This spring break I went on a cruise with my family! I’m going to talk about my adventures.
It was a 7-day cruise leaving from Galveston, TX. We were going to 3 ports, two in Mexico and one in Honduras. We had to get up at 3 AM to make the one-day drive!
Luckily I had a ton of work that night, so I just worked through the night and slept in the car.
I don’t know about you, but I’m really not a fan of road trips. The constant bumpy movements, music that’s either too loud or just loud enough to be annoying, and the heat from the sun creates a pretty bad travel environment, especially in a super limited space like the car backseat.
My agenda items for the road trip: Survive without getting super headachey, read a couple of books, and recover my sleep.
We arrived in Houston at 9:48 pm, 12 minutes before the restaurant where our dinner was waiting for us. We got a couple of pounds of seafood boil, which was super tasty after the extremely long road trip. Unfortunately, I have no pictures!
The next morning we drove 2 hours to Galveston and boarded our cruise. I expected the security process to be long and tedious, but it took about an hour and then we were on the ship! Since we dropped off our luggage we made our way to one of the three dining rooms available at the time and had some really good shrimp and beef tenderloin (picture below).
After lunch, we went to check out the ship! Somehow instead of exploring the main exciting areas of the boat, like the buffet or the pools, we went to the very top and got locked out (since staff didn’t think people would go right to deck 19), and had to get let back in by a staff member.
For the first few days of the cruise, when we were at sea, my days looked a lot like this:
I totally didn’t finish my voices novel in 2 days……
While I’m super carsick, boats are surprisingly not bad at all, 90% of the time it felt like we were on land. Which I guess is lucky for me – most of my family was hit pretty hard with seasickness.
These days at sea I also told myself I would do the onboard activities – so between ping pong tournaments, culinary demonstrations, and origami classes, I got to meet a lot of shipmates.
Do you know how most cruise ships have stores you can shop at? I never thought I’d spend my time in any of these – but low and behold I spent almost as much time in the jewelry store as I did the buffet.
There’s a good reason, however! They were giving out these charms – most were related to our actual cruise (a ship wheel with our cruise line’s logo, the ports we visited).
As a joke, I told my family that we should collect all 6-7 charms that were spaced out over the cruise… everyone picked up on it and it became our daily tradition for a week to go collect our charm things.
Once we got to the ports the cruise was super fun! Not only did we have the same great cruise amenities, but there was also an entire port to explore (not to mention the ship was completely still – for some reason the restaurants would be super rocky even though the rest of the ship was good.
POV my dad in Cozumel (or was it Costa Maya? One of the two).
Since my sister was taking this week off from school (even though she still had classes) we only visited each port for a couple of hours, especially since there really wasn’t that much to do besides buy super touristy stuff or lie on the beach.
After the 3 sea days, we had three port days, each in a new destination. Our schedule every day would pretty much be waking up at 7, getting breakfast then start exploring the port at 8. At about 10 we’d either 1) Exhaust what each destination had or 2) Get really hot with the sun beating down. We’d return to the ship at about 11 and have a good 4 hours with all the cruise amenities to ourselves. That was super nice!
Overall I really enjoyed my cruise! Was a great way to refresh after January, Feb, and March. I would definitely make it a spring break tradition – it’s like a normal vacation except you don’t have to worry about transportation, food, hotels, entertainment, and a bunch of other great things.
-Max
3 thoughts on “Cruise! ”
Hi Max. I saw a lot of travel blogs this cycle and I really liked yours because you basically did the exact same thing that I do on vacations: try to explore and give up to go back to my room and sleep. However, I found a lot of things to be relatable beyond that. I must say, the 3AM to 10PM drive sounds rough. Personally, I don’t get too carsick unless I’m reading in a car, in then which I feel like I want to stab myself with a pencil. Also, I must say, eating food is always my favorite part of any vacation, and it seems like you got a great fill of awesome food so big W to you! As for seasickness, I’m a lot like you, I love boats and I don’t really get sea sick, but I also haven’t stayed on a boat for like a week straight so maybe I need to check that out. The little charm collecting thing you did was pretty cool. I’m really bad at getting souvenirs and whatnot to remember trips by, so having those charms will definitely be nostalgic in the future. Overall, great blog and I can’t wait to see the next!
axzhang1
Wassup Max! I remember you telling me about your cruise so I’m looking forward to reading in detail how it went. I’ve never been on a cruise but I’d like to someday. All I did this spring break was watch John Wick at the cinema with friends. Speaking of which, you should read my blog post about it. I’m not a fan of road trips either, not that I travel a lot, but when I did as a kid I didn’t have a phone so it was really boring. Oh I completely forgot about the sun, the sunlight was very annoying too. I’m not the biggest fan of seafood but I wouldn’t mind eating it once in a while. Thankfully the security process isn’t like the airport. I’ve heard that cruise food is pretty good. I feel like looking at the sea would get boring for me. Good job for finishing your voices novel. That reminds me to finish mine. I only get motion sickness when I read in the vehicle and I thought boats would be worse but it wasn’t for you. Are you good at table tennis? We should play someday. Of course you watched the culinary demonstrations.
alu1
Hey Max. I tell myself that I like road trips, excited for the empty time to listen to music and gaze out the window. But at some point that empty time becomes too long, especially when traveling as far as Texas, so I’m glad that you were able to use the time to be productive during your travels. I’ve never been on a cruise, but I used to imagine that, despite the ship being packed with activities, I would quickly run out of things to do, finding that certain attractions or stores could only entertain me so much. But clearly I’m wrong, seeing as your family spent a lot of time on the ship even on port days, with new activities like ping pong or origami every day. I guess the activities are appealing because they’re familiar things that everyone can do, but things you don’t get the opportunity to do often. I’m impressed that you were able to make unique activities for yourselves, like exploring every level of the ship (even though you got stuck) or searching for the charms each day. It’s amazing that you got to stop in Mexico and Honduras, and I hope you were able to eat a lot of good foods outside of the ship as well. Overall, I loved seeing all the ways that you made the most of your trip!
kkelliher