Adventure Caribbean

The original plan was to hop on a ship computer every day to update this, but it didn't happen. So I'm gonna do the best I can to break through my drunken, foggy memory to remember the trip.

DAY ONE - THU NOV 20

Mica, Jodi and I flew to Miami today. We were supposed to be on the red-eye later tonight, but when Jodi checked Alaska's website this morning she saw that it had been canceled! Turned out that Alaska canceled flight two months earlier but hadn't bothered to let us know, so instead we had an 11:30 AM flight from Portland to Seattle, then a 1:30 PM flight from Seattle to Miami. Uh oh, as soon as we checked in at the Portland Airport we learned that the 11:30 flight had been canceled, too. There was a 10:30 flight that was leaving in just a few minutes, so we ran to the gate and made it just in time. Thanks, Alaska.

Our flight from Seattle left on time, for a change, and while we were seating I realized that Andy (Wes's dad) and Marge (his step-mom) were seated just two rows in front of us. Small world. Twenty minutes in the air and a passenger a few rows behind us starts having a seizure. The flight attendant starts screaming "turn the plane around!" In a few minutes the guy was back to normal and the flight continued to Miami. Right as we landed in Miami the guy had another seizure and everyone remained seated at the terminal as he was wheeled from the plane. Poor guy.

At the airport we found a shuttle that would take us to Fort Lauderdale and shared it with a 70+ year old couple from Victoria BC. The old woman was hilarious and very blunt. They were also going on a cruise, but on a different ship. They thought it was very important to find the cheapest motel possible and ended up at a dive that was only $49 a night. In their excitement they almost forgot their bags in the van and she exclaimed that she "would have to sleep in the nude and might get raped". We were cracking up. We ended up at a hotel just minutes from the terminal and walked to an Irish pub for dinner.

DAY TWO - FRI NOV 21

At noon we groggily made our way over to the sea port where the shocking contrast between industrial container traffic and floating hotels made your head spin. (It could have been the alcohol, though) Getting onto the ship was a little chaotic, as it holds 3000 passengers and the facility was not really large enough to handle everyone. When we finally made our way on and had a chance to explore it was pretty overwhelming. The Splendor is Carnival's newest and largest ship and throughout the trip were continuously discovering new places. Our first night we broke out one of our eight stashed bottles of liquor and started making drinks. In a happy, vodka-induced fog we roamed the ship until the wee hours of the morning.

DAY THREE - SAT NOV 22

Our room was on the inside of the sixth deck and had no windows. It also had no clock of any kind, so it was impossible to judge the time. We slept in late, recovering from our late-night-binge, and enjoyed our day at sea by laying around on one of the many sun decks. The Lido Deck pool had a giant TV screen that played movies every evening and night. The days leading up to our cruise seemed to drag on forever, so it was really nice to have nothing else to do except lounge around and relax.

It was formal night on the ship, so we dressed up and hit the Gold Pearl Restaurant for a full-course meal that was pretty fancy. We met some partners-in-crime at dinner, three cousins named Shante, Tamika and Alisha. Later that night we again broke into our hidden stash and grabbed a fifth of rum and roamed the outside of the ship. Seeing a pattern yet?

DAY FOUR - SUN NOV 23

Most of this day was spent at sea but in the evening we arrived in San Juan, Puerto Rico. We walked up through the old town, fighting a light breeze and rain, and happened across a giant old rock structure called Fort San Cristobal. The facility was celebrating a festival of lights, and a bored-looking security guard happily told us all about the history of the fort. He was better than a tour guide, as he was very knowledgeable and excited to tell us all that he could in the few minutes we were there.

From there we walked west along the northern coast of the island to a plaza in which there was live music and food vendors, then to the northwest tip of the island where we found Fort San Felipe del Morro, a sixteenth-century fort that was built to guard the entrance to San Juan Bay. Totally breathtaking. Next we walked back downhill toward the port looking for food and drink, then stumbled onto the only microbrewery on the island. Perfect for a beer snob like me! Since the only affordable beer on the ship is Budweiser, I was craving something dark. Not too bad. By the time we got back onto the ship it was about midnight and we had to wake up early the next morning, so we called it a night.

DAY FIVE - MON NOV 24

For the first time on this cruise I was hating life. Our plan for the day was to go on a snorkeling excursion in St Thomas, Virgin Islands. We had to wake up at 6:30 AM to be ready, and with the three-hour time change it was like waking up at 3:30. Ouch. Once we were off the boat we finally saw that the weather had shaped up and the sun was out. An open-type shuttle drove us about 20 minutes around the island, which was predictably beautiful. A medium-sized catamaran with a crew of three sailed us even farther around the island and then out to sea where we anchored near Great St. James Island for some snorkeling. It wasn't the best snorkeling that I had every done, but it was exciting to finally get into some tropical water. While I was chasing a stingray, Mica and Jodi found an octopus that would puff up and change colors to match its surroundings. After a while we climbed back onto the boat and enjoyed rum punch all the way back to the dock. Once we were back on the ship all three of us fell asleep on some lounge chairs and pretty much frittered away the rest of our day. That night we watched a stand-up comedian do his thing in one of the ships smaller venues, and crashed out happy.

