Spring Break 2019 Caribbean Cruise

It's been over a year and while I decided not to try to fill in the blanks, the only thing I'm going to post from 2019 is our Caribbean Cruise!

Day 1: Puerto Rico! We got in the night before so we had a full day in Puerto Rico. Our hotel was kinda shady, but that's ok because it was right on the beach! We spent the day at the beach and then went into San Juan before getting ready to get on the cruise ship that evening. We visited old downtown Puerto Rico and went to a historic fort before getting on the ship.

We did a Southern Caribbean cruise on Carnival cruise line. Our first day stop was St. Thomas! Here's a funny story. We wanted to wake up somewhat early so we could enjoy a full day on the island. But when I woke up I looked at my phone at it was already 10:00 am! We hurried and grabbed some things, ate a quick breakfast and headed out to this open air trolly-taxi thing that would take us to where we wanted to go. I was feeling stressed and rushed and bummed that we'd missed half the day and we were all still SO tired! Everyone was yawning and groggy still. When we got on the trolly somehow we looked at another clock and realized it was 7 am!!! Our phones hadn't synced and we'd woken everyone up at 6 am on accident! It was nice because we had a full day at Coral World and at the beach. It was beautiful!!! This was the day though I was carrying a tray of food back to my family and full on ran my head into a palm tree. Totally knocked me flat for a minute!  The other thing about this beach were the iguanas and the fact that the beach attendants (the guys renting the chairs) were smoking pot ALL day right behind us and by the end of the day the smell was kind of making me sick!

Photos from St. Thomas.

I think day 2 was a day at sea. It was fine but I'm glad we only had one full day at sea. I remember between the candy store, the free ice cream and a dessert buffet, the kids hit a major sugar crash around 3 and everyone had a huge melt down! It was fun that night though the show was a life-size board game show and the kids got to participate. Deacon also got pulled on stage to help the juggler. The girls tried new foods every night at dinner but Deacon literally had a PBJ for dinner every night!!! Here are some pics of us on the ship that day and throughout the week:

The next day was Barbados! This was probably my favorite beach because it was pink sand! It was incredible! We hired a guy to pull us around on his banana boat thing and then dropped us off and waited for us to snorkel for a while out in the ocean where there were some abandoned ship wrecks! There were also turtles out there! It was amazing snorkeling!

Day 4:  St. Lucia

   This was another awesome beach day! This day was also fun because we went to a floating, inflatable water park. The kids played there most of the day! Piper got tired, so we hung out back at the beach and had the most amazing mango of my life! A man also walked up to us and started making Piper a hat randomly, so we had to buy it. 

Day 5: St. Kitts

  We wanted to do something other than beach this day so we visited Romney Manor which is the home of a former sugar plantation, there are also some ruins of the plantation there and a tour of where they make Batik fabric.  It was a really pretty place to walk around. The kids were bored and hot but I thought it was cool! After that we did Greg's safari jungle tour. He taught us a lot about the history of St. Kitts and the Caribbean including their history with slavery and colonization.  It ended at a black sand beach. I was really hoping to see monkeys in the wild, which are common there, but the closest we got were pet monkeys that people let us hold!

Day 6: St. Maarten

Here we spent the morning walking around their downtown area shopping and looking around. We had to take a little boat from the port to the city center and on the way they were playing music. Sweet Caroline came on and the entire boat sang along at the top of our lungs! After exploring the town for a while Aaron REALLY wanted to go see Maho Beach or Airport beach. This is where big airplanes fly in right over the beach. When they take off everyone has to hold their things down or they blow away! What a weird tourist destination! But it did end up being really cool, even though the waves were bit and kinda scary. St. Marteen has a french side that I really wanted to go to but we ran out of time. I think I could do an entire vacation here. Except, I did almost get assaulted by a drunk guy when I went off into a weird church-yard to get my hair braided.

Day 7: Puerto Rico again!

We sailed back to Puerto Rico again overnight, so we had another full day in Puerto Rico. We were ready for some rain forest adventures after so much beach time. We did some hiking in the El Yunque rain forest all day and then one of the most amazing things was driving to this natural rock water slide in Las Paylas! This was a really cool kind of local things to do! We loved it! Then that night my favorite thing on the entire trip was going to the bioluminescent bay! We don't have any pictures of this because it you have to have a special kind of camera to capture it, but it was honestly so magical!!! I loved it so much! We stayed in another kind of sketchy hotel, went to a beach for a while in the morning and then flew home.