Come Sail Away With Me

The First Night:
We board the ship, Majesty of the Seas, and upon entering our stateroom find two lovely orange life vests and instructions for a mandatory evacuation drill. At about 4:30 pm we don our vests and are herded to deck 7 for the drill. After finishing the drill, we toss our jackets in our cabin and rush upstairs again to watch as the ship pulls away from Miami. At 6 pm we have our first dinner seating at which we meet our awesome waiter, Morris. Dinner is excellent...prime rib with garlic mashed potatoes and a rum soaked creme puff for dessert. After dinner we attend an awful revue of latin music starring the onboard performers. The night gets a whole lot better after we stop at the pizza bar, and head on out to the Paint Your Wagon Lounge to conclude our evening with some Karoke and a Family Fued-like live gameshow.

Day 2, Nassau:
We wake up in Nassau and grab a bite to eat at the Windjammer breakfast buffet. At 9am we disembark the ship and prepare for our underwater Sea Explorer excursion. This is only okay...we see some sights (Oprah's house, Chuck Norris's house, and Nic Cage's boat) before boarding a semi-submarine. The view isn't great, but we see some interesting marine life. Next we decide to visit the straw market...this is by far the coolest shopping I've ever done. It's all cramped and busy, we're moving in masses and getting called at from all directions: "See something you like honey? I make you a good deal!" I see a beautiful bracelet and pick it up..."You like? Fifteen dollar, but I give it to you for twelve." At this point I realize that even though it is beautiful, I never wear bracelets and probably shouldn't splurge on this. I say no thank you and begin to walk away..."You wanna pay ten?" This is intriguing, but I decline again as I will still never wear the bracelet. In another section I spy sterling silver necklaces with square pendants. "You like honey? Fifteen dollar but today it's twelve." I've already decided to buy one, but as I'm choosing between colors the woman says, "Come on honey, twelve dollar, but special deal, 10 dollar just for you." I smile at her and choose the pink one. Walking away my husband says we should have seen if she would go down to eight...she probably would have, but I don't feel bad about paying 10. We have so much fun at the straw market that after a lunch back on the boat, we go back to pick up a couple more things. Back on the boat again, we take a quick nap and then get ready for formal night at dinner. Mmmmm, dinner is delicious again, filet mingion with seasoned vegetables and cherries jubilee for dessert. Morris, entertaining as always, takes time out to pose for a picture with us. After dinner, our favorite new passtime is Karoke. Tonight, Andrew gets up to sing...he's about 6'4'' and he's wearing a faded Back to the Future ringer tee complete with Delorian. Andrew rocks Unchained Melody and puts everyone else to shame. We finish the night with a very funny comedy show and a poolside midnight buffet as we pull away from Nassau.

Day 3, CocoCay:
Again, we eat our breakfast at the Windjammer, and then hop a ferry for the Royal Caribbean owned island. CocoCay is beautiful and hot. We make our way to the Snorkel Shack to pick up our equipment and get a quick snorkeling orientation. After slathering ourselves in suntan lotion, we get suited up (vests, flippers, and goggles) and struggle out to the water. It takes us some time to get used to, but as soon as we learn the best ways to not suck in a bunch of salt water, we're snorkeling! We see lots of fish, parts of a shipwreck, and a sunken plane. We're in the water for an hour and a half, and by the time we pack it in we're starving. Luckily, RC is providing lunch on the island today! Mmmm...tasty fruit punch, a grilled hot dog, and some delicious mac n cheese. There is also barbecued ribs and chicken and lots of other things too. Hot and tired, we decide to call it a day (for the island anyway) and are tendered back to the mother ship. Tonight at dinner it is Italian night and we are super excited. I choose chicken marsala and eat every bite of it! For dessert I have a wonderful piece of tiramisu...mmmmmm. After dinner we catch a comedy/juggling show that is very entertaining and then stick around to see Love and Marriage, a newlywed-ish sort of game. This proves to be the best entertainment on the ship...we even skip Karoke tonight.

