On August 13, Berta, the kids, and I went on a cruise to the Caribbean. We made arrangements for this couple months ago via Carnival’s website as our family vacation for this year. Our destination: San Juan in Puerto Rico, St. Thomas, and Grand Turk.
So on that Wednesday, we loaded our luggage into the car and drove to the port in New York City. We were running a little bit late because we had to drop off the house key with our cat sitter, and I was afraid we weren’t going to make it, but we did manage to not “miss the boat”. Nonetheless, that short delay did manage to affect our whole trip.
After dealing with the registration folks and boarding the boat, we were told that our state room was ready to occupy. So we went directly to our state room. What we should have done, is gone to the Phantom auditorium to watch the embarkation show. The embarkation show was a short show put on by the cruise director giving everyone the information they would need to know what was going on on the ship during the trip. Obviously, this was an essential bit of information that we somehow missed, and is really the only explanation I can see for why we hardly ever ran into any of the thousands of people who were on the ship with us.
Anyway, we did find out that the ship was operating a “kid camp” for kids so that they could get away from their parents for a little while. Abby was very enthusiastic about attending kid camp. They held a short meeting for parents that evening to learn more about kid camp, which we attended. Apart from that, we wandered around the ship a little bit and got acquainted with it. We walked through the Lido deck, deck nine, and as we did both Berta and I accepted drinks from one of the waiters.
One weird thing about the cruise is the “sail & sign” card. They issue you these cards at the start of the cruise, and each person gets one, even the kids. The card is used not just for opening your state room door, but also to pay for things while on the ship. So whenever you get a drink, which includes both alcohol and soda, you need to present this card so they can charge you for it. It’s a handy way to simplify purchases on board the ship, but it sure does rack up by the end of the trip.
Over the next two days we did nothing but sail through the ocean to our destination. This is the part that makes me think I will not cruise again. While we spent maybe 6 to 7 hours at each of the three ports, optimistically 21 hours total, we spent four solid days getting from New York to the Caribbean, which doesn’t count the time it took to get from port to port. Don’t get me wrong, when we finally figured out where things were going on on board, there was enough to do, but really, there’s only so much gambling, drinking, and off-Broadway show watching you can do without land in site.
During this time, Berta and I made spa appointments. I’m not really sure what she did, but I got a shave and a haircut. The haircut was ok, but the shave was way too close. I ended up with itchy ingrown hairs on my neck for the next couple days. I had even got a “mini facial” (whatever the heck that is) along with the shave, so I don’t know what the problem was. I was supposed to do a follow-up, but I decided to pass since I had such a poor experience.
After two days of not much else but being surrounded by water, we were very happy to see San Juan when we finally pulled into view. Outside the bay in which the ship docked, there was a large fort. It was very castle like. While passing by, we thought that it might be nice to look at it while we were on shore.
When the ship was finally docked, we made our way down to the gangplank and exited the ship. It was a couple hours before our excursion was scheduled to begin, so we decided to wander around near the dock on our own. There were a lot of tour buses near the dock, complete with drivers looking for people to take tours. Every few feet one of them stopped us to ask if we wanted to see the town. Knowing that we had an excursion planned, we didn’t accept their offers. Instead we walked a bit down the waterfront, and looked at a few local people selling things from kiosks on the road. There wasn’t anything there particularly noteworthy, but it was interesting to see local folks selling locally made items.
It wasn’t long walking when we had to turn around and go back to the pier to wait in line for our excursion. While in line with tour guide collected our tickets and then we made our way back out to the road and boarded one of the tour buses. Our scheduled tour was to be a tour of San Juan night life, since we were there in the afternoon and into the evening. Our driver decided to take us into new San Juan on a short drive around town.
This was perhaps one of the more disappointing aspects of our trip. The driver didn’t really take us to any interesting places to see, and seemed more interested in telling us the prices of condos in the buildings that we passed, and pointing out where the back doors of some casinos were. We did stop at Puerto Rican Senate building, which was not remarkable but was near a good view of one of the castles. Abby and I took a couple of pictures there, while Riley napped on Berta in the bus.
The bus left from there and continued to a small park in the old section of San Juan. Around this park were a few designated stores that were chosen by the cruise line to remain open and give us good bargains. I found it ironic that most of the items in the stores were made in Mexico and not in Puerto Rico. The shopping wasn’t so interesting, but the outside architecture was. You could tell that you were in old San Juan because all of the buildings exteriors were painted different pastel colors and had a specific kind of architecture. Combined with some cobblestone streets it was a pretty nice view, and more what I like to go on vacation for than shopping in some pre-designated stores.
