We've been waiting for a half way decent snow. The first day of March brought it to us! Blacksburg got about 7 inches of snow! We haven't had snow like this in a while. Thankfully the bulk of the storm waited to hit until all of us at Smith Mountain Lake for the TBS retreat were able to get back to Blacksburg! Driving through those mountains in a bad snow storm is not good. It was snowing but it wasn't sticking yet. At about the time it had just started sticking I did go over to Kevin's house and it was slippery and scary to drive up there! By the time we were hungry and went out again, they had plowed all the roads and driving was a lot better. However, by the time I left Kevin's house for home around 10, it had started to do this weird snow sleet sort of thing and the roads were all covered again. Scary! It took me three times as long to get home than usual. I made it home, and I saw lightning?! Woah!? Apparently the winds and stuff were so crazy that it was creating snow thunder.

I took some pictures around my house this morning!

This is the view from my house:

My backyard:

And on our deck, you can see how much it snowed on our table:

Hopefully I'll get some more pictures later!

~Taylor~

Excitement! We're checked in online and thinking about packing. Tomorrow we leave! We're going to drive down to just outside of St. Augustine. Over 9 hours of driving, but we have plenty of entertainment lined up for ourselves, and Kevin loves to drive. Hopefully we don't kill each other by the end of this trip! While we're not use to spending day after day 24/7 together, we've done pretty well on previous trips. So this should be a BLAST!

This is what the cruise plans look like:

In Nassau we're taking an excursion to Blackbeard's Cay!

"Enjoy a scenic, 20-minute boat ride through Nassau Harbor to the private island of Blackbeard's Cay. Once you arrive on the island, enjoy pristine Bahamian beaches with crystal clear turquoise waters, swaying palm trees, island music, and excellent views over the water to Nassau's famous Cable Beach. A beach chair and welcome drink are included. Other watersports are available through independent vendors, as are food and beverages. A wonderful experience for the entire family."

We should also have time to walk around Nassau and see the area before we leave for Blacksbeard's Cay.

In Coco Cay we've decided to hang out on the beach and enjoy the island. Coco Cay is Royal Caribbean's private island. So we may be the only ship there. They also have a little lane of vendors to sell us unexpecting tourists something useless we don't need. The best part is since it is Royal Caribbean's island, we get free lunch while we're there! Awesome! :)

Our final stop in Key West we will be exploring the shops and sites of the most southern point in the continental US! It'd be kind of cool to walk down to the actual southern most point, but it's quite a walk from where the ship drops us off. There are some definite shops that I want to take Kevin to. Like the store where they sell wine, but none of it is made out of actual grapes. When I was there in December, for a Christmas present, I got Brittany a bottle of wine made with oranges fermented with chocolate. It tasted like one of those chocolate oranges that you have to hit on the table to break open into little orange slices. I think my parents tried some raspberry wine and banana wine. The sad part is when you get on the ship, they take the alcohol away from you because they only want you buying/drinking wine from them, and then they give it back to you on the last night on the ship. Which the day in Key West is our last day/night on the ship, so I don't know why they'd take it away from us! Also, every time we go to Key West, we always go to the Key West Lime Shoppe! I especially want Kevin to go there, because his beloved Tom Green has been there, and there are pictures of him all over the store. My parents love their stuff there, but I'm not a fan of Key Lime. A great place to get gifts though!

I can't wait to share the cruise experience when I get back! I'll definitely try to post something before Spring Break is over and I am crazy busy again!

~Taylor~

There are many moments from the cruise that I want to share, so I hope to create many blog entries from the trip rather than throwing them all in one blog entry and no one wants to read anything because it is so long!

So where do I start?

The beginning!

