boarding area at Port Canaveral. As you can tell, Scott took the opportunity to make his son look even more like a mini-hoodlum with layers upon layers of Heat gear, all acquired during the preceding week spent in Miami. My dislike of the gear aside, John really enjoys strutting around in his (now two) Heat jerseys! During the first day on the ship, dozens of friendly RC staff members stopped to ask John who his favorite Heat player was, or to give him a celebratory high-five for the NBA championship. John loved all this attention! However, I made John take the hat off quickly after I saw how he looked in the above photo!

Below is a shot of our first impression of the cruise ship as it was docked next to the pier during boarding. Until recently, The Freedom of the Seas was the largest passenger cruise ship in the world. The ship had fourteen decks and from a passenger's perspective, the ship was just massive. I'll provide a better description in a later post when I show photos from around the ship.After eating lunch and checking out our cabins (which were much larger than I had anticipated), we headed up to to the deck for the departure from the port. We stood on deck 12 to watch the sail away party, and from here we had good views of the children's swimming area (The H2O Zone). All of the sculptures below sprayed water in some fashion and ended up being thoroughly enjoyed by our children.

Below is a view of some of the adult-friendly swimming pools.

Leaving the Florida coast.

The photo below was taken the following day when we were docked in CocoCay. I included it here as a preview of things to come, and to show just how large this ship was!