It was Berta’s idea that we could try to eat dinner in San Juan, but it seems that the cruise line doesn’t really consider this when they create their excursions. It seems like they figure you already paid for dinner on the ship so why would you want to eat and pay for a meal at one of your ports of call. As a result, the excursions don’t seem to leave time for meals on shore. Nonetheless, we weren’t that far from the ship and decided that if we stayed to eat we would simply missed the bus and catch up with the ship before it left. Unfortunately, there were only two places to eat in the small square where we had stopped. One was a small café that did not seem to serve dinner, and the other was a restaurant that was highly recommended by a guide that I picked up early on, but seemed quite busy considering the number of patrons sitting at tables in the sidewalk outside.
A little frustrated with the situation, we decided to head up the hill toward one of the castles. Since we were in San Juan so late, and so much of the day had already gone by, we were not in time to catch one of the walking towards of the Fort. Still, the outside grounds were open to wander in, and offered plenty to look at even if we couldn’t go inside.
Visiting the Fort and going off tour was probably the best thing we did that day in Puerto Rico. I’m glad we left the tour bus behind and skipped dinner to catch the castle in the last of the sunlight. It was definitely something to see and I wish I had more time or could come back during the day to take a tour of the inside. Maybe next time.
We had to make our way through the square to get back to the ship, and although we arrived 15 minutes late the tour bus was still there waiting for other people who apparently enjoy the kind of junk shopping that the cruise line would like you to do. Instead of walking the whole way back to the ship, where it would inevitably be dark and in a strange place, we decided to catch the tour bus back to the ship, and eat dinner in the ship’s dining room. Sure, it’s kind of a bummer that we didn’t get to eat authentic food in San Juan, but who knows if you can even drink the water there.
I should take a moment to describe dinners aboard the ship. Of course all the dinners were prepaid with the cost of the cruise. You get a predesignated mealtime, either early seating or late seating. Most of the events on board seem to jive with the early dinner seating, and so of course we had selected the late seating. Being that we usually eat late in the evening when we are at home, this didn’t seem like a problem, and really, on board the ship, it wasn’t a problem either, just everything was a little bit later than what you might expect.
For example, the usual show that corresponds with the evening entertainment takes place during the late dinner seating. There is a second show for the people who go to the late dinner seating, after the late dinner much later at night. Our kids are used to staying up pretty late, so that wasn’t much of a problem, but it did stretch out the day very long.
Regarding the dinners themselves, Carnival prides itself on its casual atmosphere, yet still has two formal dinners aboard during the weeklong cruise. One on the way to the Caribbean, and one on the way back. That’s fine, we had planned for that. There are a couple of other places to eat on board, including a 24 hour pizza place, which doesn’t have half bad pizza. Still, the non-dining room fare is definitely not as good as what you can get in the dining room. Also in the dining room, there are people to wait on you, which is really what you want when you’re on vacation.
Our waiter, the head waiter for our section,Pongsac , was quite good and kept the kids entertained. There were even little performances by the waitstaff on some nights, including the YMCA dance, and a very long conga line. Pongsac also did a very interesting rendition of the birthday song, first in English, then in Chinese, where everyone got to shop along. It was pretty fun.
As far as the food itself goes, all I have to say is “warm chocolate melting cake.”
Our next stop was in St. Thomas. St. Thomas is one of the US Virgin Islands, but it used to be one of the British Virgin Islands, and so everyone there still drives on the left side of the road. None of this makes any sense however, because they still use cars with the steering wheel oriented for right side road driving. This is just something that I found curious.
Our excursion that was scheduled for St. Thomas included a bit of sightseeing via another tour, and then a stop at Megen’s Bay, one of the highest rated beaches in the world.
We got off the ship in the morning and lined up outside ready for our excursion. Our driver, named Tuffie, was a seasoned veteran driving his own vehicle. In stark contrast to our driver in San Juan, Tuffie knew what the heck he was talking about and was very entertaining during our drive around St. Thomas. We stopped in a couple of places during our drive.
