Cruising the Mexican Riviera

Besides the move and the mission call and the business and the new job and everything else going on, we've been on the countdown for the CRUISE!  Having gone almost exactly two years ago, we were even more excited, anticipating the whole experience and every detail.

We left on Friday, February 6th.  We checked all the kids out of four schools, and got on the road to head to Vegas.  We had a reservation near Fremont street, thinking it would be a fun new side of town to see.  YIKES.  Vegas has some innerestin' situations going on.  We ended up being only one block from all the action, and we did like seeing the ceiling light up every hour and the people zip-lining through the air above us, but other than that it was a little scary...

But nothing could dampen the excitement for our cruise!  We got up early and packed up to head to Long Beach.  There's nothing like handing over your luggage to the luggage guys and walking towards that HUGE ship that's just waiting for you to start your adventure.  We checked in, got our room keys, and went across the bridge to the Carnival Miracle.  They take your picture as you get ready to leave the check-in building so we snapped a picture of the photo...it was all so exciting! (You should hear the way Landrie said it the entire cruise...."It's soooooooo, essssssiting!!!"

We went to check out our balcony rooms, drop our stuff, jump on the beds a little bit, and then headed  up to eat and explore the ship.

 I took all these from outside on the balcony.  We had interior rooms last cruise, so this was a real treat to wake up every morning and see the ocean sparkling with the sun shining on it.  They opened our doors to connect our three balconies, and Hartman spent a lot of time on the little table, sucking his thumb and looking over the railing into the sunrise and sunset.

 We liked these little rocking chairs!

My favorite part of the cruise is the dining room.  It's so gaudy-fancy, and the settings and 3 course service is so fun!  There are always exotic dishes and delicious starters and main courses and desserts to choose from.  And if you can't decide, they bring you everything!  This was dinner the first night in the Bacchus dining room.  Grapes are the theme, if you can't tell.  I just loved getting dressed up a couple of the nights, walking back to our fancy reserved table, and enjoying a delicious meal looking at all my children's faces.  We had so much fun in this dining room!  

 You can choose to either eat your meals on the lido deck cafeteria-style, or in the dining room.  On sea days, we loved going to the dining room for a fancy breakfast.  Since we don't drink coffee, they always brought us 9 hot chocolates.  That hot chocolate is the bomb!  Scarlett and Hartman just loved pouring the creamer from the tiny pitchers into their chocolate.  They wanted pictures to remember how fun it was.

You can see we downed that basket of pastries and sweetbreads pretty easily...

 Lounging poolside with chicken nuggets, fries, fresh fruit, and ice cream cones.  Mmmmmmmm.

 Romney had to soak up all the Mexican sun she could get before heading out to freezing Russia.

 That ocean!  There's nothing like it.

 First Formal Dining night

 Coasting into Cabo San Lucas

 Eat enough, Brent?  There's always more...

 The famous rocks as you approach Cabo

Scenery

Girls and Hart

We were so excited for our day in Cabo.  It was a beautiful, warm if not hot sunny day.  We got off the boat and were immediately approached by several men wanting us to buy tickets to ride their glass-bottom boats.  One guy offered a great discount and let Hartman ride for free--so he was our guy.  It was seriously SUCH a beautiful day and so fun to go around the rocks and see the see lions basking in the sun.

 We could look down into that rectangle on the floor and see all the fish swimming under us.  Lots of Dori's from Nemo...

The famous Cabo Arch

There was a rock that they call Scooby Doo because it looks just like his head.

This seal was just basking in the sun on a beautiful day.  Stinky but cool. We saw lots of live crabs crawling up the rocks near him.

 The water taxi took us to a great beach where we found a large area to lay out all our stuff and our nice Carnival beach towels.  We played and played and played in the sand and water.  It was the perfect day to be on a perfect beach.

Sophie did a good job making Landrie a mermaid.

That water!

 We didn't want that day to end, but we finally had to get back on the water taxi to take us back to the ship.  Hartman chose a Cabo San Lucas baseball cap for his souvenir.  You can see he was happy with his choice...

 We loved the Phantom theater and saw some great shows.  You're strictly forbidden from taking photos of the shows, but we saw a "Generations" show that had singing and dancing through the decades.  Pretty good, too!

