Cruise Report! Part 2

[If you missed Part 1, click here. ]

After all the snorkeling and kayaking in Roatan, we went back to the ship to change, then walked down the pier to the shops there.

 
And found Fat Tuesday's! Home of the spectacular frozen drink - margaritas, daiquiris, whatever they can mix up. And then, once you've had one of those...

...you realize something has happened to your shoes and you have to stay there! We wandered around sipping on something cold and looking at all the goods. There was an inlaid-wood ice bucket that I'm still kicking myself for not getting. Hey! If anybody's gonna be in that neighborhood, pick one up for me, k?

On to Belize!
Had a fun evening on the boat while we made our way to Belize for the 2nd excursion. Brenda and Doug were going on a different one from the rest of us -- cave tubing -- and they left early that Wednesday morning. Ours didn't leave until almost noon, and we boarded a boat directly from the ship, so we were never actually in Belize City. But we saw it from our balcony. We were anchored about 6 miles out.

We hopped onto the boat that would take us to our snorkeling site - about 20 minutes out, we thought. It was a bit cool, and we asked about the water temperature -- "refreshing" was the description. I was a little anxious, but what can you do?

After about a 25-minute ride, we finally got to the island where we'd get our gear. First, we saw these little houses:

Available for rent!

And around the corner was a little island setup with a gift shop (of course!), a dive shop, and a restaurant. We stopped there for just a bit, then got back on the boat for the cruise to the coral reef.

Waaaaaay off in the distance, there's another boat.
That's where we're going...

We could see the water color change and small breakers where the water got shallower - that was our target area. Then, it was into the water (refreshing, yes!) in a group of 9 with our dive guide. He warned us about spiny urchins, fire coral, and jellyfish. The water was only about 5 feet deep where we put in, and maybe 12 feet at the most. The view was spectacular and quite different from what we saw in Roatan.

There's one of those spiny urchins.

 And then there was this beautiful guy!

The reef was beautiful and big! Sea fans and feather dusters were everywhere, and Kelly found a jellyfish that looked like a tube -- luckily she stayed away from it!

We were out there for a full hour and it felt like no time at all. We re-boarded the boat and headed back to the island for a pit stop before getting back to the ship.

These two have never met a camera they won't pose for,
but I'm really showing the little beach that was behind the restaurant.
Those little houses are to the right from here.

On the way back, we finally got to see our entire ship:

When we got back, we rested a bit before getting ready for dinner. I thought Brenda and Doug would have been back for hours, but it turns out their excursion was all day! They hiked, tubed down a river, wandered in town...they're wild ones, those two!

This was our actual anniversary day, so dinner was special:

Our waiters Luis and Marius sang to us and took the picture. Marshall and Kelly had gone for a dinner in the steak house to celebrate their anniversary, so it was just the four of us. I had every intention of writing down what we ate each night, but completely failed on that. Seems like this one was steak for me, but who knows.

What about the evenings?
I've not written a lot about what we did in the evenings after dinner, quite frankly because we were all over the place on that. The first night, RDub and I bailed and were asleep by 10. In our defense, we'd been up since 5 and driving from Fort Worth to Galveston. The entire group was made up of people who get up early for their jobs -- 5am, 6am... -- and changing that habit just for vacation is hard. But we managed a few of these...

We actually have video of this, too, but I'll spare you the truly bad music -- I think the band had talent, but they were trying to sing "Achy Breaky Heart" to get us to dance. You really shouldn't sing that song with a Romanian accent. They were more like a polka band, but when we came in, they asked what we'd dance to. With country as the answer, they did their best. We didn't stay long after this dance...

For the first time ever, I didn't go see any of the stage shows. We went to the traditional "Newlywed/Middle-wed/Old-wed" game -- they ask three couples to answer questions like "What's your husband's most disgusting habit" and then see if their answers match. That was followed by a comedian, but the entertaining part was deciding which of us would get to kill the rude people who kept coming in late and trying stand in front of our chairs. We turned some old guy into our own personal bouncer.

Somewhere there is very likely video of us at the rooftop club doing "Gangham Style" but you can't prove it was me.

Well, we're down to our last two days on the ship, and already beginning to miss it. Next installment: COZUMEL! We're pretty sure our picture is on a wall somewhere, and we may or may not be allowed to return...