First Time Cruising with Celebrity: the Silhouette

While we were parked at Rose Bay, Aaron found an EXTREMELY last-minute (and cheap) cruise with Celebrity - just 2 days' notice!  It happened to fit well within the time we were parked at Rose Bay, so we decided to go!  This was our first time cruising with Celebrity, but we'd heard great things, and we were excited to try it out aboard the Silhouette.

We loved this cruise!  To start, we had booked an inside guarantee room and with the half-full ship we were upgraded to a balcony room - and not just a balcony room, but one with a HUGE balcony!  We had heard the food on Celebrity was remarkable, and it really was - starting with our first trip to the buffet restaurant, which had so many different and delicious options, and free hand scooped ice cream!  The ship had a lot of great spaces - from a quiet lounge in the middle of the ship with little nooks to sit and read, to a beautiful adult indoor pool area, to an actual lawn with real grass on the top deck!  We spent a lot of our spare time watching the World Cup on the big screen over the lawn.

One of the reading nooks

Walking barefoot on the real grass

Watching the World Cup on the real grass

The ship was decorated throughout for Christmas

Nighttime on the top deck!

The ship stopped at Key West and Nassau, though we didn't bother getting off at Nassau this time.  We love Key West though, and rented some bikes to explore the island again, making it to the Southernmost Point ahead of the crowds, checking out the Christmas decorations on the Harbor Walk, exploring an old fort we hadn't seen before (West Martello Fort, now a botanical garden), and finding a nice waterside bar for some cold drinks.

At the Southernmost Point - note the 
festive reindeer!

One of several nautical-themed trees on the Harbor Walk - this one had plastic
 lobsters inside the lobster crates!

Dining and entertainment were excellent aboard the ship.  The first production show was a bit of a disappointment, perhaps because it featured music from the 00's (who wants that?? ;-)), which most of the audience didn't recognize and the performers just didn't seem to be able to get into.  However, the next show was an amazing "Reigning Rocks" featuring rock music from Britain, and the final show was an incredible Cirque du Soleil-style production - we absolutely loved both of these, and the performers seemed to as well!  Our last evening we splurged a bit and dined at Le Petit Chef, and amazing restaurant featuring a bit of an animated show playing out on your tabletop!

The tabletop at Le Petit Chef - here they 
are telling the history of the tomato - the 
colors on the table are projections from 
a camera above the table

Amazing acrobatics at the Cirque du Soleil-style show

As we debarked in Miami, we noticed one final nice touch - as they called each luggage group, the announcers rotated to feature members of the various departments aboard the ship, thanking you for sailing with Celebrity.  We LOVED this cruise and can't wait to sail with Celebrity again...unfortunately they are normally quite expensive, so we'll have to wait for Aaron to come across another amazing last-minute deal!

Family time and Cruising

As I mentioned earlier, we have left the Orlando area!  Our first stop on our trek north was a two week stint at Sunshine Holiday Daytona, a Thousand Trails resort where we stayed in the fall to be close to my sister while we helped with the kids.  As with the last time we were here, we parked in the rear of the park with all the full-time residents.  I have mixed feelings on this resort, as the parking situation is not great - again it was difficult to navigate around the permanent residents' lawns that held vehicles, lawn decorations, and outright anti-RV posts to the edge of the lots.  However, the staff here are quite friendly and accommodating, they have the cheapest laundry I've seen since we started RVing, and *most* of the residents are very friendly.  I say *most*...for the first time basically ever since we started all this, we encountered a hostile neighbor.  We're thinking he was grumpy because he was going through a divorce - when we arrived, there were two kayaks and two bikes at the site, but by the time we left there was only one of each, and in the couple days we were there before we moved we only saw one man.  We promptly asked the office to be moved and they were able to accommodate us a day later, relocating us between two friendly new neighbors.  Somehow in all of this we didn't manage to take a picture of either site, so instead of our typical campsite photo here I'll show you a picture of poor Beamer, who we still had for the first day we were there, wondering why his house shrunk and why it was moving!!

Stressed out pup!

We chose this campground due to its proximity to my sister, and we went over to her place both weekends.  We enjoyed playing games, eating good food, and trading cruise stories.

Playing Carcassonne

Playing the card version of Pictionary - a rare event when my
brother-in-law and our eldest nephew actually joined the game!