 We dined and dined and dined.  This table was near the very back of the ship and sitting here we kept commenting about how crazy it was that we were eating these fancy meals on a boat in the middle of the ocean.

 One of the crafts on the boat.  They taught us how to make tissue flowers....something I'm totally unfamiliar with...

 Then it was off to Puerta Vallarta!  Cabo was more of a dry, desert-type landscape, but PV was very tropical.  It was also a much larger city with a Walmart, Sam's club, and shopping Mall right in front of where we docked.

 The weather was so warm, but overcast.  We still played for hours at the beach because the water was so nice.  Some of the waves were getting pretty big--we each got blasted in the face or the back a couple of times.  It was fun--Brent and Raegan and Sophie and Alivia went running down the beach to get the harder waves.

 Walking back towards the dock is a looooooong boulevard that goes along the beach and has lots of statues and hotels and restaurants and cool things to look at.

 Brent ended up sitting here for awhile by the Mexican dancers while we lingered in a souvenir shop. I think every one of us came out with several things.

 This is a famous, cool old church in Puerto Vallarta.  There were nuns outside selling stuff and we felt funny in swimsuits, but we peeked in.

 Why is no one ever listening to the babies?

Sophie was happy and Alivia was astonished that the seahorse seems to be the symbol of PV

 We stood fascinated for a good half hour as we watched these little Mexican men in costume climb way up this pole.   The man on the top played a flute, and we kept waiting for the big event.  Finally, they started coming down...

 Upside down and spinning around until they got to the beach at the bottom.  Pretty amazing!

 We stayed docked in Puerto Vallarta that night, and there was a Thriller Dance class taught by one of the male performers on the ship.  He was really good!  But Raegan and Landrie stole the show.

 Several people came up to them afterwards and said, "We watched you the whole time, you were the best!"

 The next morning, Brent and the five girls went into town early to catch a taxi up into the jungle to zipline.  Brent bough a whole CD of pictures of their adventure that I'll have to figure out how to add later.  I would have loved to have gone, but these babies would not have gotten into the zip line scene I'm afraid...so we went to the Gallerias Vallartas--the mall.  We found some fun things to do!

 The carousel was a hit, and the girl who drove the train took these two all over the upper floor of the mall.  I finally stopped following and just waited for them to come back.

 We thought it was pretty cool that we could walk out the front doors of the mall and see the ship right there...

There was a pet store in the mall that had some dogs just running around inside and a bunny hopping and a huge blue parrot just sitting up by the ceiling.  There were some huge tarantulas in glass cages that we looked at for a while.  But these parrots near the ship were so loud and so colorful, we ended up watching them for quite a while.

 Our dining room staff was so great.  The little guy on the left is Christian.  He loved Hartman and Scarlett.  As soon as we would sit down, he would bring us our bread and then bring big glasses of chocolate milk to Hartman, Scarlett, Alivia, and Landrie.

 The guy on the right is Soe from Burma.  The NICEST guy.  He loved doing trivia and puzzles with us.  He had a new trick every night.

We found out that these guys work for 6 months at a time, just cruise after cruise for 12-14 hours per day.  They only talk to their families about one time per week, and look forward to some weeks off every six months to fly home and see their wives and kids. They are all so kind and so helpful.  We were really sad at our last dinner to say goodbye!  

 The crew is so good at making these towel animals.  One morning the kids went up to the pool and every chair and stool had an animal on it.  They were fascinated!  We had them in our rooms each night, but there were some pretty creative animals up there.

 One afternoon we met at the Fountainhead Lounge for a game of Amazing Race.  It was so fun!  There are signs all over the ship that say "have fun but don't run".  Well, we RAN.  All the other groups were running like crazy too.  We had to see how many kilograms the glass elevators could hold, how many glass stairs led up to the steakhouse, how many computer screens were in the library, how many entrances to the theaters, stuff like that.  The kids loved it!  We missed the trophy by ONE point.  Darnit.

The bean bag toss drew some pretty stiff competition in the atrium.  Brent took a shot at it, basically a game of cornhole.  Seeing the cornhole thing and this guy together, made me think he was Cade.  He was tall and skinny and had similar facial features.  I was trying to get a picture to show Cade...

 This was our second formal night going into the dining room.  It was fun to dress up!

