Tuesday, September 24, 2013

Cruising: Oasis of the Seas

At the end of August hubs and I took some time off from work and Lulu to for some much needed R&R. We did a 7 night Eastern Caribbean cruise on the Royal Caribbean boat, Oasis of the Seas. Hubs is a huge fan of cruising while I usually run luke warm on the idea...mostly because I get sea sick pretty easily. Hubs was constantly reassuring me that since the Oasis of the Seas is the largest cruise ship out there that I would be fine, but true to me of course I doubted him. Turns out like most things, he was right. I made sure that I had my transderm-scop patch, but for the most part I couldn't even tell the boat was moving.


We left for Florida on a Friday night after a crazy busy day at work followed by a crazy evening of packing Lulu up and dropping her off at the dog-sitter and a frenzied/panicked packing session by the both of us. In retrospect that was incredibly poor planning which led to a lot of overpacking. NEVER.AGAIN.

The first stop on our cruise was the island of Nassau where we checked off one of my biggest bucket list items and swam with dolphins the Atlantis resort. Okay, we didn't exactly go swimming with the dolphins, but we did stand in the shallow area and play with the dolphins. Too bad they didn't let us take any pictures with our personal camera. Instead they charged a million dollars for their pictures, which means we didn't get any. Boo. While we were at Atlantis we got to go their water park and play. They have this really long lazy river with some spots with some "rapids" which was nice so that floating along didn't get too boring. We also rode this water slide that shoots you into a clear tube in one of their shark tanks. Lots of fun.
L to R: getting ready to play with the dolphins, hanging on to each others inner tubes as we float down the river like sea otters, floating through the shark tank


Our next stop was St. Thomas. We spent a little time shopping around in the downtown area which was heavily dominated by jewelry stores. We spent some time browsing the jewelry stores, but it wasn't really anything to write home about. We mostly stopped in them to get a brief reprieve from the outrageous heat. After about half an hour of window shopping we were over it and ready to head back to the boat.


The last stop on the cruise was St. Maarten, where we did a Sea Trek and I checked another item of my bucket list. At first it made me a little anxious because the helmet they put on you feels really heavy and as you go deeper and deeper into the ocean you have to continuously pop your ears due to the increased pressure. It feel really weird at first too since the water comes up just below the helmet and it's negative pressure that keeps the water out of your helmet. The tour guides help guide you along a little roped off pathway on the ocean floor. They even give you fish food so you can feed the fish...which seems really cool but is not so cool when it actually happens since the fish have sharp little teeth. I was really excited that we got to do this since I never thought I'd be able to see the fishies so close up since I'm such a weak swimmer.

All in all the cruise was a lot more fun than I had anticipated. Between all the different shows and the excursions we did there was still lots of time for lounging by the pool and napping in our room. I think we napped every single day we were on the cruise. It was so relaxing and I'm really glad that hubs planned this trip for us.
L to R: unlimited soda cups = best accessory on the boat, obligatory towel animal 

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