We dressed for the wedding before departing for the ship. Little did we know this was the warmest we would be for seven days.
Emily and Jaret were married on the ship at 1:00 p.m., a reception was held in one of the nightclubs where Dean and I pretended we knew how to dance and at 4:00 p.m. the ship sailed.
This photo was taken in the lobby of the ship.
One of the first things I learned is that the seasickness patch and I do not agree. My mouth tasted like I had gargled, swished and spit with a concoction of liquid metal and goat urine and then stuck cotton balls to the sticky leftover liquid inside my mouth. Imagine how that would affect your stomach and you'll have an idea of how I felt. After trying to relieve the dryness of my mouth by drinking five hundred and twenty-two gallons of water and setting a personal best record of peeing five times in one night I'd finally had enough, and on the third morning I ripped the patch off. Of course later that day the seas got choppy, I got nervous and put another patch on. A day later I decided I'd rather puke my guts out with seasickness than continue feeling the way I was so off it came again only to discover I don't get seasick anyway.
We signed up for a cheap room which was in the interior of the ship on the second deck near the front. I was surprised to discover that the gentle sway of the ship resulted in the best sleep I can remember having, even when the swaying came with an intermittent BANG! as the front of the ship came down and hit the water during the choppy seas we experienced.
One night during my dry mouth period, on one of my many trips to the bathroom I wanted to drink a glass of water before returning to bed, however when I turned on the tap nothing came out. Being new to cruising I was surprised but I just figured each room was only allotted so much water. I knew I hadn't taken a long shower the night before so I shrugged, figured Dean must have been the water hog and took my dry mouth back to bed. The next morning we walked out the door to wet carpet and several crew members hard at work repairing a broken water pipe and drying the carpet. The nice part of the story is everybody affected by the lack of water was credited one day's room cost.
We ate dinner every night with 688 (of 3,500) of our new best friends and two of those nights were elegant evenings when we all put on our finest duds. The servers were awesome. After the first night they knew your name, remembered if you had coffee with dessert, and what roll you preferred. Several nights as we were eating dessert (which of course we never turned down) they would all quickly gather around this huge stairway in the dining room and sing, some of them even dancing on tables, and then immediately return to their duties.
Monday was Cozumel. Within minutes Dean had crawled over the short wall to collect coral from the beach.
This is before Dean got in trouble from the friendly security people for crawling over the short wall to collect coral from the beach.
Cruise ships are gigantic and are like small cities. Ours was eleven decks tall with several elevators, a huge casino, a large auditorium, multiple stores to shop in, a gym, a full spa, bars and nightclubs everywhere, and multiple pools and hot tubs.
Tuesday we were in Belize City and took a city bus tour with Dean's mom and sister. We were told Belize City was not a safe place to explore on your own. Dean's reaction was, "oh, they're just saying that." However when we took the tour we discovered it was a very poor city that had been hit by the hurricane recently and the only thing we would have been exploring on our own would have been extreme poverty. We were allowed off the bus once to visit a church. All of the schools are church-affiliated and as I was walking around I could hear school children in the school next door chanting their lessons.