I'm still playing catch up and today, I wanted to report in on the cruise Jeremy and I just went on for our 20th anniversary. It was a magical trip in every sense of the word, I'm fairly certain it was the best vacation I have ever had, but don't tell the kids that we had so much fun without them. We have been home for a week and already the details are slipping away so I will try my best to get it down before I forget even more.
The trip got off to a bit of a rough start with a very delayed flight. We were supposed to leave here at 11pm and fly overnight to Boston. Unfortunately, our flight was very delayed. We didn't end up leaving PDX until 1:30am. We then had a VERY tight timeline for catching our connecting flight in Boston. It was tight enough that once the plane landed the flight crew asked everyone to stay put to allow those of us trying to make our connection to San Juan to get off the plane first. We made our way to the front of the plane, but unfortunately the airport crew had an extremely difficult time attaching the gangway so that we could deplane. Once we were finally allowed off, we had to sprint to our next gate (thankfully only a few gates down) where we found a fully boarded plane waiting for us. The second flight was uneventful and we finally made it to Puerto Rico.
The first day is Puerto Rico is a bit of a blur. We had mostly been awake for 36 hours. We took an Uber from the airport and the driver ended up not actually dropping us at our hotel. He told us we were there, but when we got out, we were not. We had to drag our luggage about a 1/4 mile to the hotel, which would have been more fun had the roads not been rough brick/cobblestone. We got settled into our hotel, found some food, and did a little shopping/walking around. It started to rain that evening and we were beyond exhausted so we ended up going to bed before 9, which was really crazy considering that would have been 6pm our body time.








The next morning we were recharged and ready to spend the day exploring San Juan, since we didn't have to be to the ship until 3pm. We spent much of the day wandering around old San Juan, ducking into shops with AC whenever possible. We visited an old military castle/fortress, Castillo San Cristobal, which was not only really interesting, but gave us incredible views, including our first peak at our ship. We found an amazing little hole in the wall place to eat and had empanadas, fish and shrimp tacos, and traditional Puerto Rican beans and rice. Eventually, we made it to our ship and were on our way.













Our first morning of the cruise, we awoke in St. Thomas, USVI. We had heard that St. Thomas is very touristy and not the best of the Virgin Islands, so we had planned to immediately head across the island and take a ferry to St. John. We had to take our life into our own hands just a little with a taxi driver who thought he was a race car driver in order to make it to the ferry, but in the end it was worth it. We took the ferry to St. John and then another taxi to Maho beach. St. John as a whole is incredibly beautiful, most of it is a state park. At Maho, we found an incredible beach that is designated a sea turtle sanctuary. We snorkeled around and saw sea turtles for the first time. Unfortunately, we didn't get to stay as long as we would have wanted because we knew the ship was two taxi rides and a ferry away and the last thing we wanted to do was miss the ship on the very first day. We did make it back though and were rewarded with our very first towel animal. We ended the night with formal night on the ship.