As anyone who knows Aaron would guess, he constantly has his eye on cruises and discounts on cruises.  As luck would have it, Carnival cruise line was running a spring/50th anniversary sale when we arrived at Daytona.  Aaron found a great deal on a cruise that ran during the week, leaving us our weekends free to spend time with my sister.  It was going to two islands we hadn't visited before on a ship we hadn't been on - perfect!  So with a few days' notice we booked the cruise and headed down to Port Canaveral to board the Carnival Elation.  We cruised in our first-ever inside cabin...I have mixed feelings, on the one hand it was a LOT cheaper and had basically the same space as the outside cabins on the ship, but on the other hand not having any natural light actually made it harder for me to sleep, and the lack of natural ventilation made it a little musty (though that might have been the age of the ship - 20+ years old).  The ship, being old, was much smaller than they build cruise ships nowadays, had basically no specialty dining, and had quite small entertainment lounges.  We had trouble finding seats at the evening theater productions and at the comedy shows.  On the flip side, the entertainers were very talented, and the ship had more character than the more modern ones did, with artistic architectural and decorative touches everywhere.  The one hiccup in this cruise was that someone had a medical emergency on route to our first port (which should have been Grand Turk) - right at the beginning of a sea day - so we had to divert to Nassau, which became our first port instead (we skipped Grand Turk and headed to the Dominican Republic on schedule).  As far as we know the person recovered well after getting to Nassau.  Here are the highlights of the cruise!

A dolphin swam around the port area before we departed!

Our daily breakfast spot at the buffet restaurant

One of the best things you can expect on a Carnival cruise
is a towel animal zoo!

A first for us - this ship offered tea time
on sea days, which consisted of tea,
sandwiches, and light desserts - yum!

A nighttime view of "Tiffany's" buffet - I loved all the stained
glass peacocks!  Hopefully you can kind of see what I mean
about the artistry of the ship

An outside view of the ship from the port at Amber Cove

The view atop Loma Isabel de Torres - amazing!

The Christ the Redeemer statue atop 
Loma Isabel de Torres

A heart shaped photo opportunity in the park
surrounding the peak

A young man was driving these cattle in the middle of the road!

We had a few days after we returned to visit my sister again and do laundry before beginning our trek north through public parks (read: no sewer in my future!).  We also discovered we were down to just 18% left on our propane tanks - a problem since I use propane for cooking all the time!  Unlike the last time we rushed to fill the tank when we misread the gauge, this time we were legitimately low on gas, so we needed to fill up.  Finding a place to fill the tank permanently attached to our RV has always been a challenge, but much to my delight I discovered this time that truck stops can sometimes provide propane!  A Flying J on our route on 95 offered reasonably priced propane, so we didn't even have to divert from our travel plans.

Aaron likes to see what's going on and 
ask the guys about what they're doing
when we get the tank filled

With that we were headed to our last stop in Florida on the way north.  

Carnival Mardi Gras - Inaugural Season!

Our last couple weeks turned out a bit differently than we expected.  After Moss Park we spent just under a week at Sherwood Forest, a Thousand Trails regular for us as we can *usually* get a reservation here (except the week before, as mentioned in my last post!) and it's about 10 minutes from Disney's entrance.  I spent the week getting all the laundry clean and trying to use every last thing in the refrigerator in preparation to leave the RV in storage for our anticipated cruise.

So, first, about the RV park: they put us in a site that surely was NOT intended for an RV our size.  Every other RV in the lane was parked at a certain angle, but due to the presence of a tree at the back of our site we had to pull in at the complete opposite angle, placing our utilities on opposite sides of the RV.  Normally your power, water, and sewer are all close to each other on the driver's side of the RV, but we had to park between the hookups so that power was on one side and the water/sewer were on the other.  Our wires and hoses are plenty long to accommodate this, but it made it pretty obvious we were too big for the spot.  I felt badly for kind of infringing on our neighbor's spot, but there weren't many other options to switch campsites, so we stayed where the office put us.  Not a really big deal, but the first time we've been so badly misplaced in an RV park, so I'm mentioning it as a curiosity rather than anything else.

