Bon Voyage: Our Cruise Vacation

"A vacation is like love: anticipated with pleasure, experienced with discomfort, and remembered with nostalgia." - Author Unknown

One week after our move home from Atlanta, Charles and I took a five night cruise to Cozumel and Belize City on Royal Caribbean's Navigator of the Seas. After all of the stress from the past year, we needed a getaway! I barely had time to say hello and unpack our things before it was time to pack again, say goodbye, and head to the port in Miami on Monday morning.


Other than forgetting to pack Charles' tuxedo shirt (rented one onboard, crisis averted) and forgetting Charles' wallet (it fell out in the car, but wasn't a problem because we didn't actually need anything in it... fortunately, I had the passports and money), our departure was smooth-sailing. Pun intended.


This will be our fifth cruise with Royal Caribbean and our second time sailing on the lovely Navigator of the Seas. We thoroughly enjoy this class of ship, as it is very large and offers a variety of activities and venues, but is not so large that it's cumbersome to traverse.


We particularly like the gorgeous three-floor dining room, the Royal Promenade with its cafes and shops, solarium-style pool deck with hot tubs, Las Vegas-style casino, ice skating performances, not to mention the various lounges with great live music and trivia games! We also managed to find a secluded area where we played a few rounds of shuffleboard. It was pretty windy, so we never got to play mini-golf on this trip.







Something we take verrry seriously is our ongoing Monopoly Deal tournament. The card rooms (usually bursting with Memaws playing bridge) are a relaxing way to spend a few hours; just imagine being surrounded by breathtaking views of clear blue skies and the endless tranquil ocean while serving up a hot plate of Monopoly whoopass (sorry Charles). Do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars!


If you ask me, the evening is the best part about cruises. I love getting dressed up each night for dinner in the elegant dining room followed by taking in an ice show, the Love & Marriage Game Show (think Newlywed Game), or The Quest (adults only scavenger hunt... you just have to see it). We have rarely missed a formal night and even though I HATE packing all that extra stuff, in the end it's worth it. When else do you have the chance to dress up besides the occasional fundraising dinner or wedding? It's not like I have to badger Charles into wearing a tux... quite the opposite, he's the rare gentleman who likes formal wear. One of his many, many charming quirks. I'll scan our formal portraits eventually...


Enough about the ship and all the fun things on board! The point of a cruise is to actually GO somewhere and this trip took us to Cozumel and Belize City. Unfortunately, it rained the day we were in Cozumel so we stayed on the ship and relaxed. At our second port of call, we booked an excursion that would take us cave-tubing and hiking through the jungle in Belize. It was, in a word, spectacular. Please note, as this was an extremely WET excursion, I did not bring a camera along. It would have been too distracting to juggle a camera and as your body is half-submerged in an inner tube, putting it in your pocket is futile. I kicked back and really enjoyed the moment instead of fumbling with the camera and I just found some pictures online that represent our experience. They're from the EXACT river and caves we explored in Belize City with "Major Tom and the Fun Team", which I highly recommend.


We took an hour bus ride from the port, during which our tour guide educated us on the finer points of daily life, geography, and culture in Belize. Points of interest include the country's ONE stoplight (technically, there are a total of four but only one works), miles of banana and cashew tree farms, and heavily armed guards charged with preventing any undesirable "cash crops" from crossing the border.

Once we arrived at the cave-tubing facility, we received our flotation devices and proceded to march down a rocky path into the Belizean jungle, crossing a river and passing through dry caves, upstream toward our entry point into the waterway. The guides were kind enough to stop periodically and tell us about the local wildlife (tarantulas) and vegetation (various rash-inducing vines, medicinal ferns, and different types of wood including the native prized mahogany).


After our jungle trek, we came to a steep hill and at the bottom we found a very shallow, crystal clear river leading into a dark and foreboding cavern. The riverbed was lined with smooth stones in a dazzling array of color. Before you could say "claustrophobia", we had hopped onto our tubes, linked up into a long chain, and drifted into the current which would gently guide us through the "entrance to Hell" (according to the ancient Mayan civilization).


Drifting through the alternating darkness and light of the caves was surreal. We lazily floated past protruding stalactites and stalagmites, shimmering mineral deposits in every imaginable shape and texture, and glimpsed the occasional bat. We passed a modest waterfall inside a large, echoey cavern which distorted the sound so that it seemed as if the tiny cascade eclipsed Niagara Falls in size. The most beautiful of all the sights (and I wish I could find an exact picture of it) was an opening from the cave to the sunlit jungle above, called a cenote. The vines and roots had grown down into the edge of what is basically a large hole in the floor of the jungle exposing the limestone caves. If the caves were said to be the entrance to Hell, then the cenote by comparison looks like the gates of Heaven.


In conclusion, we floated out of the caves and down stream to the end of our run. I must not fail to mention that we learned a new phrase on this journey: butts up! When you're floating down the river and the stream gets shallow in places, or there's an upcoming rock that threatens your caboose, the guide calls out "BUTTS UP!" That's your fair warning to lift your fanny and avoid a "free massage with black and blue tattoo souvenirs" as they say in Belize.

We ate a delicious lunch of coconut-milk-cooked red beans and rice with jerk chicken. After a nap on the bus ride back to the port, we were tendered back to the ship and sailed off into the sunset. That concludes our adventure in Belize.

The fun on the ship was not done! My last photos were taken as we were leaving the ship in the Port of Miami during an absolutely stunning sunrise!




I have absolutely no idea what these guys were doing... some kind of lifeboat inspection or something. I just thought it looked neat!


As you may have guessed, we had an absolutely fabulous trip and can't wait to go on our next cruise THIS DECEMBER! Let the countdown begin...


Special thanks to my mom and Buz for watching Holly and custom making Charles' cravats, and to Bernice for taking care of Kittums while we were away! We couldn't have gone from our stressed-out "before" picture (above) to our stress-free "after" picture (below) without your help!