Caribbean Cruise 2014

We have returned to the real, cold world with only memories of the sun in the Caribbean to keep us warm.  Brody and I, sans baby, spent a week in the south eastern Caribbean.  It was a week full of food, sun, exploring and a lot of missing the baby.  We visited 3 new countries plus the U.S Virgin islands and Puerto Rico.  Here is a little description of what we did on this long vacation in the sun!

Day 1- Puerto Rico

Beautiful streets and colorful buildings!

Brody and I, having left Madeleine with my parents, (we had to drive through a crazy snowstorm to drop her off and ended up changing our flights to leave from Pittsburgh because we really couldn't get back to Detroit) flew to Puerto Rico and checked into our hotel in Old San Juan.  We got in late so we just had dinner and walked around for a bit.  In the morning we explored the beautiful, old streets of Old San Juan.  We ate breakfast at the best waffle place ever and visited the old fort.  San Juan was gorgeous and Brody and I really enjoyed the architecture, the closeness of everything and of course the warmth.  Later that day we boarded our cruise ship and set off for St. Croix.

Amazing waffles!

Fort cerca 1600s

Exploring

Day 2- U.S. Virgin Islands St. Croix
Brody was scheduled to scuba dive this morning so I headed to a little beach in the town of Christianstad.  St. Croix was a sleepy little island with not much going on. There wasn't even much shopping. St. Croix ended up being our least favorite stop since there really was so little to do and taxis seemed to be a rip off.  We did learn that Alexander Hamilton was born and raised on this island.  Also people drive on the opposite side of the road and the island became a U.S. territory during WWI.

My home for that day :)

Day 3-St. Kitts
St. Kitts is its own independent nation.  It is a small island with its very own volcano. This day Brody planned to scuba dive again.  I  didn't really want to just sit on a beach for the whole day by myself so I started looking for something to do.  I ended up joining a group of 7 old ladies to go on a tour of the island.  It ended up being quite fun and I made friends with all the ladies.
I got to see the Romney Manor- which is an old house with beautiful gardens. (including a 400 yr old tree), some volcanic beaches and the point where the Caribbean meets the Atlantic Ocean, all while learning the history and other tidbits about the island.  I met Brody afterwards and we tried a local restaurant and walked around the port town.

Where the Atlantic meets the Caribbean

Romney Manor gardens

Day 4- Dominica
This was our favorite island.  This was the most tropical and green place I have ever been.  Dominica is known for amazing waterfalls, a boiling lake, hot springs and gorges. Several movies were filmed there in its beautiful rain forest.  Here, Brody and I snorkeled at the Champagne Reef (you can see tons of little bubbles under water), drank banana soda, swam through a gorge, scaled rock walls and even jumped off a waterfall.  We ended the tour by visiting one of the famous waterfalls and a hot spring.  It was an adventurous day full of fun.  We also got to see almost any tropical plant you could think of.  The tour guide pointed out mango, banana, nutmeg, star fruit, bread fruit and many more. The driver told us that they might not have much money, but they never go hungry because they can just pick food where ever they go, year round.

Brody was a great photographer

Day 5- Grenada
This island is called the Spice Island.  We visited a spice farm and learned all about it.  They grow nutmeg, cinnamon, bay leaves and chocolate (or cacao) there.  We also drove around much of the island and visited another waterfall.  This was one of the poorer countries that we visited.  Our tour guide said that the teenager pregnancy rate was high on the island, and they've had grandparents as young as 26 there! Crazy.  We even saw multiple young girls walking around with tiny babies.  It killed me to think about all these poor babies, and it made me miss mine all the more.

At the spice farm.

Day 6- Day at Sea
By this time I was missing Madeleine a lot and feeling ready to be done with the vacation.  We tried to have as much fun as we could that day though.  I enjoyed a good book and laying in the sun.  This cruise had much better entertainment and activities than our last one.  So that helped make the time on the boat better. We definitely wished we could have had friends with us this time, since it was so fun to have Ryan and Kristen with us last time. Also, the couple seated with us at dinner were the LAMEST people ever.  I guess I shouldn't be that mean.  They were nice but incredibly boring and not very social.  We would have had more fun if our waiters or dinner companions were as good as the last cruise.

Day 7- U.S. VI St. Thomas
We didn't have any plans for St. Thomas so we set out and wandered the dock city.  St. Thomas had the most shopping out of all the islands we visited.  Were were also next to a dock full of private yachts.  We saw some huge, amazing boats. After we shopped for awhile and stared at the yachts like stalkers, we decided to head to the beach one last time.  The water in St. Thomas was a beautiful shade of turquoise! It was beautiful and sunny so we couldn't complain.

We got back to Puerto Rico the next morning and tried to get on an earlier flight home. (When we booked the tickets we had planned on taking the baby with us so we weren't worried about getting the soonest flight out. It was very expensive to change the fight dates earlier so we were told we could call the day of and try to get the tickets changed that day and they would only charge us $50 a person) Well of course there weren't any seats at all on Saturday so we had to wait until the next morning.  I wasn't expecting to miss Madeleine so much!  I struggled with extreme guilt for leaving her as well.  I will never leave her or any of our other children for that long when they are babies.  It was just too hard.  She actually did really well at my parents (probably better than she acts with me) and didn't seem to miss us too much.  She was kind of confused when she saw us again and took awhile to warm up, but since then she's been quite clingy to me and hasn't been sleeping as well at night.  Oh well we will get back on schedule soon enough.