You can see the offending tree and the bad angle here

We had not yet booked a storage spot for the cruise, as we were really hoping to keep it at Sherwood Forest, but they would only rent a spot to guests in person in their office.  We were taking a bit of a gamble there, but when we showed up they did indeed have several storage spaces available and we were able to get one for the time we needed.  It was awesome to have a spot just 5 minutes down the road (and it was only that far away because the road to the back of the community is a little curvy and max speed of 10mph).

We did stop by Epcot again while we were at Sherwood Forest - we painted some more spots on the paint-by-number-mural we had worked on before, it's coming along quite well!

The weather started turning a bit chilly - good time to get out of town on a cruise!  And here our excitement began.  On Wednesday - just three days before we were due to sail on the Disney Fantasy - Disney sent us a note that our cruise itinerary changed from an Eastern Caribbean cruise (with stops at Tortola and St. Thomas) to a Western Caribbean cruise (with stops at Cozumel and Costa Maya).  Thanks COVID!  (The implication from the email was that the Eastern Caribbean islands were not welcoming cruise passengers due to Omicron.)  Now, there's nothing particularly wrong with the Western Caribbean, but we've done it a lot, and when we booked this cruise nearly a year ago we specifically paid significantly more money for the Eastern Caribbean route, and Disney wasn't offering any kind of refund, so this wasn't too palatable.  They offered the opportunity to reschedule or cancel without penalty, so we rescheduled for the next eastern sailing two weeks later (turns out that one suffered the same fate, but we wouldn't learn that until later...).  This ended up being cheaper because we could book it at the last minute rate, and the refund we received was just about enough to pay for a Carnival cruise!  We were presented with a quandary at this point - we had storage booked for the period we were supposed to be on the cruise, but if we didn't go on the cruise, we would have to find somewhere to stay in the RV at the last minute - a distinct problem in today's RVing environment.  So, with the refund we got from Disney and the problem of finding somewhere to live for a week, Aaron decided to go ahead and book us a cruise on the Carnival Mardi Gras!  It left out of the same port as our rescheduled cruise for the exact same time period, so solved all of our RV parking problems.

The Mardi Gras is Carnival's flagship, the newest ship in the fleet (they've been sailing for about 6 months).  And it is HUGE!  It has 18 restaurants, two major evening entertainment venues, two comedy lounges, a ropes course with a zip line over the ocean, and even a roller coaster!  Ironically the sailing we went on went to Cozumel and Costa Maya, just as we would have done on the Fantasy, but it went there for a lot less money, and with such an amazing ship, we booked the cruise just for the experience on the flagship rather than any concern about the ports.  We had a blast!  The evening entertainment kept us crazy busy every night and we were SO impressed by the shows on their 'Center Stage' in the ship's atrium.  I could write a whole review here on the ship, but I imagine no one wants to read that (let me know privately if you do!), so I'll just post some pictures of the trip.  The RV lasted the week in storage without incident - and as far as we can tell, no new rodent residents ;-).

The Mardi Gras shares the name of the first ever Carnival cruise
ship in 1972 - this plaque commemorates the two

The ship was too huge to get a full picture from the dock, but 
you can see most of it here.  (And in case you're wondering,
Mexico requires masks indoors AND outdoors.)

This was taken from the shopping area in the port at Cozumel

For the first time I think ever we went on an 'excursion' in a port
that wasn't booked through the cruise line - we just walked 
across the street from the port to rent a Jeep and drive around
the island on our own!  

Crocodile!  We drove down to Punta Sur, an ecological preserve
at the south end of the island.  The water was SO clear, you could
see every bit of the crocodile even though he was mostly submerged.

Atop the lighthouse at Punta Sur

There were several iguanas in Punta Sur

Iguana tracks!

After exploring the natural and historic
landmarks we grabbed a drink on the beach

At Costa Maya we just got out to wander around the port

On the chairlift to Carnival's private beach
on Isla Roatan

Our ship had to stop for a rescue at sea!  The people in this tiny
wooden boat had run out of gasoline in the sea about halfway
between Cuba and Mexico (we don't know where they were headed);
our ship filled them up with gasoline and water.

And some pictures of the ship itself since it was so amazing!

Dinner at the Teppanyaki restaurant

"Art of the Table" dessert at the steakhouse -
the chef came out to decorate a large tray 
with syrups and delicacies

Can't be a Carnival ship without ice carving!

Appetizers stacked up in a box at the Chef's Table!