After taking an unusual detour through a Home Depot parking lot, which actually became a part of the tour description, as Tuffie described the need to have their own Home Depot for when hurricanes hit and they needed to rebuild, we stopped at a lookout platform seemingly designed specifically for tour buses to park. The platform was situated very near the top of one of St. Thomas’ tall mountains. From there we had a spectacular view of the port and the ocean beyond. This is where I obtained one of the best photos I took on the trip. I have taken many chots from this platform and combined into a large panorama, which is now my computer’s desktop wallpaper.
This is unfortunately one of those places where the pictures don’t do justice to the actual place, since you see this kind of thing in pictures all the time and you become a bit desensitized to it. Seeing someone else’s pictures, sure, it’s nice to know that someone once there, but unless you saw it yourself, it doesn’t really mean as much to you. Still, I think the picture is pretty cool.
From there, we went on to Blackbeard’s Tower. Blackbeard’s Tower is a three-story tower sitting in the upper regions of the mountains on St. Thomas. It was erected as a lookout for pirate ships in the area of the Caribbean around St. Thomas. It has since served as a stronghold against the sometimes violent Caribbean weather, and has withstood all hurricanes since it was built.
The tower itself is surrounded by a small museum and a hotel. It was strange that the hotel pools are intermixed with the museum exhibits, but it makes it look nice. The one aspect of the museum that we enjoyed most were the large pirate statues placed around the grounds of the museum. Each statue depicted a single pirate, and have a plaque at the bottom with a bio of the pirate. An oversized statue of Blackbeard himself stood outside the tower.
We also got to see the inside of some of the houses that originally adorned St. Thomas. Most houses on St. Thomas don’t have air conditioning, instead they have east-west facing windows that allow the wind to blow through and cool the house naturally. Most rooms on St. Thomas have high ceilings which allows the hot air to collect above the cool space where people stay. Also since there aren’t many natural springs on St. Thomas, most houses have some kind of water collection device on the roof. There is a desalinization plant on St. Thomas but most houses don’t make use of it unless their water collection runs dry.
I’m not sure what the big deal was about the 99 steps, but we did go down them. It was a long trip, and the steps were deep. I’m pretty sure I took some video of that too. Riveting!
At the bottom of the steps was the old town, which was all shops. There was also a post office and the St. Thomas Liberty Bell, which I didn’t see close up personally, but Berta reports that it looks fairly identical to our own Liberty Bell, screws and all. I was busy in one of the shops learning about watches. They had air conditioning, and the cheapest watch the guy showed me was $800 (and kind of sucked).
We didn’t spend much time there when our tour guide rounded us up to take us to Megen’s bay.
As I said, Megen’s Bay is apparently one of the top 10 rated beaches in the world, and from what I’ve seen it has earned its reputation. The beach itself has clean, fine, white sand, then to the facilities are good for a beach that size. The water was very clear, so clear that you could see fish in the water swimming around you when the water was several feet deep.
While we were waiting for our lunch at the snack stand, I went into the bead shop and bought a pair of goggles so that I could look around underwater while I was swimming. We ate our pizza, salads, hamburger, whatever, and headed out to claim a spot on the beach. The kids took pleasure in observing the wildlife, collecting very small shells, noticing the actual coconuts on the actual coconuts trees, and trying to drown me in the ocean.
Abby spotted a large lizard in among one of the grooves of trees. While watching it, another huge lizard came out of the trees. These things must’ve been 3 feet long, and sat there for a long time looking at us like we were food. They were pretty cool.
I swam out in the ocean to the extent of the swimming area, where I could definitely not touch bottom, but I could see it. From there I could also see the entire beach, and it was all very cool. Megen’s Bay was certainly not a disappointment.
After a short two hours at the beach, we packed up our stuff and loaded back into the tour bus to go back to the ship.
Oh, I completely forgot to mention the Riley pox. Earlier in the morning, before we arrived at St. Thomas, Riley started to develop its malt Reds box that looks almost like insect bites all over his body. They were a little itchy, but didn’t bother him too much. But he did look like he had come down with some kind of terrible, terrible disease. Berta took him to the infirmary on the ship where they prescribed some antibiotics for the inflammation noticed in his throat and some Benadryl for the spots.
Riley was fine after a couple days, and the spots completely cleared up in that time, but it was still a bit worrisome being so far from home with what could have been a much more serious problem.
Our next port of call was grand Turk. If you’ve been following my twitter account, this is the part that you’ve been looking for where I talk about being dead.
