Ok, Crisis Averted!!

Ok, not sure if anyone is even out there reading this (except the one I talked with about it....), but I thought I would let you know that things were MUCH better than I expected. THANK GOD.

I know that today was the honeymoon period and the rest/best/worst is yet to come. But things today were really promising!! I am so happy for that, and I think that if today went so well then I know that the rest of the days are going to be bearable and happy ones!

Now, if you'll excuse me, I will be crashing very very hard tonight!!! :-)

Feeling Extremely Overwhelmed and Petrified

I am taking a short break from blogging about the cruise (just for this time...). The reason why is that I need to get something off of my chest. I am terrified. I start school tomorrow, and for the first time in my four and a half years, I am so scared. Don't get me wrong, I am always a little jittery and nervous. But this year I am so downright scared I am making myself sick. I can't quite decide what it is that is different about this year.

Kids? Curriculum changes? Not being quite ready? Not ready to come back? Parents? Teacher changes? Establishing routines? New challenges with kids? Behavior issues? Medical issues? Home? Family? Friends? Car? Animals? Future? January student teacher?

I am sure it is a combination of everyone one of these things, let's be real. But my thing is that ALL of these things happen every year pretty much. So, why am I so scared about this year? I don't know....I wish I could pinpoint it, so I could try to fix it.....

Sigh. For now I guess I'll just hope that tomorrow goes well and do my best to put my fears on the backburner. Going to hope for sleep tonight.....

Good luck to all my fellow teachers. I hope tomorrow goes well for you all! And may you all have the confidence and excitement that I feel I am lacking at the moment!

Hello Dolly--Day 2

Our first "Fun Day at Sea" started innocently enough. D and I woke up and went up to the Lido Deck to eat breakfast around 10. After we ate, we went directly to the pool. It was pretty hard to find a spot to sit, everyone had the same idea we did, to get in some sun!! Here are some shots of the calm before the storm:

Pretty soon, there was a little storm on the horizon. I took a picture of it thinking, "Well, we've never had it rain on us on the ocean, it'll be a first." Man, I had no idea!!

After the above rain shower hit, they moved the sky pool's roof, so that people could lay by the pool, in spite of the rain. This is a shot of the roof as it moved.

We decided to head toward our cabin, even though we only had about 30 minutes by the pool. However, by the time we made it around to heading back in, the skies had cleared. Everyone else had left, so we claimed another couple of chairs and soaked up about 20 minutes more of the sun. Hehe, while we were sitting there, I had Donia pose in front of me. What she didn't know (until later) was that I had her stop right where the fantail would look like it was coming out of her head.....me, I know I'm evil sometimes!! :-)Before long, our new spot was also dampened by another rainstorm. We decided to call it quits on the laying out idea.
Here are some shots of the storm, as it continued that afternoon. Pretty soon, we began to hear a buzz that we were actually going through Tropical Storm Dolly. This was really a shock to us, because on Embarkation Day, the captain made an annoucement that we would NOT be affected by the then tropical depression in the Gulf. In fact, he told us that we would be going completely away from it, staying 250 miles away! Yay, we were in the clear, no worries.

So that is why I didn't believe it when I heard that we were going through a tropical storm, surely it was just a little rainstorm, right? WRONG! I went down to the internet cafe and checked the weather.....Our little rainstorm was actually Tropical Storm Dolly. We went actually pretty close to the eye from what I could figure....crazy! I think that the captain was trying to go around it, and it blew up so fast and filled the entire gulf. That made it very hard for him to "go around it." Also, with the intensity that it blew up, it was pretty shocking to learn that even though it was actually a TS, it was only 4 miles an hour away from being a hurricane. And in fact it did become a hurricane just a few hours after we went through it. So....we pretty much went through a hurricane.....crazy crazy crazy!!!


Poor Donia didn't do well with the storm. I think she was actually a little sick before we came, but the rocking of the boat during the storm made it worse for her. She actually napped that afternoon while I went to lunch with the 'rents. I brought her lunch in bed, but she was puny for most of the rest of the afternoon.


She did get up for the newlywed game in the main lounge. Here we are, just enjoying some time inside.....with Dolly raging outside.

The video below was a shot of the ocean outside our balcony during the storm. I wish I had a video to show the way the ocean is when there's not a storm raging, it's really quite calm most of the time.

Not long before dinner the skies starting clearing a little, we were hoping that it was the beginning of the end of the storm. It was actually just a little lull. It started back up pretty soon, and lasted well into the middle of the night.

The motion in the ocean didn't keep us from dinner of course!!! Here we are eating, it's what we do best!!

Got back to our second towel animal, and thank goodness Donia took some motion sick pills, so she was feeling much better!!

That's it for now, next time will be our second "Fun Day at Sea."

Embarkation Day-Finally Done!!

Ok, I know that a lot of people have been asking me about when Embarkation day was going to be continued.....Sorry, I know it's been a while. School has really been consuming my waking time and when I am at home, I'm just too tired to post. It's not that I don't have the energy to tell the stories, it just takes me FOREVER to get through the pictures to choose a good representation of our time. We just took so dang many!!

Anyway, here we go with Embarkation day. These are just a few snapshots of our first day on board. So, here ya go!!

In the picture below, Donia is on our balcony, and I was on my parents' balcony taking her picture. We were all supposed to have rooms in a row, but it just didn't work out that way, which was a bummer. But we weren't too far from eachother, just about 6 rooms between my parents and I, and then 6 between my parents and Christie, Jeff and Chels.