DAY SIX - TUE NOV 25

We decided to take it easy today in La Romana, the third-largest city in the Dominican Republic. I didn't know much about the DR and was a little disappointed to find that La Romana was basically a tourist town, and a fairly dirty one at that. Our exploration of the city was short and punctuated by a mediocre meal in a fine dining restaurant located just a few blocks from the dock. On the light side, the conversion rate was very favorable and there were plenty of places to poke around for shopping. It was here that I had my first Presidente beer, brewed in the DR. Not too bad, especially for $2 a bottle! With about an hour before the ship was to depart, we watched some of the local baseball teams practice at a fairly respectable field just outside of the dock.

At night we discovered that the Splendor had a karaoke bar on the fifth-deck aft. Michelle, the karaoke girl, was new to the ship and pretty much let us do anything we wanted to get the shy singers going. Somehow we managed to bring a crowd to the bar and by the time it closed at midnight everyone was singing loudly, clapping and dancing.

DAY SEVEN - WED NOV 26

Grand Turk Island was probably the most beautiful place we visited on our trip and the destination to which we would most likely return. The water was the lightest shade of aqua and the sand was the cleanest white I had ever seen. We didn't get much of a chance to explore the island, because we had decided to do another catamaran/snorkel excursion. The catamaran left from a dock right next to the ship and was far larger than the one that we had sailed on in St Thomas. It held 85 people and had a crew of five. We sailed about a quarter of the way around the west side of the island and anchored a few hundred feet from the beach. The most dramatic part of the dive was that the water was so clear that even though the reef was twenty-five feet below the surface you could see it so perfectly. Then, about 50 feet away from the boat, the reef dropped off and there was a sheer underwater cliff that went as far down as you could see. According to the captain it drops off to 5000 feet. Unbelievably awesome.

After finishing the snorkeling, we had a few hours to lay on the beach and play in the warm water. This was a true paradise and it was tough to see it go from the top of the ship later that day. It was another lazy night, since we had burned a lot of energy.



DAY EIGHT - THU NOV 27

This was another day at sea and it was nice to sleep in again. I think it was the laziest day yet, with nothing more going on than lounging around the pool, soaking up the rays and poring through a good book. Oh yeah, it was Thanksgiving!?! We got dressed up and went to the formal dinner to celebrate. After dinner we decided to pop our heads into the karaoke bar again and before we knew it midnight had arrived and we had rocked the joint yet again. Throughout the trip people would continuously approach us and tell us how much fun they had watching us perform. We pretty much had no memory of any of them. :)

It was tonight that we finished off the rest of the vodka and broke out the last bottle of rum we had smuggled on-board. With about half of the bottle still full and barely poking out of my hip pocket, we were just outside of the karaoke bar when a security guard walked up behind me, snatched the bottle and my wrist and demanded my full name and room number. As my options blinked through my inebriated brain I decided that my best bet was to just disappear, so I scrambled down the nearby staircase and into another bar on the floor below. I sat down at a small table with a couple of Russian guys from New York, explained that I needed them to be my cover for my daring escape, and proceeded to chat with them for about ten minutes. They were cracking up, I must have been pretty drunk. Later, I wandered back up to the area where I had been caught and another security guard started following me around. A few minutes later he asked me if my name was Darren, and I denied it, claiming my name was Steve. Steven. Farnsworth. He looked at me funny, then walked away. Hehe, I am such a smooth criminal. What I DIDN'T know is that after I had run away Mica had chosen MY name as his own cover and I think we really had confused security.



DAY NINE - FRI NOV 28

Today was our last destination, in Nassau, Bahamas. I was a little apprehensive about going through the security checkpoint to get off of the ship, thinking that my ID card was going to set off some buzzers and red lights, but nothing happened and we all left the ship peacefully. Whew. Nassau was a bustling, touristy city with plenty of fantastic old landmarks to walk to. We started by walking up to Fort Fincastle, then down the Queen's Staircase which was chiseled from solid limestone as an escape tunnel three hundred years ago. From there we headed to a Pirate Museum in downtown Nassau that had an exceptional interactive tour that blew us all away. Then after a late lunch at a little local joint we headed back to the ship and started our nightly drinking and wandering.



DAY TEN - SAT NOV 29

The ship docked back in Fort Lauderdale at about 8AM and Jodi and Mica headed out for a tour of the Everglades while I made my groggy way to the Fort Lauderdale airport. It turned out that there was a taxi strike, so as 3000 people fought to exit the ship they found themselves standing in a large parking lot with pretty much everyone else from the ship. Those who had secured travel plans early were greeted by buses, everyone else just scratched their heads. Luckily, I had found one of the few taxis that broke the strike line and I hopped in and was at the airport around 9 AM. My flight didn't leave until 6:15 PM, and I just didn't have the energy to try to explore Fort Lauderdale, so I camped out in the terminal and alternated between napping and reading. Mica and Jodi joined me around noon and we just vegged together. From there we flew to Houston TX, then got back to Portland at midnight. Another adventure complete.