I screwed up. I'm not sure how, but I did. I got all the directions and addresses together for Kevin and had him print out a copy of the map quest directions to act as a back up to his GPS. Somewhere along the line, I saw that we were leaving from Ft. Lauderdale. Which was odd, because where we were leaving from said "Miami." But the two cities have always seemed synonymous with each other. So we type the office address of the area into the GPS, because once we got to Port Everglades in Ft. Lauderdale we would be told where to go. Once in Ft. Lauderdale, the GPS was taking us all over the place, including to a dead end. We finally get to a check point, which my dad said would happen, and the guy gives us a hang tag and tells us to go to Terminal 18. We go, and there is a pretty Royal Caribbean ship. I'm so excited we're finally there after all of the driving! We weren't sure where to park, so we pulled into the area where you unload all of the luggage and there is a guy there to help you. My dad had told me that you should tip them $2 per piece of luggage. We had three, so I tipped the guy $6. He then was going to give us the tags that told the luggage guys where to take our stuff to our room. He asked me my room number, and I told him 4036. He hesitated, and asked if I was sure. Yes, 4036, it is right here on my Sea Pass. What ship are you on? Majesty of the Seas. Oh, this is Independence of the Seas. (It actually was the Navigator of the Seas) Oh crap. Where is Majesty of the Seas. He told us it was at Terminal 2. He told us how to get to Terminal 2 and kept my tip...oh well. We get down there, and there is no ship. Um... Kevin tells me to call the Royal Caribbean people. Luckily, Kevin has a handy dandy iPhone that you can do anything on. I look up a number, and just guess at who to call. I gave the guy our registration number, and tell him our predicament. We're at Port Everglades, and we can't find Majesty of the Seas, what Port Terminal is it at? He tells us, first of all, it's in the Port of Miami, not Port Everglades. Oh crap. He gives me an address and directions, so we type it into the GPS and head the 20 miles south to Miami. Thank goodness it was so close!

Well, we get to Miami, but the GPS is giving conflicting information to our directions. It takes us across a bridge where we can see our ship, but we couldn't get over to the ship. Another U-Turn! We finally get to the right street, and we see where we need to go, but how do we get there? I told Kevin to go on a road that looked right, but it took us away from the Port. Oops... Luckily there was a sign that we could follow that took us back to the Port. So U-Turn... Kevin told me to stop saying stuff, and he'll figure it out himself. Which I thought was a good idea! We finally got to our terminal, unloaded the luggage, tipped another guy, but we were at the right ship, so oh well, he even told us where to park. We get all situated and went through the check-in process, and got on the ship. Thank goodness!

After the traffic in both cities we were in and Kevin getting super frustrated, and then I'm sitting there freaking out about the mistake I made, it's amazing we made it through everything. Kevin just kept talking me down, which I'm sure helped a lot. In the end, once I was on the ship, I was totally fine, and we were able to eat and be merry! :)

~Taylor~

As usual, besides eating, the first thing we did on the ship was the Muster Drill. My favorite part of the cruise! Except not really. We got shoved with a bunch of other people into a small area on the deck and that is where we are suppose to go if there is ever any emergency. Right. Like people are going to actually go to their muster station?! Kevin and I stood nicely, as we were told how to put the life vest on, etc. etc.

After the muster drill we put our life vests back in the room and headed out to the deck to watch the ship leave the port before dinner. We ended up being on the 7th deck right in the center of the front of the ship. I thought it was a good spot, but we should have gone higher. It was the best location I've ever had anyway. There were about four or five other ships in front of us, and we were all leaving at the same time. So we had to wait for everyone else to get down the channel before we could. It was a neat site that I had never seen before.

In this picture you can see three ships in a line in front of us. There was also a Carnival ship down the way that had already turned the corner. We stayed on the deck and watched us go down the channel until about 5:30 before we decided we needed to go change for dinner at 6:00. Dinner was of course excellent, and we got to meet all the nice couples we sat with! More about them later. :)

Entertainment that night was a comedian, Hank McGauley:

He was very funny. He did the typical cruise ship jokes, the small rooms, small showers, the scary sucking toilets, etc. He was pretty funny though. The last night he did an adult show, which basically was similar to the first show but with a lot more cussing, and vulgar jokes. It was funny anyway.

After the show, Kevin and I decided to go to sleep. We had had a long drive and were exhausted. However, after deciding to go to sleep, we changed our mind and decided to go explore the ship at night and get a little late night snack! We ended up stumbling on the 70's Disco Party. We watched that for a bit before we headed back for sleep for good.