 There was a great Beatles show that we thoroughly enjoyed singing along to.  The stage sets and singing were great!  They handed out glow sticks to everyone in the audience that we waved around for several songs and at the end shot out confetti onto everyone.  We liked it so much we went back for the late show!

 Romney took a picture of the jewels I bought in Puerta Vallarta...

Scarlett in front of the Beatles screen

 We got back to the rooms after dinner and heard Raegan screaming and laughing.  This was a pretty creative towel set up left by our steward Darmoyo.  He waited for us to come out the next morning to get our reaction.  So funny...

 These two ended up sharing the upper bed like this a lot instead of having separate beds.  They both wanted to be in our room, and they both wanted the top bed.  It worked out!

They are constantly taking pictures of everyone to sell--for like 20 bucks a pop!  So we sneakily took photos of the photos...

(It's hard to not have a glare when you're trying to be sneaky and fast!)

 Sophie and some of her bffs from Club O2.  We also saw some pretty funny comedians in the Mad Hatter's lounge.  We are still quoting some of their lines...

 Those sunsets!

Romney and Raegan for infinity....minus the bikini bottoms...

 This Scottish kilt guy was watching Raegan do her clap routine with Liv and wanted IN.  He ended up slapping up a storm with them while we waited to go into the dining room.  Nice guy.

Romney had to take a picture of her entree of frog legs.  She loved them so much she ordered three servings!

 These guys were so great, several nights in the dining room they turn off all the lights and crank the music and we all stand up and dance.  Our waiters told us they spend time practicing their moves!  On the last night they played "Leaving on a Jet Plane" but changed the words a bit.  Something about how they hate to see us go.  Scarlett LOVES that song now.  She said she was almost crying while they were singing it.  We stopped at a Cafe Rio on the way home from Long Beach and that song came on the radio!  She loved it again.

 Brent finally won his trophy.  We played Name That Tune where you had to write the name of the song AND the artist.  He had almost a perfect score!  This guy knows his tunes.  And the kids were so excited to have "a ship on a stick" as they kept calling it on the cruise.

 On the last night of the cruise there was a talent show.  We pressured Romney and Raegan to enter.  They did one of their dances from the EHS dance team and were so good!  The Cruise Director interviewed them afterwards and they EACH got a trophy, a bottle of sparkling cider, and a medal!  All to raucous applause.

 Waking up on the last morning as we headed into Long Beach was bittersweet.  It was so pretty outside, and we dreaded getting off the boat!

 They want us out of our rooms at a certain time, so after we stuffed ourselves with as much food as we could eat, and then a couple more ice cream cones each on top of that, we waited to be called to the deck to disembark...

 Going the other way across the bridge back to dry land...

 One quite stressful thing on the ship was Scarlett's tooth.  I couldn't believe it when she started complaining again of her cheek hurting on the 2nd or 3rd day of the cruise!  Sure enough her back, top left tooth was tender.  We began a rigorous salt-rinsing routine after each meal, and Brent gave her a blessing.  We had faith that everything would be okay until we could get to a dentist, and it was!  But it changed our plans a bit.  Instead of driving to Vegas and getting a hotel to head North to Elko, we ended up going through Salt Lake so we could see our on-call dentist on a Sunday....AGAIN.  Being Valentines day and President's Day weekend, there were NO hotel rooms anywhere in California, Utah, or Nevada!  At least not for less than $300 per night.  I knew we'd have a hard time driving a full 12 hours, especially with Scarly boo's face so sore and swollen, so I texted Jon.  All I can say is that we owe Paul and Sharon Geertsen BIG time for letting us use their beautiful home in Hurricane for a night!  It was better than any hotel, and you can see here that as we watched Music and the Spoken Word that Sunday morning and finished washing towels, the kids had a blast with the closet of toys.  They say those are the best toys they have ever played with, and are jealous of Adren, Eli, Paisley, and Zeke because they get to play with them all the time...

Look at Scarlett's poor face!

 Brent had a couple more shots of the cruise that I wanted to add to the post...this was the girls on the way to the zip line with Brent.

And now we're home!  We had a torturous experience with Dr. Roth getting Scarlett's tooth pulled, but by the next day she was almost 100 percent again.  

It was a vacation to put in the books, people!  Who knows if we'll ever cruise again, but it felt like a bit of heaven to be with my favorite people on earth for a whole week.  These are the best of the best!