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Deb and I booked our cruise a while back, which is somewhat uncharacteristic of our typical seat-of-the-pants travel planning, so we had both been looking forward to it for a while now. But the short story is: we loved it!

We spent 5 nights on the Empress of the Seas traveling from Ft. Lauderdale to Key West to Grand Cayman before returning back to Ft. Lauderdale. We took a couple of shots of the Empress, which always seemed gi-normous and quite nice—even after we found out it was the smallest and the oldest ship in the Royal Caribbean fleet.

The first thing we did when we got on the boat was to head straight for our (1) stateroom (sounds so fancy) (though as you can see below it was not so terribly fancy) (I felt a bit like steerage class and looked to see how they would lock us in if the boat struck an iceberg). It was if they were reading my mind, though—they had a mandatory safety drill immediately prior to setting sail the first afternoon. (2) Deb and (3) I book looked pretty suave in our (state-of-the-art, I might add) lifejackets.

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Food was a huge (!!!) part of the cruise. I have to admit, though, that there weren’t as many buffets as I thought there would be; this is not to say there wasn’t lots of food and that we didn’t stuff ourselves silly, but it wasn’t quite what I was picturing. We really ate at two different places—the more fomal Carmen Dining Room (where we had all of our dinners and several lunches) and the casual (4) Windjammer Cafe on the pool deck (which did have some buffets, but our eating habits didn’t always coincide with the buffets having the widest selection of foods—but there was always lots of fruit to keep me happy). At dinner we were seated at a table with 3 other couples, all of whom were great. Ironically (though perhaps not surprisingly), there was a OB/GYN doctor sitting at our table who was ecstatic to have a pregnant woman at her table (”I can’t get away from work no matter where I go!”). We also had a teacher and two chefs. It was a cool table, and I liked the continuity of eating with the same people each evening.

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One of the evenings (mornings, actually, since it started at midnight) the kitchen crew hosted the Gala Buffet. This was an interesting spectacle (and I feel comfortable calling it that since the buffet was open from 11:30p-12:00a for photographing only before it opened for an hour for folks to actually eat). In any event, the staff had spent something like 300 man hours preparing the “gala” spread which included everything from chocolate dipped strawberries to bread baked into specific shapes to (5) monkeys made out of citrus fruit to floral arrangements made out of cut radishes to (6) watermelon aquarium scenes to (7) a rock band made out of lemons and chicken (with a carrot/cucumber guitar).

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We had four full days on the boat. Two of the days were spent in port, one at Key West and one at Grand Cayman. We spent the other two days, the “At Sea” days, just relaxing. It was wonderful. The (8) pool was shockingly small, and really one of the only disappointments of the cruise from my perspective, but it did have plenty of deck space on which to enjoy the sun and a bar serving delicious (virgin) Strawberry Daquiris. We spent part of the time playing (9) blackjack with our friends (and tablemates) (she’s the doctor) Holly and Paul—we even entered a blackjack tournament and did well enough to both be on the (10) leaderboard at the same time! Deb and I even took some time out one not-so-busy afternoon to play a game we brought from home, (11) Skip-bo!

The cruise also had some shows and other entertainment opportunities. We watched a cheesy Broadway-wanna-be show which was pretty enjoyable. The cruise director (a real position, not just one in the Love Boat television show) hosted a very funny rip-off of the Newlywed Game with three couples who were on the cruise. We also attended an art auction at which they were selling some relatively pricey works (a Rembrandt in the $17k+ range, as I recall). Before you go thinking we’re getting all snotty on you, please know we went (I went) for the free champagne.

The “towel animals” were one of the fun parts of each evening. When we would get back from dinner, the stateroom attendant had folded some of our clean towels into various animals. My favorite was the elephant, though I think the monkey wins for creativity.

I’ll write about the shore excursions tomorrow…