ship – Jo McVey Photography

As many of you know, Steve and I went on a Caribbean cruise for our honeymoon a couple weeks ago. It was wonderful, and I really enjoyed seeing a part of the world I had never seen before. In this post, I’m basically going to show and tell you everything about the ship we were on, the Caribbean Princess.

This was my first cruise ever, so I didn’t really know what to expect. I knew it was going to be a huge ship, but nothing can really prepare you for the massive size of a cruise ship.

This was our first view of the ship while driving through the parking lot. I couldn’t even fit the whole thing in my view finder!

Here’s a full view of the ship from our excursion boat in Bermuda. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Excursions are coming in a later post.

We splurged and decided to go for a balcony room. It was our honeymoon after all! And I’m so glad we did!

Uh huh….I could get used to this!

Here’s our teeny weeny bathroom. Steve said that it was actually pretty spacious for a cruise ship bathroom. I don’t think it could have been much smaller.

And there’s me in the tiny shower taking a picture of the other side of the bathroom. We went to two comedy shows on the cruise, and both comedians made jokes about the tiny showers. Like, how if you dropped the soap, you wouldn’t have enough room to bend over and pick it up. You would think it was funnier if you actually had to take a shower in one of those!

While we were docked in Brooklyn, the Statue of Liberty was about 1/2 a mile away from our balcony. So of course I took several pictures.

Doesn’t this picture look like it was taken 100 years ago? 🙂 I just had to process it this way since that old ship was in the foreground. It wouldn’t look right any other way.

Our stateroom was toward the back of the ship, so when we looked out our balcony, this is what we saw.

We ordered a room service breakfast almost every morning, and I always ordered the ham, egg, and cheese breakfast sandwich, while Steve ordered plain ole cereal….and a banana. We ate breakfast every morning on our balcony.

Isn’t this the tiniest glass you’ve ever seen? It was pretty much the size of a double shot glass. Two sips, and it was gone!

We had 2 formal nights on the cruise, so I took advantage of it, and did a little photo shoot with Steve on our balcony. Hey, it’s not very often that I get him dressed up, so I have to seize the opportunity when it presents itself!

Isn’t he handsome?

Mr. GQ

Ok, I’ll stop now. 🙂

If you’ve never seen a hallway on a cruise ship, you have never seen a hallway! This thing was so long that you couldn’t see the end! Now I know why Rose had so much trouble finding Jack when he was handcuffed on the Titanic!

Here we are at the bow of the ship (that’s the front for those of you who are not sailors).

This was the pool area at the back of the ship that was supposed to be “adults only”, but I saw kids in there a lot, and it was really annoying when you were trying to lay out peacefully and then get splashed by a kid doing a cannon ball into the tiny pool.

Before we set sail, all the passengers had to do a safety drill where we learn how to put on our life jackets and where to meet. We’re prepared for anything with these lovely orange ensembles!

Can’t get enough of our balcony!

Here we are on formal night #1. Shortly after we sat down for dinner I had to go up to the room and take some Dramamine. Yep, I was feeling sea sick! I couldn’t believe it! Luckily it was just a little nausea with no other visible side effects….if you know what I mean.

Formal night #2. On each formal night they had photographers set up all around the ship with different back drops. We ended up buying 5 photos. I know! It’s a little excessive, but I liked all 5 of them, and I couldn’t choose!

I can’t forget our couples massage!!! We had a 50 minute full body massage, and liked it so much that we scheduled another one for the next day. Except the second massage was 75 minutes and also included hot stones! Mmmm….I could use a massage right now!

Steve pretty much spend each sea day in the casino. In his defense, there really was nothing else to do on the boat, unless of course you wanted to attend an anti-wrinkle seminar, a teeth whitening seminar, or a “glee” choir rehearsal. I’ll admit, I did do one activity on the boat: a photography walk around, where the head photographer on the ship took a group of people around the ship and gave pointers about photography. The only problem was that 80% of the group (of about 50 people) had point and shoot cameras. This activity is not for you, people!!! It’s for those of us with nice, professional cameras….cameras where you have to actually look through the view finder instead of the large screen on the back of your little $200 camera. So that was a little frustrating. The instructor spent most of the time trying to show the P&S camera people where each setting was on their camera instead of actually teaching. But, oh well. You can’t win ’em all!

This had to be Steve’s craziest hand! I mean look! Five 4s! How often does that happen?!

Here’s the main plaza. I was actually expecting something a lot bigger. It was only three stories tall, and from what I’ve seen, normally cruise ships have plazas that run the entire height of the ship.

This is from the top deck looking down at the pool. I can honestly say that I did not set one foot in any of the pools on the ship. They were just too crowded. You’d have to wake up at like 6am to reserve a chair, and then people would lay their towels on the chairs (like you see toward the bottom of this picture) and just leave for the rest of the day, so you didn’t know if someone was sitting there, or if they just felt like leaving their towel behind. It was very frustrating.

Steve and I own our own business, and our honeymoon was our first vacation in 4 years. Naturally he was worried about the business while we were away, so he and I both did customer service emails on our honeymoon. I know, romantic, right? But sometimes you just gotta do what you gotta do.

Every night at dinner, we sat with the same six people….all New Yorkers, and all complainers. Whenever we’d try to say something positive about the service or something of that nature, they’d find a way to say something negative. They were nice to us, but just never happy with anything.

On a side note, have you ever seen anyone as tan as that woman below me? I mean, my goodness!!! Someone has taken one too many trips to the tanning salon! Enough is enough!