Monster Blog Caribbean Chronicles Chapter 1:Travel

I just returned from a week long trip to the Caribbean with my family (grandparents, parents, siblings, aunt, uncle, and cousins). I had the opportunity to experience so many strange and new things. I was planning to cover the trip in one big blog, but it would just be too long. I will try to get it all in within the next three days or so. I will not be publishing any photos of my family to protect the identities of the innocent.

Let's start at the beginning. We left the cold climate last Saturday morning. We traveled with my parents and brothers. They drove down to fly out of the city with us. Eric managed to handle his fear of flying quite well for the first plane ride. He listened to jazz and remained calm.


We landed in Orlando and discovered the most run down airport of all time. I think there was an asbestos issue. I am not sure why I think that, but the place seemed asbestos-y.


Unfortunately Eric's calm about flying was short lived. We were all unnerved when we realized our flight from Orlando to Miami would be inside of a flying cigar. Seriously, this was the smallest plane. There was one seat on each side of the aisle. The cockpit was not blocked off; I'm not sure but isn't that against federal regulation?

We could all see out from the cockpit as we were landing and the horizon was just swaying back and forth. My Dad told me that he wondered if that was the end of his life for a few minutes. Below you can see that the terrifying flight did allow us an amazing sunset. Anyway, we landed on the ground and made it safely to Miami by Saturday evening. We met up with my Grandparents at the hotel that evening.


Sunday morning we woke up and had breakfast before heading out to get onto the cruise ship. We really got to appreciate the winter warmth of Florida.

The process of boarding a cruise ship was strange. The guys that took our baggage onto the ship pretty much told us, with absolutely no shame, that we had to tip them. We did. When we finally boarded the ship we anticipated that the rooms would be freakishly small, but they were actually a nice size. We had a great porthole, as you can see below.


We finally set sail late in the afternoon. We were initially put off by the large number of people on board, but once everyone found their rooms things were much less crowded.


We wandered around the ship. We discovered that there were 13 levels, many restaurants, a casino, many bars, a theater, a bowling alley, an art gallery, tennis courts, basketball courts, a climbing wall, stores, swimming pools, hot tubs, a water slide, a naked deck, etc. The theme of the cruise line is "freestyle," and our family began joking about how everything was "freestyle." When someone would eat two breakfasts they would say that they were "freestyling". Note to fellow vegans, cruise ships are not particularly vegan friendly. I think Eric and I are the only people in history to actually lose weight on a cruise ship.


The second morning we awoke to see Cuba port side (I don't actually know that it was port side, but I really wanted to throw in some ship lingo). You can see the skyline of Havana in the photo below.


We dressed up and went out to dinner with our family on the second evening aboard our ship. Below is a photo from dress up night.

Finally, the end of our first full day was highlighted with a towel swan on the bed. Nothing says welcome aboard like a towel swan!