Cruise to the Southern Caribbean Jan, 2008
Days 1-2

This is the BobLog of mom and my cruse to the islands of the Caribbean in January, 2008.  You may click on any of the pics for a larger image.   Also, any text in blue is a clickable link to another website.

We left Rochester in the early afternoon, arriving Washington, DC on-time.  The pilot of the small plane needs to take some more lessons in flying though - he came down pretty hard during the landing!  Almost thought we were going to crash, it was so hard.  Before we left Rochester, mom was not feeling very well.

Ate some food there at the airport, and had time to do some last-minute work from my laptop, after finally finding an available power plug.  We boarded the plane, and were en route to Puerto Rico!

We were met at the airport by Femy, Willy's sister, who lives in PR.  She and her husband Joel (pronounced "Jo - elle") were very gracious to pick us up, take us out for some food, and let us stay the night at their house!  Unfortunately, Femy had to run out early the next morning to prepare for a party at her dad's house (Three King's Day, an additional Christmas holiday celebrated in PR), so I was unable to take any pictures of her.

We discovered mom had forgotten her cane, so the next day we called around to see where we could find one.  Found one at a local CVS!  Oh, mom's stomache thing thankfully went away by the time we arrived in PR too!  Praise God!
(me) with Joel in the kitchen
 Mom, on the phone, in their lovely living room.



They have a lovely home
...with a beautiful view of PR

After a trip to CVS, we headed for the ship's port.  On route, we got a little glimpse of PR.  Below is a picture of a car sales place.  They parked the new cars right in the middle meridan of the road! 


Interesting way to display your cars for sale!
 Very nice hotels are in abundance in the area


They began loading at 1PM, with a scheduled departure of 11:00PM.  It was a nice sunny, hot day there, and we were greeted with quite the waiting line of people ready to board!  It was also quite windy that day - almost lost my hat once.
The line in front of us...
 And the line in back of us!



Finally made it on board!  This is our little balcony
 The view of PR from the balcony.

Its hard to see in the pic, but there was still that long line of people waiting to board.  It was that way for many hours.  Not sure what the slowness was, as the last cruise we went on, we had no delay at all in boarding.  Anyway, we got food, and rested up a bit.  We were assigned the "Anytime Dining", and went for dinner around 6.  Met Cathy and Sandy who were sisters from Pennsylvania (one of which works with Zonervan Publishing).  We would see them one more time during our trip.

The grand-ness of the ship has to be experienced to be appreciated.  The Crown Princess is one of their largest ships.  It holds over 3000 passengers and 1200 crew members.  There are several restaurants, lounges, pools, performance centers, etc etc.  They have a lot of activities to do, with things some things scheduled twice so that you can make at least one of the performances.

In the center of the ship there was a large area called "The Piazza", where there were a lot of shops, main desk, and some performances.  There was a juggler there that did his act, which included juggling while on a unicycle, and still catching the pins UNDER his leg!
A juggler, doing his act on a unicycle
 Me, on the spiral stairway between decks 6 and 7, mid-ship

That night mom went to bed early.  I went to see the evening show, which included a sampling of the comedian Sarge, who was just plain funny beyond belief!   Just found his website with some of his videos. Check it out!

Go to Day 3