Monday, May 3, 2010

OUR CRUISE - DAY 4


I woke up at about 6 this morning.
I’m not sure if it was excitement or nervousness, but It was impossible to fall back asleep. As soon as Kristy woke up (2 hours later), we got got ready for the day. One of the benefits of getting up that early, is that you can get breakfast in the dining room. As it turns out, as we got ready for breakfast, we realized that we had not docked yet. It was interesting to watch the dock. It turns out that on each side of the ship, there is a captain’s bridge that extends out to allow him to see everything.

Well, that was great to see, it made our breakfast a little more stressful then we planned. Now as we went into breakfast, we did not know it, but it was probably a bad day to do that. Our excursion was planned to leave at 930 am, and we got to breakfast at 840. That seemed like a good time to eat and get down to the excursion. As the clock went to 9:00 without our food coming, we realized that despite the lightning fast speed of dinner, the breakfast crew was going at about 3 miles an hour. We ended up getting our food with about 5 minutes to chow down before heading for. Kristy got a chance to see how it feels to be me and eat so fast you barely taste it.

As we got off the ship, it was neat to see all the shops. We made it to our excursion with time to spare as apparently we weren’t the only ones that didn’t realize breakfast was an all day kinda meal. Our excursion began with a boat ride down the coast for about 45 minutes. The boat was fairly packed, but beyond that, it was pretty to see all the clear blue water. The boat took us to a Mexican “national park”. I use the quotes only because us Wisconsin-ers hear national park, and think of lots of trees and perhaps mountains or lakes. This instead was about a mile long excluded beach. The crystal blue water crashed into the white sand and made it look like a little piece of heaven.

Our first activity was snorkeling. Having went scuba diving on our honeymoon, this would be a piece of cake. What I didn’t expect however was how much we would see. We snorkled onto of a reef in the national park area, and got to see so many types of fish. One of the weirdest things is that the fish didn’t seem to care that we were there. I’m so used to seeing fish, and then the second you put your hand in the water, or do anything, they dart away like lightning. Instead, it was as if these fish were dancing with us. As the group of snorkels slowly passed above, the fish put on a show swimming this way and that. There were fish as big as your head, and ones as small as your pinkie.

It seemed that if you were patient enough to look, it wasn’t just in the reef either. On the way in, we spotted the strangest looking fish. It seem to stare at us and be thinking “ hmm, those are the strangest looking fish have ever seen” so I guess the feeling was mutual.

After we got back to shore we had a short break before going for a quick kayak ride down the coast. Our destination was a cove that contained lots of conch shells. I have seen plenty of shells, but there were real live conch inside. Everyone got a chance to hold one of the shells and the conch came out to say hello. Its sort of like a snale, but it has a single arm that it uses with a nail at the end. It uses that arm to turn itself over, or to protect itself when it feels threatened. It turns out that the white sand we were walking on, was actually full of pink specks from the shells that broke up over time.

We finished out our excursion with a Mexican buffet that left a bit to be desired, and some time in the sun, that was nice, but also lead to both Kristy and I getting a bit more sun then we needed.

In the evening we got to have dinner and try something new as one of the appetizers offered was escargot( aka snails.) After dinner we were ready for the party of all parties (according to our table mates) that night on the cruise. Despite the buildup, it was not all that special. We chose not to let that ruin our night. We’re probably one of the only couples dancing most of the night away. We were determined to make the most of the night, and have the cruise we wanted.

As we wound down for the evening and went to bed, we both began feeling a little sick. Not sure if it was the snails, or something else we ate at dinner, but both Kristy and I got pretty sick that night. The motion of the ship doesn’t help when you already feel query, but luckily, after that long night and getting out of our system, we were ready for the next day and feeling fine.

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