The croooose!

For my Dad's 60th birthday (which is actually next week) we surprised him with his favorite kind of vacation - a cruise! We'd gone on a cruise together once before and had a great time. Mom successfully kept the secret from him for months! He thought they were just coming down to visit. We also invited Rob's parents, who came with us on the other cruise, and they gladly accepted -- and so they surprised BOTH my parents by their arrival at the airport at the same time! So the 7 of us headed off for 4 days together on a big ship headed to the Bahamas :)

There are tons of pictures from the trip, so I'll just post a bunch here with some short headings.

The airport!


The ship: Carnival Sensation


This is our first meal after boarding the ship (lunch). We ate our lunches in this cafeteria-style area and then had nice fancy dinners every evening.

We got off to a good start on the first day of the cruise, as I won a little Carnival medallion and an art print (which I don't really like, but oh well). It was a trivia question: What language failed by ONE vote to become the national language of the U.S. ? Well, I don't know if it was Frau Hewitt who taught me this or someone else, but I was pretty sure it was German. Two other people jumped in ahead of me, but both of them were wrong. The first one was amazing....the (British) emcee of the trivia game repeated the question to her and she said "Britain...I mean like British, whatever they speak there...." It was like watching Jay Leno go Jaywalking in real life. So he explained to her that the language he was currently speaking was in fact English. The second lady guessed French. So I got the prize! Very exciting, eh?

Here is a nice photo that Rob's dad took of sunrise on the first day of the trip:


Enjoying Freeport -- several of us got off the ship and headed to the beach. Beautiful!


Back on the ship, we were always greeted with a new towel animal when we returned to our room. This day it was a walrus - the room steward had even put Rob's sunglasses on it.

Formal dinner night was the perfect night to have them bring my Dad a little birthday cake!


Thanks to our waiter, Pablo, for taking this shot for us.


Meredith was amazingly well-behaved at our sit-down dinners.


Here comes her lovely meal! (There was a lot more on another plate, as well as some fruit, but we were trying to keep it manageable to get started.)

Later in the evening on formal night, Dad and I sang in the Karaoke lounge. Ok, fine, so we sang EVERY night in the Karaoke lounge. But we looked the coolest on formal night :) Dad became a minor celebrity, with his own groups of fans who would recognize him during the day on the ship!


Here is a view of Nassau from the ship. We didn't spend much time on land because it was very hot and humid.


We discovered one great thing about being docked at a destination: many people from the ship are gone, leaving us with the full run of the place! The ship had a splash park, waterslides, and a mini golf course on the very top. It was perfect for our little girl!




The grown-ups tried out the waterslides too! Here are Rob's parents.


We went mini-golfing twice (in case you notice Meredith switching outfits...).



When she got close to the hole, Meredith decided it was most efficient to just pick up the ball and put it in.


The last dinner -- Meredith went all out, with a patch that matched her outfit! Everyone oohed and aahed over her as we walked by. The waiters had made her a little boot out of a napkin, which we used to bring one of her cookies back to our room after dinner.

Here's what Meredith sometimes does now when you ask her to smile. Apparently, from this picture, she learned it from me.




We had such a special and memorable time with our family. It's not the kind of thing we can do often, but we hope we'll have another chance someday to cruise again with everyone.