2012 Cruise

John and I had the pleasure of going on a Carnival cruise alone...yes, without the boys! We had a relaxing, wonderful time. I hadn't ever been away from the boys for more than 2 hours for a year (besides one shopping trip I took with John that may have been 3 hours)! So it was definitely a change of environment for me! My main goals were to spend some quality time with John and get sleep since I wouldn't be up with my year-old-newborn-sleeper.

The cruise started at 12:30pm on Monday out of Galveston, TX, and traveled to Progreso, Mexico and Cozumel, Mexico. It landed back at port at 8am Saturday morning. We were actually in our car and traveling home at 8:19am Saturday morning! John preached the next morning so we had to travel to Mesquite to pick up Noah at my parents house (5 hours to get there), travel several more hours to get Luke in Oklahoma City, and then another 1 1/2 hours to our house. We had the boys in bed by 9:15pm. Wow! Long day!

Here is a picture of our ship when we got off at our first port, Progreso. We both got a 45 minute massage for $15 each. I call that a good stop!

The slide...

We went to several shows, family comedian acts, played putt-putt golf, dressed up each night for dinner, swam, shopped, played games in the cruise library, met tons of people, watched a movie on the big screen, laid out, read A LOT, and just enjoyed being together! Here is our informal formal night picture. Love him!

We also loved coming to our room each night and seeing different towel animals. We actually went to a towel folding class and bought a book on how to do it. If you ever need to know, I am your girl! Here are some of the towels...

Thanks go to Grammy, Pop, Grandpa, and Nana for watching the boys!

I am a fan of cruises for sure. It is the second one we've been on. I love that you just pay one flat fee for the whole week...which is crazy cheap when you can go in the off-season and get a price that is unbeatable! You get to do a lot of different activities on the boat, eat as much as you want, shop in different ports, etc. I would ski every year if I could but this is a MUCH cheaper vacation. We ate way more food each day than we paid for...so we pretty much got our room free. Thank you Carnival! I would prefer a Disney cruise which John has done but it is much more expensive. I think the shows would be more family-friendly, there wouldn't be the extent of drinking that can happen, and everything would just be higher quality. I was absolutely pleased with the food but disappointed with the desserts on our cruise. And I am not hard to please when it comes to that! I think the desserts were just fancy - using dark chocolate, visual appeal, and uniqueness instead of just straight tongue-pleasing. Overall though, I loved the cruise and look forward to spending that quality time with John again.