One of the many shows on Center Stage - the cool thing here is
that the backdrop is all just a bunch of screens stacked together!
The screens were high resolution and nearly seamless; during the 
day, the screens dropped below the stage to reveal massive
windows behind them.

Disney, Disney, and More Disney!

But not the Disney you think!  Ok so I'll admit aside from one small comment on storage, this has NOTHING to do with RVing, but we spent 3 weeks traveling doing this so I figured I'd update the blog so you don't get too bored ;-).

We just took the Panama Canal/repositioning cruise for the Disney Wonder.  This ship has its summer season in Alaska and then spends the winter in the Gulf of Mexico/Caribbean (not that it had a summer season this year due to COVID...but it was still on the west coast).  It traveled from San Diego, California to Galveston, Texas.  Since we were flying across the country anyway, we decided to tack on a stay in Anaheim, California to visit Disneyland for the first time before the cruise.

So, first things first...the flights.  Aaron and I both flew regularly for work and pleasure before leaving our day jobs, and for the most part we had no significant problems.  I don't know whether it's COVID and related staffing and supply shortages or just bad luck, but both of our flights were canceled!  We knew a few weeks ahead of time that our midday Southwest flight from Galveston to Jacksonville was canceled and we were rescheduled on a flight that got back at 11pm (not so great for my brother-in-law, who was due to pick us up).  But then our American Airlines flight from Jacksonville to Anaheim was canceled less than 24 hours before scheduled takeoff!  They rescheduled us for the following day, but given that we already had park reservations in Anaheim that would be wasted if we arrived a day late, Aaron scrambled to get us on a flight from Jacksonville to Los Angeles that got in late at night.  This lost us a half day in Anaheim and added an expensive Lyft drive from Los Angeles to Anaheim.  Overall we decided that it's just not the right time right now to fly anywhere, and we plan to avoid it if at all possible until all these COVID repercussions have passed.

Aside from the flights, our trip was awesome.  We stayed at the DoubleTree Suites within walking distance of Disneyland...well, *I* think it was walking distance, Aaron was a little grumbly about it.  To be fair, after a day walking around the park, walking another mile back to the hotel was a little rough.  We bought a 3-day park pass to Disneyland, with two days at Disneyland itself and one day at Disney California Adventure.  We think this schedule worked great!  Neither park is huge, and we ended up arriving at park opening and leaving by 2-3pm each day (the nighttime fireworks weren't going while we were there), and this let us see everything we wanted to see without burning out.  Lines overall were pretty short, particularly before noon, and significantly shorter than Disney World.  A huge difference we noticed between Disneyland and Disney World was that most of the Disneyland queues are outside - an indication of milder/less rainy weather in Anaheim?

I felt that Disneyland was a slightly altered version of Magic Kingdom at Disney World (or more accurately, vice versa, since Disneyland came first).  Unsurprisingly there were a lot of duplicate rides, though most (aside from Rise of the Resistance) were noticeably different between the two parks.  By and large we thought the Disneyland rides were better than their Disney World counterparts, which was cool.  My favorite different thing at Disneyland was Davy Crockett's Explorer Canoes, in which you and 20 of your closest friends actually paddle yourself around the lagoon!!  It reminded me of a similar canoe ride we did in Montreal along the fur trade route (not in an amusement park).  Another different ride I particularly enjoyed was the Storybook Land Canal Boat - though this is definitely presented as a little kids' ride, I really enjoyed seeing all the miniature versions of buildings from various Disney stories - this one reminded me some of Madurodam in the Netherlands.  

Outside the entrance to Disneyland

Sleeping Beauty's Castle

Getting ready for our canoe ride

Agrabah from Aladdin on the Storybook Land Canal

My favorite of the two parks was definitely Disney's California Adventure.  Certain aspects were reminiscent of areas of Epcot and Hollywood Studios in Disney World, but overall it really just felt different and definitely had a lot of different rides, including my favorite of the whole trip - Guardians of the Galaxy- Mission: Breakout.  This was their replacement for Tower of Terror, but it wasn't just a new face on the same ride - they seriously changed the sequence of the drops such that we were completely surprised from the first.  The decorations for the ride were incredible.  While there we also enjoyed the other ride and many shows in Avengers Campus and I particularly enjoyed some of the rides on the Coney Island-feeling Pixar Pier.  We lunched at Pym Test Kitchen in Avengers Campus, and everything there was comically over-or-undersized (in keeping with the theme of Pym particles from Ant-Man).