It was a fun day! :)

~Taylor~

Our first stop was in Nassau, Bahamas. We were planning on going on an excursion at 1:00, so we had all morning to explore downtown Nassau. First, we decided to have breakfast in the dining room, rather than go to the buffet in the Windjammer. I love having breakfast served to me...what can I say? :) We were seated at a four seater, and shortly after we sat down, another couple was seated with us. (in the dining room, they just fill up the tables as they go) We had small talk, and ate our breakfast, however something was seriously bothering me! The husband of the couple kept staring at me. It made me feel so uncomfortable. So after that one dining experience, we ate up at the windjammer for breakfast the rest of the trip. Also in doing that, we were able to sleep in a bit longer! :)

Some friends of mine from Virginia Tech had also gone a cruise. They had gone on a Carnival ship and were coincidentally at Nassau the same day as we were there! We mentioned how it would be cool to see each other, but never made any concrete plans to meet up. When Kevin and I got off the ship and were headed into town, I hear, "TAYLOR!" I turn around and there is Lindsay with her group of Aerospace Engineers. I thought it was so awesome the first thing we did off the ship was run into them! Also, Lindsay took this picture of Kevin and I, and despite my awkward face, I love it!

We chatted for a bit, and then walked around downtown together. I had a coupon for a free pendant necklace from a place called Effy, but the "f"s were facing all weird to make it look fancy. The lady wanted me to buy matching earrings, but I wanted the free thing only. I felt bad for that, but hey, college students live for free things! We continued on, and it didn't take long before we ran into a liquor store. Again, we're college students...we went in. They had a lot of liquor in there! Kevin and I had sampled a type of coffee/cream liquor that came in two different bottles stuck together, and I can't remember what it was called, but it was really good! It was in the store, and I was disappointed the price in there was the same on the ship. They had sampling in the store as well, and Shadie tasted the different tangy liquors they had. I wasn't about to have alcohol, no matter how little the sample size, that early in the morning. After a bit, looking at the maps Shadie and some others found out that the Governor's mansion wasn't too far from where we were. So we walked up to it. It is PINK! Awesome. Naturally we took about 500 pictures there. From there, Kevin and I parted ways from the group. We had the excursion coming up, and wanted to eat lunch on the ship before we left for Blackbeard's Cay.

We got back on the ship and went up to the 11th deck to get some lunch at the windjammer (I think we might have taken a nap first :P). We found some seats overlooking the water. Gorgeous view to have while you're eating! Kevin asked me what time we had to meet up with the people who were taking us to the beach break, I told him the tickets said 12:45. He didn't believe me, after that whole wrong port fiasco. So I got the envelope with the tickets out, except it didn't have the tickets in it, instead it was a note. Oops, had the wrong envelope. The paper inside said that the time had changed for our excursion from 1:00 to 9:00 and that we were to meet on the pier at 8:45. Um...what?! Oops... We hadn't even gotten the envelope until after that anyway. Our room steward had left the envelope on our bed after he cleaned up while we were at breakfast. I mistook the envelope for the one with the tickets in it (which were exactly the same). Luckily, it said that if that time did not work for us, we could just take the tickets back to the Excursions Desk, which eventually I was able to and we got a refund!

Since we had the rest of the afternoon to do whatever we wanted, we decided to hang out on the pool deck with practically no one there! Normally it is filled to the brim with sun tanners, and people playing in the pool, etc. We found two chairs right by the pool and put our stuff on it. Kevin really wanted to get into the pool, it turned out to be freezing, so I did not stay in it very long and instead went and bathed in the sun. (I have nothing to show for all that time I spend in the sun except a sun burn in the middle of my back!) Kevin joined me shortly after and we got some drinks from the bar! EXPENSIVE! While we were hanging out on the pool deck, one of the cruise entertainers got some people together to play "Blongo Ball", or in this area "Hillbilly Golf." She managed to get four people to join in. Most were horrible at it. But this one woman was awesome! She got almost every one of her balls on a string things wrapped around the poles. Her husband came up to us while watching and told us that he had taught her everything she knew. It was funny. :)

That was our time in Nassau. It was a good first day! :)

~Taylor~

Our second night on the ship was formal night. Everyone gets all fancied up and eats dinner. Not much different than any other night, except we just look nicer and there are a million chances to get your picture taken. Above is a picture (excuse Jeremy's head :P) of the duo who went around taking requests and serenading us. Our table couldn't come up with anything, so they starting singing brown eyed girl. A little down the dining room someone requested Free Bird and they played it! Guitar break included. It was pretty awesome. Naturally on a ship full of college students, Free Bird would be requested!

