Western Caribbean Cruise - Feb. 2012

Last summer Shawn decided he wanted to go on a cruise for my birthday, how can you argue with that? My one stipulation was that I wanted to go somewhere warm and have some beach time. The last time we went on a cruise in 2010 we didn't visit one beach! Looking back that really bothered me that here I had been in these places that are supposed to have fantastic beaches and I didn't even walk on one of them! So wanting to make me happy he booked us on a Western Caribbean cruise with ports in Grand Cayman, Roaton Hondourus, Belize and Cozumel. I was pretty excited because neither of us had ever been to any of these places and it's always fun to go to new places together. :) At the time of the booking it was a LONG WAY off so it wasn't really until the week before the cruise that it actually seemed to sink in that we were really going! Thankfully my wonderful Dad was willing to come out and stay with the kiddos again - I don't know what we would do without him! I made sure that I had freezer meals made for every night we would be gone and I left a detailed list of what the kids needed to do to keep things running smoothly. It seemed like things went better this time then the last time we left - of course the kids are 2 years older too and I'm sure that helped (not to mention we were gone 3 days less...).

Two days before we left for Florida we saw on the news that our ship, Crown Princess, had come back into port early because hundreds of the passengers and crew were sick with the norovirus. That was a little concerning at first. Okay, it was A LOT concerning. We tried not to worry and made sure we were going to go prepared (thank you doTERRA oils!!). Then, the night before we left we got a phone call from the company telling us to disregard the email about our cruise being cancelled-- WHAT??  What email??  Apparently an email had gone out by mistake to everyone on the cruise saying that it had been cancelled due to the illness (we never actually got the email...). They were calling to re-assure us that the cruise was still on and that the ship had been docked for 3 days and disinfected by the CDC and that we would be ready to set sail as scheduled. We decided that this was actually to our advantage because now we knew for sure that everything was clean on the ship!

So Friday morning February 10th we got up as usual and got the kids to school (R & T - A & B stayed with their mother), finished our packing and left for the airport to make our noon flight. Following the mammogram, colonoscopy and body cavity search we finally made it to our flight on time (haha). YAY, we were finally on our way!! :)