cruise 2011

This afternoon we returned from a week long trip to the Caribbean with my parents and brother.  This was our second consecutive November beach vacation, and I like the trend.

The first night and day (a day at sea) were a little rough.  We left from New Orleans and once we got out of the Mississippi and into the gulf, the water was pretty choppy.  Amazingly Lelaine was able to sleep through most of the night and wasn't too sick.  I thought that was a pretty big accomplishment considering that they handed out barf bags and I even had trouble sleeping, although some of my sleeping woes were due to the fact that I dislocated my knee playing soccer a couple weeks ago and am in a giant knee brace and must keep my right leg fully extended for six weeks.  A steady intake of Advil, Dos Equis (Dos Equis is to me what Robatusin is to Chris Rock), and stronger pain killers help, but sleeping is difficult.

On day two we arrived in Costa Maya, a small town on Mexico's southern end of the Yucatan peninsula. The cruise ship companies appear to be trying to create a new destination and it has to have the most Senior Frogs per capita of any town in the world.  According to wikipedia there are 1,295 people living in the two towns that make up Costa Maya and there are three Senior Frogs.

Lelaine went on a catamaran-snorkel trip with my mom and dad.  Matt had stitches in his leg and couldn't swim, so he joined his gimp brother on a tour of the area.  Once we figured out how to get out of the cruise ship compound, we rented a golf cart and drove around the town/beach.  There are small hotels and little shacks along several miles of very nice, thin beach, but we hardly saw any actual people once we exited the little central business district.  It was my kind of beach.  Hungry and looking for a place to eat, we saw a couple people fixing a bar at a little hotel right on the water and when we asked about the possibility of lunch we were told they could put together some "meat" tacos and a few cervezas.  We had two great seats overlooking the clear ocean and had a leisurely lunch eating the tacos, which were pretty good (they ended up containing ground beef, potato, onions, cilantro, and a couple types of salsa).  In the hour plus we spent there, we saw only a few people walk or ride by on a bike, ATV, or golf cart, otherwise it was just us, a few stray dogs, and the ocean. It was a pretty stellar day. Maybe it foreshadows us driving around Florida in golf carts while we are retired many moons from now (with Lelaine making us tacos).

The others didn't do so well.  Mom got pretty seasick from the catamaran and while Lelaine continued to do well for someone who gets motion sickness on elevators, she wasn't feeling at the top of her game after they made it back to the cruise ship.

Day three was Belize.  Mom and Lelaine, still recovering from the catamaran, and Matt, still recovering from being out until the wee hours of the morning several nights in a row, stayed on the ship while Dad and I set out for Ambergris Caye.  He really wanted to go and we planned on taking a boat there from Belize City, but the timing didn't work out so a cab driver took us to the "airport" (I use quotes because the building housing the airport is smaller than our 650 square foot apartment) for a 15 minute flight on a very small airplane to the island.  It ended up being a really neat experience.  There is one town on Ambergris, and we walked around it and the beach and had lunch.  I had heard some pretty bad things about Belize - Mom says it is one of the worst places she has been - and while I agree that Belize City is pretty bad, Ambergris was beautiful.  The water was amazingly clear.  A couple from the cruise ship who also flew there for the day and went snorkeling saw tons of fish, turtles, and sharks.  Definitely need to go back there sometime.

We woke up in Roatan, Honduras on Thursday.  The others hired a cab driver and took a tour of the island while Lelaine and I went to a Tabayana Beach.  It was a little too crowded and loud, particularly after being spoiled by the solitude of the beach on Costa Maya on Tuesday, but still nice.  Unfortunately the skies turned pretty dark and it rained quite a bit, forcing us to go back to the ship earlier than we had hoped.  Before the trip I was most looking forward to Roatan, and while I enjoyed it, I liked it the least out of all of the stops.

Friday was our final stop, a day in Cozumel.  It was the whole point of the trip, as my parents wanted to go to where they spent part of their honeymoon at some point in time that occurred in the millions of years between the big bang and when I was born.  All of us participated in a cooking class, in which we made a tortilla, potato, and chorizo appetizer, a main course of grouper, and a tower of rice pudding for dessert, then for lunch ate what we prepared.  The guy running the class was pretty good and kept everything simple enough for me to follow.

It also included one of the highlights of the trip.  They taught us different presentation techniques and then to label all of the food when we finished making a course we would plate it and then write our names on the plate with a decorating liquid.  My dad, who of course incorrectly thought his food was the best looking and tasting, does not have good handwriting (the Chester Bumpky incident).  His "Chris" on his dessert plate was so bad that the poor person handing it out thought it read "Lisa."  So for the rest of the trip, and the foreseeable future, I will refer to him as Lisa.  Other highlights, beyond what I already covered, included the daily trivia contests, someone actually taking notes of my dad's travel stories in the Belize City airport (suckers), and laughing at the cruise director's claim that the band that played by the pool is "the greatest steel drum band on the seas" - unfortunately for the poor band, a bunch of drunk old folks in the hot tub kept demanding they play the UB40 song Red Red Wine over and over again.

Saturday was another day at sea and we crossed the gulf and made our way back to New Orleans this morning.  With the exception of the breakfast staff on the ship repeatedly saying screaming "waki waki, eggs and baci" as you picked up breakfast every morning, I had a great time.  Thanks Mom and Dad. Here are pics.