After dinner we ran upstairs to the Chorus Line Theater for the Captain's Welcome Aboard Reception. There we took a picture with the captain. It was very formal. We waited for Amy -- one of the entertainment staff -- to come up, get our names, and then she brought us over to the captain and introduced us. Then we took the picture and went on our way. We never saw any picture from that. Must of forgotten to print them out! After the picture, we got some free champagne! I wasn't a fan of it, but I sipped it anyway. The Captain made a speech and introduced other important members of the staff. He had a cute accent, he is from Norway. It was interesting that most of the other more important members of the staff were also from Norway. He joked about if he was here, who was driving the ship?! That would be the navigator of course! Here is the Captain:

After the reception we decided it was time to change out of our fancy clothes before the show. First we stopped by many of the places taking pictures and got a portrait taken in front of the ship's white baby grand piano. We felt this was the best background to have taken behind us since Kevin loves the piano so much! We did end up shelling out the $20 to have the portrait later on. I think it turned out all right. :)

When we finally got back to our room, we saw our first towel animal! Cruise ships are famous for these things. In December when I went on our Christmas Cruise with my family we actually went to a towel animal making demonstration, which was very interesting. I now have a little pamphlet...somewhere...that explains how to make each animal. I believe the one we had was a dog, and our Steward found Kevin's goggles and used them as the "eyes."

We changed and headed back to the Chorus Line Theater to see the first of the shows put on by the Royal Caribbean singers and dancers. It was a 70s show called Boogie Wonderland. Since we got there on the late side, we got a crappy seat. They need to have better speakers over on the sides, and there were a lot of poles blocking the view of some seats. It was an okay show. I've seen better by Royal Caribbean. Kevin was amazed they could do all that on a moving ship. And remember multiple shows.

Our night was not nearly over yet. There was still a lot to do! There was a mid-night buffet that night, and to entertain us until then, we went to play "Survey Says," which is Royal Caribbean's version of Family Fued. The entertainment staff guy in charge, I forget his name, wanted us to get in groups of six. Kevin and I were a group of two, so we decided we would just watch. A group of four people, however, asked us to join them. So of course we agreed. The staff member told us we'd be playing as many rounds as possible to get everyone that wanted to play a chance to play in a certain amount of time. He asked each group to jump up and cheer and show that they really wanted to play. We didn't get picked for the first round, but we were able to watch and see how they were playing. Apparently Royal Caribbean surveyed 100 passengers on a ship last year and this is where they got all their answers. Our group went up for the second round. We got ridiculous questions! Things like, name a fruit that starts with a "P," Name a childhood character that's name started with "Little." Ack! What?! My P fruit was papyaya, which was there! And my little was Little Mermaid, which was also there. But how many littles are there?! Apparently at least 5. Little Boy Blue. WHO?! Oh, and the other question was to name expensive car makers or something, or favorite car makers...which were all the expensive ones. Our team won a round, and the other team did too, and we ended up losing the last round. We got key chains for playing. *shrugs* okay...It was fun though! I'm glad we played!

It was then time for the mid-night buffet and ice carving demonstration! Oh, and dancing under the stars. We didn't stay long for that because we were super tired after a long day, and there were so many drunk college students there. It was Spring Break...of course there would be a ton of college students, and Kevin and I added to the college student population, but not the crazy get drunk until you puke and pass out population. Anyway, here are pictures from the time we were there! :)

The midnight buffet all set up! Each location had an ice sculpture along with it. Really cool.

They had an ice carving demonstration where he carved a fish and coral into the ice block in less than 15 minutes. I think he did it under 10! Awesome.

This was the dancing under the stars party. It was so jam packed down there that it was really hard to move around!