We actually unpacked all of our clothes this time. Since we were going to be in the room for 7 days this time, we decided that would be best. We were actually impressed with ourselves because we neatly unpacked everything and our room was REALLY clean and tidy. My mom was shocked! :-) The first cruise we just lived out of our suitcases but that made for a really messy room. Anyway, this brings me to the following picture. D and I decided to just put all our shoes together, since we often wear eachother's shoes. As we were unpacking it was getting pretty clear that we had brought quite a few pairs.....in fact I think we counted at least 26. Hehe, I know it's pathetic. The really sad thing is that this is a VERY small sampling of how many shoes we both actually have. So, here is the shot of most of our shoes (obviously almost only flipflops!) in the drawer we kept them in.

A shot of the elevators in the atrium area, can you believe this is in a SHIP on the OCEAN????

Being goofy in the cabin:

This map is on the wall near some of the bars. It is pretty cool because it shows where the ship is in relation to our whole intinerary. We looked at it each day!

Hehehehehe:

I have some weird thing about taking pictures of my feet. Here's the first of many that I took of my piggies.....

Chillaxin' on the balcony:

Checking out our first sunset:
I thought this was pretty cool. The ship and the sun were both in just the right spot for us to get shots of our shadows on our balcony wall:

After the sun went down we went to dinner in the dining room. We met our FREAKING AWESOME waiters Johnathan and Joel. They took such fabulous care of us. I will talk more about them later when I show some pictures. Here are a few shots of our first dinner:

Ok, this last picture does need a bit of explanation. On our first cruise there was one guy on staff who I had a super crush on. He was working on the Fantasy back then as one of social hosts. The social hosts are in charge of having tons of fun onboard. They lead pub crawls, games, contests, etc. Anyway, they called him Papa Smurf. At one point he had blue hair even. I was so in love with him!! He was hilarious, very cute and was always around the ship where we would see him having fun. I went so far as to take a picture OF HIS PICTURE on the wall....lame I know! I never really got close enough to get a good real picture of him.

So, you're probably asking yourself, why is she telling us about Papa Smurf when he was on her first cruise? Well, I'm about to tell ya!! We were at dinner on the first night, when the Matre 'D introduced the assistant cruise director Henny. I was eating and halfway listening really. But then I heard his voice.....it was PAPA SMURF!!!!!!! He has been promoted to Asst Cruise Director and is now on the Conquest! Oh, and he goes by Henny now-his real name. I guess the promotion made him want to grow up a little and drop the cartoon nickname. I was so so so so so excited. I think all the people at my table thought I was nutso!! So, I ran up to take his picture, I didn't even care that people were looking at me funny (including Papa Smurf). But it was pretty dark in the dining room, so the pictures didn't really turn out very well.

Then, as we walked out of the Welcome Aboard Show later that night, Christie said, "Look, it's Papa Smurf!!!!!" I RAN, and I mean RAN up to him and said, "Can I PLEASE have a picture with you??" I then went on to tell him that I had seen him on the Fantasy and we talked for a few seconds about that and he was super proud that he was promoted and showed me his new nametag with Asst CD on it. Ok, so THAT is the super long story behind the following picture. And he is making a pretty funny face in this picture, but it doesn't hold a candle to all the rest of the funny faces that he usually makes. He is the king of really weird faces!
Pretty soon, it was time to head back to the room, and our first towel animals were waiting for us. Awww, she had a baby!!
That's it for now!! Next time will be Day 2 and Tropical Storm Dolly!!!

Embarkation!! (Part 1)

Ok, Embarkation Day is here!! We got up in the morning on Sunday and got all of our things packed back up and ready to hit the road. We called a cab (van) to take us to the port. It was really ridiculous how much luggage we all had. There were seven of us, but I swear we had enough luggage for about 10 people at least!



We also were amused to see that we started our day with quite a character. Pinky was our taxi driver this morning. She was like nothing I have ever seen really. She was quite a character, very opinionated about many things, and not afraid to speak her mind. She was too funny. Jeff said one of the funniest things that day, right to Pinky, in fact I wrote it down because I felt like it was one of the funniest things. Probably to those who weren't there, it won't be too funny, but I guess you had to just be there to see Pinky; and Jeff's reaction to her. Jeff was just so amused and he said, "Pinky, you got it goin' on!" But when you read this, you have to read it with Jeff's southern accent. Anyway, we never really got a very good shot of Pinky, but I'll try to show what we have.

(A side view.....)

After we got to the port and gave our bags to the porters, we got through check-in pretty fast actually. This was the first time we were just little peons....the other two times we had a suite booked, so we got VIP boarding. I was pretty nervous that boarding in Galveston without VIP would be hellacious, but it wasn't too bad, I think it was because we were there pretty darn early. We were actually among the first passengers onboard.

After we boarded we wandered around the ship and had our first meal on the Lido deck. It was fun to explore this ship, because it is HUGE!!! You would think I wouldn't have been so in-awe of the Conquest because I have cruised twice before, but I was totally shocked by how majestic that ship is!! Here are some shots of us wandering the ship. Some need no explanation, others do.

Donia's first attempt at posing on the piano bar. I just happened to catch her in mid-fall. Too funny!!!

That's better!!!

Thirsty Donia???

I have so many more pictures, so I am going to drag the embarkation day and our first evening at sea out. I will finish this up on the next post. For now, you've probably read enough for now, eh? Until the next post......