Just. Breathe.

We broke tradition this year and went on vacation at the beginning of the summer season instead of the end! Rebels, we are. Back in February or so, I had a friend who started a travel agency and a daughter who was stressing about her 2nd semester in college, and a vacation just sounded like something we needed. I immediately thought of a cruise, and the family took about 3.4 seconds to get on board with that wild hair.  And finally it happened! We left early (EARLY!) Saturday morning--5am to be exact--in order to get to the ship as early as we could and beat some of the lines. Fact: 7-day cruises start on the day of departure, even when departure isn't until 4pm. So get there, get a deck chair and some food and drink, and start vacation! The deck would never be that empty again! We stopped by the room to drop off our bags, but the steward, Libert, was still working. We didn't understand until later why he was a little upset that we were there -- he was decorating our r...

I should realize I'm too old to wait very long before writing things down -- with my memory, two weeks is just asking for trouble! The Setup RDub and I settled on a cruise after weeks (months?) of discussing what we wanted to do for our 25th anniversary. We looked into all-inclusive resorts, travel to Europe, and any number of other options. We didn't have an unlimited budget, but we knew this would be a splurge and didn't want to worry too much about it once we decided what to do. We've cruised before (twice together, and another time for me) and have had good experiences -- nothing like what just happened to the Carnival cruise ship! While we were considering, RDub was talking to a friend who had sailed on this cruise line when he and his wife got married. Their tenth anniversary was 3 days before ours, and just like that, this became a party! The splurge was to make it a full week, and to get a balcony room. Now we're a party of four. But wait, there's...