During the week of Thanksgiving we decided to try something different. We went on cruise!
The story of why this happened actually goes back a few years…
When Alexander entered 7th grade I made a promise to him. I said if he got all A‘s on his report card for his world geography class for the entire year, he would get to choose the destination of our family vacation.
When the school year finished and he had achieved a nice set of A‘s, it was time to make good on a promise. Unfortunately we could not drop what we were doing to simply trample off on some exotic journey. That would have been great, but reality had to play a part.
When Alexander realized that we would not immediately go on his desired vacation, he was a little sad and then set out to take a year to really decide where we should go! Actually he decided pretty quickly on the Bahamas and Jamaica, but we weren’t going to do both. It took a while to figure out that a cruise might be the answer.
But, then we could not find a cruise that would go to both destinations within the same one-week cruise. Bahamas typically shows up in Eastern Caribbean routes, where as Jamaica usually appears on Western Caribbean routes.
Finally, earlier this year, I got a Royal Caribbean cruise catalog, gave it to Alexander and said, “pick one!” Perhaps he could not use it to pick something specific, but at least it would allow him to narrow down the field.
He and his sister poured through the catalog looking reading descriptions until they found some things that sounded good to them. Adventure was in, shopping was out. I’m happy with that choice too.
Then we refined the date to Thanksgiving so that the kids would only have to miss two days of school. Once again we had to adjust the cruise choice to one that was available during that week. Fortunately, once all criteria were applied there was still one option left…
Royal Caribbean - Freedom of the Seas
By July we had settled on the details of our journey aboard Freedom of the Seas. We picked our cabin, made our reservations, and let Royal Caribbean handle the details.
It was an incredible week with a balcony stateroom, snorkeling at three islands, and tons of good food!
Stay tuned for more details and photos coming soon…