Cruise 2012

Here they are, pictures of our cruise!

Heather found a great deal on a last-minute cruise booking, and since next month is our tenth anniversary, we decided to take this long-overdue vacation. It was a seven day cruise on the Holland America cruise line, and we made four stops: Grand Turk, San Juan in Puerto Rico, Saint Thomas, and Half Moon Cay.

So let me describe what you'll be seeing in these pictures.

The first four pictures were during our stop in Grand Turk. In the first, you can see the beautiful Heather, and two cruise ships off in the distance. Ours is the one on the right. We went snorkeling off of Grand Turk, and in the second picture you can see one of the snorkel guides with a stingray in his arms. He held it for a while and let people swim up and touch it. We were already back in the boat, though. The third picture is us looking awesome after the snorkeling. Then a cool shot walled in by cruise ships.

The next 27 pictures are all from our stop in San Juan. We took a bus ride tour through a rain forest, which is in El Yunque National Forest (as you can see in the picture with us next to the sign). There's not much more to say about the forest pictures other than what you can see. It was raining pretty hard while we were there, so the water in the waterfalls and streams was a lot higher than normal. In that picture of Heather with a stepped waterfall behind her, those are actually steps up to another building that we obviously didn't try to ascend. The capitol building seen in two of the pictures is San Juan's capitol, which we drove right past. And the six following pictures are of the old Spanish fort. We were too tired at that point to walk back and tour it, though.

The next 11 pictures, beginning with a picture of a cruise ship, are from our stop on Saint Thomas. It's considered the shopping mecca of the Caribbean (and something like 90% of the shops are jewelry shops, no joke), but we're not big into shopping. We mostly just wandered around looking for Claritin, because Heather had some pretty serious sinus issues. The cruise ship seen in the two pictures was docked across the bay from where we had lunch. It's a Norwegian Cruise Line ship. I took the pictures mostly because I thought the waterslides on top were neat. The rest of the Saint Thomas pictures are of the bay or landscape. It was quite picturesque.

The last 7 pictures are from our stop on Half Moon Cay, which is the cruise line's private island. (And consistently voted the best of the cruise line industry's private islands according to their staff.) In the first couple pictures, I was trying to capture the length of it. It was a long island. The ship couldn't actually dock at the island, though, because the water is too shallow. So there was a ferry that ran back and forth all day. The pictures of the ship are while riding the ferry back from the island. The last picture is showing the contrast of the bright turquoise shallow water with the dark blue of the deep water.



We had a great time. The food was awesome (and all you can eat, even at the sit-down-and-order style restaurants) and the ship staff were excellent. We both really liked snorkeling. We went a second time during the stop at Half Moon Cay, and that was even better than the first time; we saw more fish, the water was calmer, and we got to stay out longer. So we're excited to do that more.