the long and winding road...

Sea Day! After so many ports, it was nice to have a day to rest up from our vacation a bit :-) Honestly, we didn’t do too much. Slept in a bit, had a little breakfast. For the sea day they did a special brunch buffet with ice sculptures, a chocolate fountain, and carved fruit and stuff. It was nice because they had a half hour beforehand where you could just come in and look and take pix with it in its pristine form. The food itself was pretty good but it was sooooo crowded. OMG, it was the first and probably only time on the ship that it felt crowded (that’s actually one of the things I’ve really enjoyed about the ship, it never feels crowded).

After brunch, they were doing a pirate themed thing in the Fun Factory so we thought we’d take G over there to check it out. She’s never done the kids club before and I’m not all that keen on leaving her anyway but the director told us earlier that we were more than welcome to join in on any of the activities with her. The other thing is we don’t go on vacation to get away from G. We want to hang out with her. On the other hand, it is sometimes a little hard to entertain her every waking hour and it’s a bit harder for her to entertain herself on the ship than it is at home where she has all her toys and stuff. So we thought maybe it would be nice if she could spend an hour or two having fun and playing with some kids. We could tell she’d actually missed this. She’d been talking about her friends at daycare for a few days.

It worked out ok. They did the craft then they marched around the ship screaming out some song. G seemed to be having a really good time (we know because we walked around spying on her). They were supposed to move on to an ice cream party which is where we were going to meet her about an hour later. But, for some reason, when they got the ice cream, G started to cry “I want my mommy!!” Luckily we were right there, she just hadn’t seen us, so I went and scooped her up. She calmed down pretty quickly but we felt bad. I think we messed up because we told her she was going to do the craft with the kids but not the ice cream. She expected us back after the craft and when we weren’t, she got upset. Oops. Anyway, we all sat and had some ice cream after that and G seemed happy enough.

Other than that, we roamed around the ship and had a nap. We decided to stay out of the sun. We’d had enough sun over the past few days already.

It was nice to get a picture of the our dining area empty This was the main dining area sort of around the corner from us. It was set up for the brunch buffet. We didn't get to sit in this area. They put us in the unofficial kids section. I think I mentioned before that we had a really crappy table near the entrance, at the intersection of the walkway, the kitchen and the waiters' work area. It was ok overall but didn't have the nice dining room feel that we were hoping for. Plus, G's quiet so we didn't really need to be relegated to the crying room but I guess the cruise ship doesn't know that.

I really love the fruit carvings!

I must not have snapped any pix of our activities that day. Of course after dinner we did pix. Hey!! We'd already paid for them so why not???

This was the main stairway in the lobby area. It was actually much prettier than it looks in this picture. The floors were onyx of something and they were lighted from below so the whole staircase kind of glowed at night.

I really like this pic of the three of us. You can't tell but G was really choking me at the time lol!

Next stop Aruba!