Taylor crew on deck in Mo-Bay, Jamaica

Open seas as Eli shows Ez and Mom around the upper decks

Our international staff from the ship restaurant – Ananias, Angela and Teck – got along great with the kids

Some stuff in our stateroom with reflections of Eli in the loft bed

Hanging out in the portal

And its good for 2 points! Basketball with a view

Cloudscape over the north coast of Jamaica

City street in Mo-Bay

Eli on the banks of the Martha Brae

Our bamboo cruise director, Clayton

Eli and Dad kicking back on the Martha Brae

Chel stylin’ the Jamaica way

Way cool – but its even better in person

Street scene from Cozumel waterfront

Ez taking in the sights from his 2-seater jeep

1500 year old Mayan ruins on Cozumel – lighthouse, solstice predictor and temple

Local inhabitant looking for lunch – not a zoom photo

Clear sky, turquoise water, clean sand, no crowd – there’s a reason people come here

Lots of time for smooching – yeah, that’s what vacation is all about

Always have to end with a sunset

When Chelsea was in grade school, her family took a cruise-ship vacation. A few hours out of New York, engine trouble struck and they spent four days waiting at sea - first for tug boats, then for U.S. customs to re-open so they could disembark. Ever since, she’s talked of trying it again. I’ve largely adopted my parent’s values regarding leisure time: I’d rather choose what I do than be told, discover rather than be shown, and believe that to call something an adventure it needs to be significantly more extreme than anything you’ll find in a tour designed for the average American. So, I’ve generally stayed away from cruises.

At the same time, I try not judge things I haven’t experienced. Aside from a tour of Alaska at age 12 with my Grandparents, I had never been on any commercial trips. So, I agreed with Chelsea to give a cruise a try, but remained silently skeptical that it would be any fun.

Which cruise should we go on? Seems like a reasonable first question, so I stopped by a cruise information booth at the Woodlands Mall. To date, the function of that booth remains a mystery to me. After 3 discussions with 3 different representatives, I had no answers to any of the most fundamental questions: Where do the boats go? When do they leave? How long do they sail? Are there activities for kids? What are the differences between the different lines? “It’s in the brochure, we’ll be happy to book it for you.” The brochure was a picture of a smiling family on a beach with the boat behind - “book your dream vacation today” - little else.

So I turned to the internet. Of course, each cruise line has its own web-site each with some system for searching based on dates and days. Then there are dozens of 3rd party “find-a-cruise” search engines, and even many ports-of-call have their own sites highlighting the cruises that visit their cities. Is it a good cruise because it goes to island X? I still mostly found pictures of smiling families on beaches and no real information to help compare different itineraries, amenities, or companies. My limited patience for the internet was running out quickly when I found www.cruisesinc.com - the first line reads, “To speak with an agent call….” Real people associated with a web page? Unheard of! But, after 15 minutes on the phone with John Gawne, I had all the info I wanted. Here in the age of e-mail, I’m often reminded that human-to-human contact really is better, even if it’s just a phone call. We booked that afternoon to spend 7 days on a 1000 foot long, 12-story tall floating city called the Carnival Conquest headed to Jamaica, Grand Cayman, and Cozumel.

Two months later, we arrived in Galveston on a brisk Sunday morning set to sail. I didn’t know it at the time, but the first 24 hours would provide the worst the voyage had to offer. As a result, it took me a few days to appreciate what we had available to us and figure out how to enjoy it. Once we finally got it, we had a fantastic vacation.

The incoming boat had been delayed 4 hours by fog. 3500 guests from the previous cruise were trying to get luggage into their cars at the same time that 3500 new guests were arriving. Traffic was backed up for miles and the line of people at security was several hours long. To the eyes of the uninitiated, it looked like poorly managed chaos.

Having waited two hours to park, we bailed from the check-in line, walked to a seafood restaurant on a nearby pier and had a leisurely lunch before going back to try again. The crowd and chaos had dissipated but it still took about an hour to clear security, check in, and make our way to our room. We were among the last to get on the boat – missing dinner - nearly 6 hours after arriving at the terminal. I thought, “Oh no, I paid for a week of this?”

