New Year's Cruise

Last week I found myself in the Caribbean with my family on a boat.  For the fourth time, we've gone on a cruise over the holidays, however instead of it being over Christmas, we did it over New Year's.

Our adventure started in Ft. Lauderdale aboard Holland America Line's ms Eurodam.  Our first port of call was Half Moon Cay, the private beach island where despite a cloudy and windy morning, we did some swimming and took a hike through a trail.  A trail which we've walked on before (it's part of a Historical Nature Walk excursion, although we do it by ourselves).  This year, we found that signs had been posted at the start of the trail saying it was dangerous and prohibited.  We ignored that sign and went anyway even though we ended up not knowing where we were going.  We survived.

We then had a day at sea, which was on New Year's Eve.  It was quite the busy party on board and we rang in the new year in the Piano Bar in the midst of a mostly-drunken sing-a-long.

Our next port of call was Grand Cayman, where we did a snorkel and stingray petting excursion.  The idea of stingrays creeped me out beforehand, but they were quite docile and fun to pet.  However it was a very rough day on the sea, so the snorkeling was a bit difficult.

Day 5 found us on the island of Roatan, off of Honduras.  I didn't do an excursion that day.  Just hopped off the boat and walked around.  Not much to see or do around the port in Coxen Hole.  The exit to the port leads right onto a pretty poor street with eager vendors of cheap crap... Still better than Paris though.

Our last port was Costa Maya, Mexico.  We did an excursion to the Chacchoban Mayan Ruins, which were neat.  Not very big, but interesting.  One thing I didn't know was the the temples have all be rebuilt (with the original stone, mind you) by archaeologists.  At least there were there... I'm not sure of other sites.  Our boat was docked at a shopping complex (most ports are), where I bought one of those Mexican blankets and got harassed to buy a bracelet that said "Blue Jays" (since I was wearing my Jays hat).  Half of the port complex was actually a Senor Frogs, which meant there was no cheap beer to be had like in Cozumel.

Finished up with another day at sea, flew back from Ft. Lauderdale and now I'm back home... where I found my furnace wasn't working.  It was 6 degrees inside when I got back on Sunday.  Fortunately, it was an easy fix and as of today, it's up and running again.

One thing that was different this time was that I decided to not use the on board internet connection.  I'm glad I didn't, not so much because it was expensive (50 cents per minute) but because when I finally connected back on land, I had barely received an email or saw anything interesting that had happened on Facebook.

Here's some photos I put up on Flickr.  There's a few more in there than the ones I put up on Facebook.