The Celebration Cruise begins!! July 19, 2019!

-
More than a year ago we started planning for this cruise, and the day had finally arrived!  We were ready to leave for our big "Celebration" cruise on Royal Caribbean's Symphony of the Seas!  This year I turned 50, Megan turned 18 and she graduated from High School, so we wanted to do a big family cruise. It has been a year and a half since the 4 of us went on a family vacation, and it's been at least 6 years since my parents joined us on a vacation, so this was going to be a lot of fun! 

 We chose the Symphony of the Seas because we loved sailing on the Allure a few years ago, and the Symphony is similar to the Allure but just **MORE**! Plus we really liked the itinerary, including the new Perfect Day at Cococay, which is Royal Caribbean's updated private island. 

 We left on Friday morning for the airport to fly into Fort Lauderdale, and then we would spend the night in Miami since our cruise was sailing from there. Off we go!


Megan drove to the airport, we made it through security with no problems and boarded the plane for our flight!

When we landed we met our transfer and went to Miami.  We stayed at the Hampton Inn Brickell, which is a great area to stay in pre-cruise. There are a lot of restaurants and it's only about a 5-10 minute ride to the port in the morning! The hotel has a free drink for each guest during their happy hour, so we relaxed a bit before our dinner, and the kids played some pool.



Views from the pool deck area of the hotel


 Tonight we would be celebrating Megan's birthday by going out to dinner.  We picked a Japanese BBQ restaurant called Gyu-Kaku that was about a block away from the hotel.  











This was a lot of fun, and if you've never been to a place like this, it's sort of like the Melting Pot, but with a grill in the center instead of a fondue pot.  At first it was a bit overwhelming trying to figure out what and how to order.  The menu is huge.  But we ended up going with a platter to serve 6 and adding on some extras for appetizers and some rices.  It was plenty of food for sure!  If you're not a fan of meat, this may not be the best place for you.  But it was a fun time and we all left pretty stuffed!

We walked back to our hotel and called it a night!  We were all really looking forward to boarding our ship tomorrow! We had quite a week planned! 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

San Pedro, hustle and bustle!

-
Image
Ambergris Caye…it’s an interesting place to be! As I mentioned in some previous posts, we chose a resort to the north of the town of San Pedro. Portofino is only accessible by water taxi and it’s about a fifteen minute boat ride to get there. But when you get into the heart of the island the pace of life picks up. It’s still a sleepy island town by all means. But there’s much more hustle and bustle! The first thing we noticed was the primary means of transportation are golf carts. There’s a few taxi vans, but most people are driving golf carts. This is certainly unique! There’s a certain charm about this for sure. Our main reasons for going into town were to get to the dive shops, but that only brought us to the docks…to eat lunch and dinner once or twice and the obligatory souvenir shopping. We didn’t get a chance to really see any of the other hotels in the area. In my obsessive research before the trip, there were quite a few that looked nice, but now that I was there I
Read more

You'd better Belize it!

-
Image
That's right - Belize.  The first question so many people would ask was, where's Belize? They hadn't even heard of the country!  This was common I found because Belize was formerly known as British Honduras and didn't change it's name until 1973.  The second question I was asked was why do you want to go to Belize?  Belize suddenly began popping up to me in my obsessive travel research about two years ago.  I had been planning our second trip to Costa Rica and kept seeing great travel information about Belize and of course I wanted to see what was the big draw!  K and I have been to Mexico several times and had been to Costa Rica once previously and since I was planning our second trip to Costa Rica I kept Belize in the back of my mind for a future trip.  I started to do some research and found Belize has the second largest barrier reef in the world!  Now that's something!  Neither K nor I dive, but we both enjoy snorkeling so right there that was a great opp
Read more

A Beautiful Morning

-
Image
Imagine opening your eyes and seeing this.... Imagine that! I woke up early one morning and pulled back the cotton curtains to see if the sun had risen up above the sea yet, and this was what greeted me. I just had to grab my camera! I went out on our porch and sat there just in awe of the beauty of the place we were. How lucky we were to be here! How lucky to experience such beauty! I snapped a picture with my cell phone to send home to the kids. I wished they were here to share this moment with me. There were so many parts of this adventure that they would love, and yet so many parts that would be enjoyed so much more in a few more years. The timing just wasn’t quite right yet. I enjoyed this amazing sunrise alone…I didn’t wake up K yet. He wouldn’t quite appreciate the beauty of it the way I did. He was sound asleep still. He’d enjoy it in a picture. For me, my day was already perfect.
Read more