Our original excursion on grand Turk to do snorkeling was canceled due to some kind of equipment problem, and so while Berta planned to do some kind of ocean activity with the kids on her own, we scheduled some time for me to go on a scuba diving excursion alone.
I gathered up my stuff and headed out just after noon to meet with the other “Discover SCUBA” excursion members. In the small shopping village that apparently constitutes the entirety of grand Turk I met our small group of 12 and one instructor. After reading through a medical form to make sure that we were all fit enough to do diving, he led us to the diving boat and his partner instructor.
We did a bit of textbook instruction on board the boat without any equipment. We learned the most important rules about scuba diving, including the number one rule, “breathe”. We learned hand signs to communicate underwater. We learned about the equipment and house to use it. And then we all got equipment and jumped in the water.
There in the shallow water, we did some skills training. Basic things like learning to breathe through our mouths with the gear on, and how to find our mouthpiece if it somehow came loose and put it back in. The hardest skill we learned, at least for me, was breathing in through your mouth and out of your nose without wearing goggles. It sounds pretty easy but with the water all around you, you just want to hold your breath in the first place.
There were two people in our group that could not hack the skills, and so we took them back to the beach before we went out on our dive. For the dive, we went to a small coral bed a bit off the shore, and about 35 to 40 feet below the surface. I was still a bit nervous having just learned how to use the scuba equipment, so I probably missed a lot that I wouldn’t have missed if I’d had more training first, but I still did see a lot of really neat things. The coral is a lot more than what you see on TV. It has these treelike things that grow up into the shallower water, and of course all sorts of living things swim around the coral,
You know those blue fish you see at the pet store? The tropical ones? This is apparently where they come from, and they’re huge! I saw those fish. I saw large schools of little orange fish. I saw small schools of long silver fish. I didn’t see the turtle, but there apparently was one.
I had a little trouble near the end of the dive staying deep enough in the water. I could not get used to the idea of appointing my head downward to go downward, which seems to be the key to the skill. I will remember this next time.
Apart from that the dive went smoothly. When we were done, I boarded the boat and my instructor gave me credit toward certification. From there, we drove back to shore, where everything had gone crazy.
See, my excursion left at 12:45 and was scheduled to be only 2 1/2 hours long. I didn’t get back to shore until 5:20, which is obviously much longer than they had scheduled to have us out, but I don’t see how they could have done what they had planned to do in such a short amount of time. Of course, Berta and the kids were wondering where I’d gotten to. And so when I didn’t show up at the designated time and place, they went back and asked at the excursion desk whether my tour had returned. It was at the point when the excursion people said that my tour had returned at 3:30 that Berta began to think I was dead.
So I wandered around sure for about a half an hour looking for them, and at some point in their decided to get dressed in dry clothes. Since the ship was scheduled to depart at 6:30, I hope that they had made it off the shore and were already on board when I decided to head back to the ship and brave the long line of people who also decided to return at that time. As I made my way to the security checkpoint, I saw Berta and the kids standing there quite distraught. And of course at this time, I had no idea what was going on. I was promptly beaten upon after passing through the metal detector, even though none of this was my fault.
So that evening was pretty much shot, ending a good day with not so great being dead.
That was our last port. It was probably for the best. We spent the next two days trying to acclimate ourselves to whatever process it was everyone else on the ship had learned on the first day. I spent some time playing bingo, and we watched a few shows. The shows were pretty good for being on a boat, but there’s only so much Frank Sinatra and Gloria Estefan that I can take. The Beatles show was actually decent, and the final days show where people on the cruise impersonated different celebrities was pretty novel. We also enjoyed some karaoke, just watching other people singing, none of the four of us doing any singing. I won $150 playing craps for a couple hours.
The disembarkation procedure had a presentation also, and this time I didn’t miss it. We were pretty clear about what we needed to do to get off the boat. Disembarking pretty much thrust you directly into not being on vacation anymore, having to deal with manipulating your luggage when off of the ship, communicating with customs, finding the car, and then navigating your way out of New York. It was certainly not a pleasant way to end what was otherwise a reasonably relaxing vacation.
Overall, it was a good trip. I’m not really a big fan of the beach, specifically sitting out in the sun, but this trip was fairly entertaining even in those parts. Still, I think it will be a while if I ever go on another cruise, if only because there were many things that the kids would not be interested in onboard the ship unless they were older, and that way Berta and I could spend more time enjoying our own vacation instead of avoiding things the kids don’t find fun.
