first time for everything...

There IS a first time for everything...and this is a big year for us. If you remember this post, I mentioned something about a trip to celebrate our 10-year wedding anniversary...

And celebrate we will! WE'RE GOING ON A CRUISE! Our first (and hopefully not our last) cruise. We sail June 1 to the Western Carribean on the Carnival Triumph and I can't even begin to explain how excited I am. 7 glorious, fun-filled days aboard this massive ship with everything in the world to do. We'll visit Cozumel, Mexico, the Grand Cayman Islands and Ocho Rios, Jamaica. I'm starting to sound like an advertisement, right?

I've been told by all of our friends who've been on cruises that it really is a spectacular vacation, the only way to travel, really. Well, it would be the only way to travel if we didn't have anything else to do with our money! But this is a momentous occassion and one I didn't want to get by us without doing something really grand to celebrate. This qualifies.

I spent countless hours online researching cruises, deals, places to go -- I must've exhausted at least 10-12 different websites that boasted of "the best cruise deals", "rock-bottom cruises", etc. In the end, we enlisted the help of a travel agent that we trust and she found us a great, all-inclusive deal. When we leave ILM (Wilmington, NC airport) on June 1, we will be carted to-&-fro by air, land & sea for 7 days. No worries. Our airfare, ground transport to the ship from the airport and back, as well as the cruise fare all included. Done.

The next thing to think about was shore excursions. Oh, my heavens! So many options in each port. I spent several more countless hours online researching these & comparing and calculating the best deals for our hard-earned cash. I'm happy to say we booked our excursions last night, one on each island, and I feel sooo much better with that done. We got the ones we wanted (they weren't full yet) and we kept the cost relatively low. We won't have to get up really early on any particular day and we'll have "down-time" each day, even in port, to do our own thing.

I'm compiling basically a notebook of "stuff" to read through or to have on hand to make the experience smoother. I have our travel documents and "FunPass" printed out; I have emails in which I've gotten feedback from friends who've been on this exact same cruise and those who've been on other cruises. I found out what shore excursions they went on & what they thought of them (I used those emails heavily to help me make my decisions about our excursions). I've asked general questions about the cruise itself and they've all been just so sweet to pass on whatever information they learned from their experiences.

So now we wait. But not for too long...17 days (and counting)!