So last month, Hubs and I decided to refresh our Tahiti tans since they were slowly fading over winter. It had been fairly chilly out here so we hopped onto Costco Travel and booked ourselves onto a Celebrity Cruise to the Caribbeans. It was my first time cruising and I personally couldn’t wait to gorge myself on all the yummy goods the ship had to offer. It definitely helped that Celebrity has been consistently rated the best cruise food and they actually have a couple James Beard award chefs on board! Thanks Hubs! 😀
Since Hubs had been cruising before with his family, we opted for the Western Carribean since it featured two stops he had never been to. Our port of calls were the Grand Caymans, Cozumel, Roatan, and Rivera Costa Maya. Hubs hopped onto Tripadvisor and found out that lobster was the best in Roatan… Unfortunately Tripadvisor majorly failed us again so he was super duper pissed.
Our flights were not booked well at all… we took had to connect through LAX and on a redeye in order to get over to Fort Lauderdale, but given that we saved a good $700 on the flights for two of us, I’m not complaining. We landed at the horrendous time of 6AM, hung out and met my co-workers at the airport and then we flagged a taxi and boarded onto the Celebrity Solstice.
It was pretty. 😀 Very pretty!
I snapped this picture when we were docked and were being tendered from the cruise ship onto the Cayman Islands. Boarding the ship in Port Everglades was pretty easy. I unfortunately was absolutely cranky because some genius parents decided that it was the best idea ever to have their toddlers fly on a red eye. Seriously. DO NOT DO IT. I have NOT been on a single red eye where the kids slept soundly. I ended up sandwiched between two toddlers. One in the row in front, and one in back. It was obviously torturous for the poor kids since they couldn’t not get comfortable and sleep which resulted in everyone around them not sleeping. They fussed and later just sobbed cause they were so frustrated. I don’t know who I felt worse for… the mom or the child. Parents… please fly with your kids during the day, so that they aren’t exhausted, yet unable to fall asleep which = super cranky children. Thankfully Hubs had brought ear plugs so I plugged them in and semi-dozed.
Our rooms weren’t ready when we were on the cruise so we wandered around and ended up in the Adult Only Solarium. Ahhh… love it! They had this healthy oriented food bar that we noshed at and then we ended up at the buffet upstairs with EVERY SINGLE OTHER PASSENGER and their 18 pieces of luggage. I was definitely frustrated and my fuse was getting shorter. Thankfully they announced that our rooms were ready and we found ours and settled in. I finally got to take a nice long hot shower and we hopped back onto the deck to see the ship pull away from shore.
We were off! Throughout the rest of the day, we wandered and explored the ship. One thing that struck me as odd was that Leonardo DiCaprio was advertising Tag Heuer watches. Clearly Celebrity totally missed out on the Titanic movie. It was off putting that Jack Dawson was on the ship advertising watches… last time I checked, he didn’t exactly exude confidence in ships. I thought Tag had plenty of other spokespeople…
Since we made it back safely, it was apparent that we didn’t meet the fate of Titanic… or maybe I should say the Concordia!