On a Holiday Cruise

For the first time ever in my life I have now been on a cruise...a happy 40th anniversary cruise for my parents!  We were a party of 12 in 4 rooms with lots of fun to be had!

Once we finished our marathon almost 2 days to get there and were on the boat we had lunch in the Lido.  "Deck 9 - Lido" as the elevator and my boys would say every time!  This was the buffet and also the deck with the pools.  Cory discovered the penguins so we took a picture.

This is another Holland America ship loading up in port before we sailed off into the wild blue yonder!

Sunset at sea with just a bit of the shoreline lights still visible.

Hope just chillin' at dinner.  We had to "dress" for dinner even on the casual nights!

My brother and sister-in-law with Noah on the first formal night.  We had a really nice server named Yazzir (pronounced Ya-SEER) who by the third night was pretty good about bringing us gluten free toast with the regular bread and applesauce for the babies first thing.

Even babies get fancy!

Every night after dinner we came back to find some fun towel creations on our beds (with chocolate).  It cracked me up that the eyes were always crossed though!

Our first port stop was Grand Turk in the Turks and Caicos.  I didn't take any pictures on shore except with my disposable waterproof camera so those will come later... I hope they turned out!  Yesterday they were sitting on my desk and the boys wanted to see the pictures from our snorkeling excursion... and I had to explain to them that they had to be sent away and developed first.  It was a hard concept to explain why we couldn't just put them on the computer and look at them!

All the tourist boats tied up now that the two ships were out to sea.  In the upper left is a small cargo ship washed ashore by Hurricane Sandy.  They're still waiting for it to be removed.  We snorkeled just farther past it and saw/touched a couple of nurse sharks as well as lots of pretty fish.  We then went the other way to Gibbs Cay and got to hold a sting ray.  That part wasn't nearly so impressive, but we had another chance later in the week that was much funnier...

Hope on a boat with Nana and Grandma.  I think Joy must have been sleeping when we went exploring... the girls were slightly on opposite schedules for the trip, which made it complicated.

Playing Patty Cake in the Crow's Nest.  These babies got a lot of love on the trip, which was good because there was no place for them to play other than in their Pack'n Plays in the room.

Mommy and Me!

And that was the end of the second full day on the boat...