Our room smelled bad. We checked the kids to see who had wet their pants but it was coming from under the bed - another “oh no” moment. I tried calling house keeping several times but just got a mechanical buzz on the other end of the line and no answer.

The next morning: it sounded simple - drop your kids in our staffed game room and enjoy a few hours of kid-free leisure on the boat. Okay, sign me up. We arrive to find three locked doors at the end of a hall. 15 minutes later, 1 door is open so we fill out a few forms, get a pager, get a name tag, get a wrist band identifying which emergency exit the kids will be brought to if the ship is sinking. They invite us inside the play room to do the paperwork, but the kids haven’t actually been signed in – they’re just registered. They have to go back out to sign in. Ezra goes in the left door, Eli goes in the right door, but now there are long lines of confused parents at each. Could they make it any more confusing if they tried? We wait in line for 30 minutes to sign in Eli at his door just so he can go back inside the room where we already were.

Then, 24 hours after leaving home, the worst behind us, the vacation began. Our luck turned around and within a day our attitude turned as well. Having successfully dropped the kids off, first business was a mid-morning kid free nap with my wife – another category listed under “unheard of!” Later, Chelsea went off to the spa for a massage while the kids and I sat in hot tubs on deck. Yup, this is kinda-fun. It hadn’t occurred to me before that so many of the guests would be bikini-clad! Admittedly, vistas of sea and sky provided serious competition for my attention. Cloudscapes on the ocean are as dramatic as they can be. Even Montana doesn’t have big sky compared to a perfect 360-degree horizon of sea level.

Later in the afternoon, we hit the hoops with Eli. The gentle rock of the boat and the steady howl of wind on the top deck made hitting the basket challenging, but the novelty of playing ball on a boat didn’t wear off. During the day, there were lots of kids trying to capture one of the two available balls and loft it thought the one small hoop. In fact, it was too many kids to really be fun. The court was open earlier and later in the day, but you had to wait for the sports desk to open to get a loaner ball. So, in Jamaica, we bought our own ball and had the court to ourselves at least twice a day through the rest of the cruise.

Dinner - yet another treat I didn’t appreciate right away. Every meal in the restaurant was fantastic. The food was as good as what I expect from the best restaurants here in the Woodlands. Incredibly prompt and friendly service - everything is included so if you don’t like your entrée just try another. We sat at the same table for each meal – no waiting to be seated, no bill to pay. Just come and go as you please.

That actually seemed to work very well – just come and go as you please. In fact, the cruise company has obviously gone to great extents to ensure that you can just come and go as you please. Everything is taken care of. The boat is a finite self-contained city. You can’t get lost. There are no hazards. There is abundant entertainment with video arcades, athletic equipment and spas, pools, Vegas-style shows, 3 or 4 live bands playing at any time, sun decks, bars, restaurants, cakes, sushi, art galleries, etc… They clean your room and make your bed twice a day. I didn’t figure it out until after the cruise, but all this equals: “Freedom from responsibility!” Hang around in your swim suit and you’ll find something fun to do even if it’s just sipping Pina Coladas and watching the sun set.

I had been a little worried about what type of other passengers we might encounter. Would this be a booze-cruise full of colligate drinkers? Or, are we headed off with the senior citizens to ride busses and look at golf courses? To the contrary, I estimate half of the people were families very much like ours – couples with kids. We were probably on the younger side. The average age of kids was more like ten to fifteen with parents in the early 40’s. Another quarter of the passengers were young couple without kids - either engaged or newly-wed. And the rest were older couples with kids presumably old enough to stay home on their own. Don’t do this cruise if you’re single and looking. Cruises aren’t the cheapest vacation either, so we fit right in with the economic demographic as well. Just about everyone I met was employed full-time as a professional. Minorities were present in about the ratio you would find in upper middle class Houston. There was at least one other Anadarko family and many people from our town.