Disney California Adventure (the entrance is very similar to Hollywood Studios)

Guardians of the Galaxy - Mission: BREAKOUT!

3D Tile Image at the Ancient Sanctum at 
Avengers Campus

Lunch at Pym Test Kitchen - note the
oversized chicken/undersized bun

At the end of the week, we took a train down to San Diego and walked two blocks to the cruise terminal.  Unfortunately either Disney or the port or both just really weren't ready for the added complexities of COVID testing before a cruise.  We had to wait a half hour (or more?) after our designated boarding window in harsh sun before we were able to go inside and take our COVID test, then another 45 minutes to get the results of the test before we could board.  However, that was the end of our troubles!  The cruise was AMAZING, the best we've ever taken.  We stopped at 4 ports and had a massive 10 days at sea - just what you want on the entertainment-centric Disney Cruise Line.  

We had a lot of firsts - the first passenger ship through the Panama Canal since COVID, the longest cruise by a large cruise ship since COVID, the first fireworks at sea since COVID (not clear if this was for the ship or for the industry).  The crew had been on the ship just two months before our cruise started - one month of training and a month of sailing - and I think as a result we all formed closer relationships than we would have otherwise.  Our waiter and assistant waiter were AMAZING and made all of our food experiences better.  

Because it was such a long cruise, there were long series of things like "Anyone Can Cook" - where the onboard chefs show you how to prepare dishes you've had in the dining rooms - and the dining team's series of noon presentations on things like cheese, oil and vinegar, origami, napkin folding, and table setting.  Each sea day held these things and a ton of origami, 3D crafts, drawing classes, scavenger hunts, and random things like knot tying and a virtual bridge tour with two bridge officers.  Of course the transit through the Panama Canal was a great bucket list experience!  It was particularly neat to observe after my research for my PhD on the much much smaller canals in Britain - the operational details were very different of course!!  The thing that surprised me most about the canal was just how close you get to cargo ships traveling the opposite direction in the lake in the middle of the canal.  This was also our first trip on the Mexican Riviera, and thus our first time at Cabo San Lucas and Puerta Vallarta.  We visited Cartagena for the first time on the Atlantic side of the canal, and headed back to Cozumel, which we have visited several times.

Technically this was a Very Merrytime 
cruise, and the ship was all decked out
for Christmas!

Formal night with Daisy and Donald!

Los Arcos at Cabo San Lucas

We toured a glassblowing factory - apparently this is a 
Mexican turtle because it has a sombrero and is drinking a 
bottle of tequila

Tasting at a tequila factory in Puerto Vallarta

Pirate night!

A winning day!  I won 'chip it golf' (golf with a velcro-wrapped
ping pong ball against a felt 'green') and we won 
brainteasers trivia together

Entrance to the Panama Canal - the Cocoli Locks

On deck with Captain Mickey and Captain Minnie

We ate brunch at Palo during the Panama crossing - they finished
the meal with a 'Welcome Back' message in chocolate - here
as we saw earlier on Carnival, all the staff were SO happy to have
passengers and a job again!

Exiting the canal at the Agua Clara locks

At the largest fort in the Americas in Cartagena

Our boat for the boat building competition - 
it had to hold a can of soda and still float

On the beach in Cozumel

This is a pretty decent photo of the whole ship

All of our crafts and prizes from the cruise!  We were busy!

Our awesome dining team!!  Wika on 
the left and Blake on the right.

We have so many more awesome photos and stories from the cruise but I'm trying to exercise restraint on an already very long post!  It really was absolutely amazing to spend so many days on the ship and have the opportunity to get to know the crew a little better than we normally can.

And finally...back to the RV...overall it survived quite well for three weeks in storage, with one exception....we had an unwelcome guest!

A comfy mouse nest!

A mouse had run all over the RV leaving trails of feces, and built its nest underneath our bed.  All of the remaining food in the RV was in secure cabinets, so it didn't get into any food, but it chewed a silicone pastry brush that doubtless smelled of food and pulled batting from Aaron's comforter to make its nest.  We set traps but still haven't caught it, so I think it was away from the RV (perhaps scared by the engine under its bed) when we left.