I Came, I Saw, I Cruised

My first cruise (six nights aboard Royal Caribbean's Oasis of the Seas in November) was a big success. Five of us (Danielle and Ida from Book Club, plus Ida's boyfriend Chris and Danielle's friend Steven) cruised to Coco Cay in the Bahamas, Falmouth in Jamaica, and Labadee in Haiti. 

A couple of facts about my cruise:

• The ship is nearly 5 times larger than the Titanic
• It carried 6,000 passengers and 2,000 crew

The thing I loved most about cruising was that everything was planned for us; we didn't have to figure out how to get anywhere or find things to do because there were always multiple convenient activities available (like trivia and karaoke every night). Highlights included Sherwin and Monisha, our servers at dinner every night, the Harry Potter bar, the water slides, and taking a boat out to a sandbar in Haiti.

Who is cruising with me next time?

Lauderdale by the Sea

Ever since Mum visited Lauderdale by the Sea with her friends several years ago, she has been raving about it. It has a cute little downtown area with tons of restaurants! There's a Boston bar! Dad would love it! So when I booked a cruise out of Fort Lauderdale and Stephanie had meetings in Palm beach the week before, Mum and Dad booked travel to stay with Stephanie at the Breakers in Palm Beach earlier in the week and then a hotel in Lauderdale by the Sea later in the week, where I joined them for a couple of days before my Sunday departure on the cruise. Mum was right– Lauderdale by the Sea is fantastic! I'd go back in a heartbeat.

Running, Cheering, Voting, and Tubbing

The first week of November was a busy one. I ran Falmouth in the Fall with Billy, went to a Bruins game with Luke, voted, and had plumbers come to the house to tell me that the mechanism that opens and closes the tub drain has broken ("If you take a tub every night, it probably just wore down after so much use" said the plumber) and cannot simply be fixed because the entire setup is too old (it's 95 years old). The word "gut" was used and when I laughed that off and said I was hoping to save up for a few more years, the plumber did not laugh and said something that made me think that a few more years was highly inadvisable. In what turned out to be excellent timing, at the end of this week I boarded a plane to Florida to take a vacation!

Halloween in Charlestown

Throughout early fall Stephanie's greatest wish was to host Halloween in Charlestown. The neighborhood puts on a big Halloween celebration with all the brownstones around the monument decorated for trick or treating and she wanted us to be able to experience such a fun event. She was over the moon when this plan was approved and Liamardo/Spiderman and Ouiser/tennis player/avocado came to experience the festivities. Bridget ("Auntie B") also joined us and a great time was had by all (especially by Liam who wasted no time eating a bunch of the candy in his bucket before dinner).