After 2 days on the boat we landed at our first port-of- call: Montego Bay, Jamaica. More so than the other islands, Jamaica stood out with a distinct local character. Mo-bay is an odd mix of multi-million dollar hill-top mansions fronting on the golf course interspersed with run-down plywood and sheet metal shacks. Tourism has replaced the plantation as the main source of income and everyone has something to sell you. We walked away with 2 bracelets, a necklace, a steel drum, a local painting, a carved gourd, a new shirt, a basketball, and a new hairdo. “Reefer” attempted to appoint himself our tour guide and offered a wide variety of island alternatives, “weed, blow, crack, you name it, mon. I have it for you. Live the island style here on Jamaica.” Even our cab driver admitted, “Ya mon, I smoka three splifs this morning. No problem, mon.” No problem, unless you end up in the un-finished concrete building the local cops use as a prison for errant ship-born tourists. We’d been warned before docking that the ship won’t wait while we raise bail. We passed on the alternatives but still had fun walking around an open-air artisan market.

In the afternoon, we embarked on one of the organized excursions – rafting on the Martha Brae. With about 30 other people, we loaded into buses and drove an hour first along the coast then inland to the river. The blue-green water of the Martha Brae tumbles out of a limestone cave. Stoned Jamaicans poled our two-seater bamboo rafts about 3 miles downstream through jungle and small banana plantations passing Spanish ruins from the 1600’s.

My impression of the excursion was similar to what I had found on board the ship. Yes, I could do this on my own: fly to Jamaica, rent a boat and a car, make my way into the jungle, navigate the river. On the positive side, I wouldn’t have to wear the silly red life jacket. Or, I can do it as this tour. I still see the sights and I enjoy being on the river, but the logistics are all covered. As a compromise, I share it with other boats (though I actually only saw Chelsea’s boat and one other during the entire float). The main difference: personal responsibility. As a tour guest, you can just relax and enjoy. It reminded me a little bit of watching a good movie. You have no burden other than to enjoy the show. The movie itself can still be captivating and thought provoking. The tours are analogous – sit back and watch while the guides escort you from one compelling spot to another. See the best, skip the rest. Okay – now we’re starting to figure out what this vacation thing is all about.

Grand Cayman, our next port-of-call, had little that inspired me. An Americanized town on a small flat island, it is renowned for clear water and a small sandbar swarming with stingrays. The day we arrived, there were six cruise ships in the harbor dumping roughly 21,000 tourists. We opted to pass on the single most popular tourist destination and instead spent the day just playing in the sun on a somewhat crowded coral sand beach. We snorkeled, but the reef was pretty thoroughly trampled. Eli still had great time with his first view into the ocean and got to see a lobster, a puffer-fish, a cool silver needle-nose fish, and many smaller colorful fish, but it paled in comparison to what I’ve seen in other places (like two years ago in Belize or Pulau Seribu in Indonesia). If we go back to Grand Cayman, it will be several years from now when Ezra is old enough to Scuba-dive so we can explore the wall where the south side of the island drops over 25,000 feet into one of the deepest trenches in the Caribbean.

Our third and final stop was on the Mexican Riviera at Cozumel. This was my fifth trip to Mexico and I’ve never been disappointed. We again opted for a guided excursion, this time boarding two-seater Jeeps and heading off into Punta Sur National Park to see Mayan ruins, crocodiles, more snorkeling on a perfect private beach, and a trip up a lighthouse. Chelsea saw a sea turtle in the wild, and we picked up some sharks-tooth necklaces that remain the boys’ favorite souvenirs. After the excursion, we hung out in Cozumel for a while eventually ending up in a little shop that gave out free samples of tequila. After 6 or 7 samples, we conceded defeat and just bought two bottles.

By the last day of the trip, the kids were holding hands on deck. Chelsea and I spent as much time smooching as anything else. We we’re together as a family all day long, rested and happy and relaxed.

I’ve had to create a new category in my mental catalog of vacation types. There are activity vacations like skiing, climbing, windsurfing. There are exploration vacations like visiting a new park or museum, or exploring a new country. And, now, there are responsibility free relaxation vacations, like a cruise. While it won’t become my exclusive form of vacation, I’m already looking forward to our next….

Bon Voyage,

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