Day 4, Keywest:
We dock in Keywest around 9:30am and must proceed to the immigrations inspection onboard. Standing in line and avoiding stupid people makes us hungry and we grab a quick bite to eat. As we step off the boat, we realize that we're pretty early for our Pirate Soul excursion and decide to explore the island on our own for a while. We don't go far, but manage of course to find many of the touristy gift shops that are in close range of the pier. We find some Key Lime salt water taffy for my mother-in-law, and almost buy a personalized sign that reads "Derrek's Spot - No Parking - Violators will be towed" for Jenna's boyfriend, but decide against it. It's about that time and we decide to trek back to the pier where we are met by a "wrecker" who guides us to the Pirate Soul Museum. The museum is pretty cool, but I'm not allowed to take pictures inside. Oh well...we make our way through the museum that is set up to look like Port Royal, Jamaica in the 1700s. At the end we are let into the gift shop where we find lots of cool pirate loot that is way too expensive. We choose the perfect souvenier for Jenna and are on our way. We can't leave Key West without eating some real Key Lime Pie, so we do just that at the Blond Giraffe and it is delicious. Now by this time we are completely exhausted so we stroll back to ship and sit at the Windjammer (open air deck) for about an hour. Then we decide that since we're ready for our last dinner, we should switch to the Schooner Bar (right above our dining room), order some drinks and wait for dinnertime. At dinner, we are all tired and a little sad because it's our last dinner and our last chance to be around Morris. For dinner I eat a New York Strip steak (yes, I ate steak 3 of the 4 nights) and order Brownie maddness for dessert (which I never get around to eating). The waiters sing us a farewell song, we say our goodbyes, and it's off to our cabin to pack. We set our luggage outside the door, and do some last night clearance shopping where I pick up a Royal Caribbean sweatshirt. After shopping we sit in the Schooner Bar again with drinks until we decide it's time we introduce my parents to the best casino game ever. It's called Treasure Cove and what you do is drop quarters in and hope they land just right so the moving bar will push money over the edge. I know, it sounds stupid and unexciting...it is stupid, but it's far from unexciting! My mom must have an addictive nature because immediately she hands over a twenty so that we can get 80 quarters and drop them randomly into these machines. We do so, and when our share runs out we change in ten dollars more of our own money. Now the really hooking part of this "game" is that all of this money is charged with potential energy...it's just sitting there waiting to fall...and sometimes, it does fall! That's how we got suckered in the first place. All of sudden, my dad walks over and starts waving a twenty...there are bills sitting on top of the coins so that if a huge chunk of change falls, a bill might fall also, and he got a twenty! Of course this drives us to keep going and my mom changes in another twenty. People are surrounding us, and we're all hopped up on the excitement...sometimes a few quarters fall, sometimes more than a few...most times nothing happens. We think we have a system...we're dropping the coins at a precise moment and going really slow with every drop just in case some of that potential energy decides to convert to kinetic energy...we don't want to walk away and have the people that are surrounding us get our free money!! Finally, my parents decide to call it quits...we play till our quarters are gone and make a very wise decision to walk away...albeit slowly, and backwards. Hubby wants to play some blackjack so he finds a seat at a five dollar table, changes twenty dollars, and plays 6 hands. We have just enough time to catch the last couple of Rock-a-Rokie singers (tonight it's Karoke with a live band). We walk in and see Andrew, sans BttF tee shirt, singing Johnny Be Good...ironic, I know. What an awesome trip.

Day 5, The Journey Home:
We wake up at 6:30 am so that we have enough time to eat breakfast and be ready when our tag color is called. We are off the ship by 9am and after finding our luggage and moving through customs, on our way to Ft. Lauderdale Int'l Airport by 10:30. At 11:30 we have lunch at the airport Chili's...I have the cheesesteak. After lunch we settle into the FLLight Lounge for some euchre. It is in this lounge that, through my mother's perspective, we wittness a theft, I go incognito as Jaime (spanish pronunciation), a lady in a wheelchair steals something of ours (I don't remember what), and stemshul slugs said wheelchair lady in the face. This is how she will retell the story at school, so it must be reality. We vacate the lounge at 3pm because it's closing and head to our gate. I buy The Da Vinci Code (don't worry, it's okay because it's at the airport), stemshul buys an electronic Su Doku game, and we all have some delicious pizza. After waiting around for 8 hours, we board our plane, on time, for Detroit. We are delayed on the plane for half an hour because of weather in Detroit. Our plane ride is bumpy and the kid next to stemshul utilizes his barf bag. Because of our delays, we are now late for our connecting flight home, so we must run from Gate A70 to Gate A11 in about 10 minutes. When we reach A40-something, stemshul has us dash upstairs so we can catch the speedy shuttle. The shuttle drops us at our gate and we sprint to the counter...we made it. Thank God!! After waiting around for 8 hours it really would have sucked to miss our 27 minute flight home. We finally arrived around 12:30am and played with Mr. B and Hudsy for an hour before we zonked out in our own bed.