Days 317-323: Caribbean Cruise

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CRUISING THE CARIBBEAN -

Our ship, “Freedom of the Seas”, is currently the biggest and most innovative cruise ship in the world! It was huge and took 4000 guests and 1400 crew. It was absolutely awesome. We’d cruised before, in the South Pacific and loved it then, but this ship must have been two to three times as big! We had a huge room (for a cruise ship!) ;-) with its own balcony. Basically we spent the entire cruise just hanging out on the ship, going to all the fantastic shows (the entertainment on board was sensational!) There was a great production cast of singers and dancers and lots of special guests from around the world in terms of comedians, bands and circus-type performers. Every show we went to was incredible in terms of costumes, huge sets, choreography, songs, etc. We went to the show every night. They also had an ice show one night on the ice-rink on board and that was also brilliant!

The game shows were particularly hilarious, we’d never laughed so much in our lives, and Martin and I even won one game show and earned ourselves an amazing prize of… wait for it… Luggage tags!!! Ooooooh… so cool! We caught up on heaps of movies in the screening room, ate, went ice-skating, ate, Kristi surfed on the Flow-rider (awesome fun!!!), ate, Kristi bailed a lot on the Flow-rider, ate, drank cocktails, ate, strolled around the Royal Promenade shops, ate…. Well, you get the picture! ;-) We thought we’d put on weight BEFORE the cruise….. yeah well I think we doubled our size on the ship ;-) How can you not when the food is THAT good and all included?!?!?

We went rock wall climbing too which was brilliant - Martin raced up his wall in no time at all, while poor Kristi was half way up her section before her safety guy at the bottom decided to tell all the spectators that this was one of the hardest walls to climb!! Argh! No idea why I was there but after some perseverance I made it to the top, gained applause from the crowd ha ha - and the view was incredible! Here we were sailing along in the middle of the ocean, having climbed a rock wall that had its BASE on the 13th floor - when you were at the top of the wall it was HIGH! Phew! There were loads of swimming pools on board, spa pools that hung out OVER the edge of the ship - on the 11th floor!!! So much to do! There was LOADS of young people on board (cruises aren’t just for the newlyweds and nearly deads!) ;-) and we had a really nice couple at our dinner table every night, Jason and Kim from Minnesota, so it was great dining and going to shows with them! Martin and Jason even got intimate at one game show where they had to hold hands and skip around the studio to earn our team points - they definitely did it with style! ha ha ha

The only sad thing was that we hit a tropical storm - called Olga - while out in the Caribbean which meant that every day it was really windy out on the decks and it also prevented us from going to two of our ports - Labadee, Haiti and the Grand Caymans. Both these ports you had to take tenders to the shore and due to the tropical storm it was simply too rough to get everyone ashore safely!!! We were really gutted, especially about the Grand Caymans, and it was even harder to know this was the first time in 10 years that a Royal Caribbean ship anywhere in the world had had to miss TWO ports in the same trip!!! Didn’t make us feel much better but what can you do? Nature is nature! And besides, we were still on an awesome ship with LOADS to do! We did however get to both Ocho Rios, Jamaica and Cozumel, Mexico which we’ve put in separate blogs due to the amount of photos! ;-)

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