We went back to our room to sleep, before we slept, we checked our location out on Channel 26! I had never seen this on a cruise before, but they have a channel that shows our position on a map. I took a picture of this instance because I thought it was interesting how we did a loop on our way to Coco Cay. What was with that?!

It was a busy, but fun night! :)

~Taylor~

Coco Cay is a private island that Royal Caribbean owns. So basically, we were the only ship there on the island, unlike in Nassau where there was 4 or 5 ships docked! Since it is so shallow around the island, the ship had to drop anchor away from the island and tender boats took us to the dock to get onto the island. We had from about 8-3:30 to be on the island. Kevin and I took our time in the morning, and I think we got to the island around 10ish.

The first thing we decided to do was go visit the lighthouse on the island. Kevin's mom loves lighthouses, so we thought we'd get some pictures of it. We get there and this is what we see...

Huh? That's a lighthouse? Where is the light? Where is the house? I went up inside it anyway. There was a little spiral staircase that took you a little ways up to a plat form and the bar next to the lighthouse had put a table and chairs up in it. While the lighthouse itself was nothing to look at, the views were pretty awesome from it. I got this picture which shows the main beaching area of Coco Cay...

Very cool. That was taken before the island got super crowded. Naturally the party crowd from last night was probably still passed out at that point.

Kevin and I went to explore the island further. I wanted to stop by the Straw Market and see if there was anything neat. I ended up finding a really neat photo album made out of local plantage. I thought it would be perfect to put in favorite photos from the trip! Kevin wasn't in a shopping mood, so we continued on further when I saw a sign for the Nature Trail. I remembered seeing that on the map and I thought it would be cool to go see all the nature things they had on the island. We found it and walked down it a little ways. It was mainly a lot of trees and shrubbery. We did see little lizards and birds, though.

When we got out of the nature trail we came out to a virtually empty area of the beach. Like our own little private island! There were even two beach chairs next to each other for us to lay down together and get some sun. Kevin decided he wanted to explore in the water -- which was freezing! He went in a little ways, and a women passed by, and ever so cooly stated, "There's a Sting Ray." And sure enough, there was a sting ray. I grabbed my camera and went down into the water as Kevin was slowly backing out of the water. I snapped a few pictures and told Kevin to shuffle in the sand. (I had watched "When Beaches Attack" on the travel channel right before I left, and that is what they said to do when going into the water so sting rays know you're coming and will leave.) That Sting ray wasn't budging! It just sort of shimmed down into the sand. So Kevin splashed some water and he finally went away. It was a little creepy. I'm glad that lady came by or Kevin could have stepped on it or something! He ended up going over to where some other people were and went out to go swim around and try and see anything with his goggles. He came back complaining how it was hard to swim in an area that was only knee deep for quite awhile!

Shortly after it was time for lunch! We headed back to the main area by way of the beach. Before leaving, I turned back and snapped this shot, which I LOVE!

Lunch was a free BBQ at the restaurant on the island. The ship provided it since it was a Royal Caribbean owned island. There was BBQ chicken and ribs, hot dogs and burgers, veggies, fruit, and Mac & Cheese! Sweet! It was really good. While we were eating, all of a sudden I see a little thing run by in the corner of my eye. It was a chicken! (Yeah, not eating my BBQ chicken in front of them...) More and more started to show up racing around for scraps that people dropped. They were cute! Kevin threw a grape on the ground to see if they would eat it, and one just devoured it by pecking it all up and eating it in small pieces, but did all that very quickly!

After we ate, we went around the island some more. Laid in a hammock for a little while and got weird marks all over our backs. I got my hair braided and we went back to the straw market and got a fun frame for Kevin's dad as a thank you for the trip. We ended up putting the picture of us in front of the ship in Nassau in the frame. We went back over by the lighthouse and hung out on the chairs underneath it to just sit there and enjoy the sound of the water and enjoy how gorgeous everything was on the island. Then we decided it was time to get back on the ship and leave the beautiful island. :(

However, there were many things to do on the ship, so we still had a busy afternoon/evening ahead of us!

~Taylor~

After many fun-filled hours on Coco Cay, we got back on the ship. Shortly after they got together guys who were willing to job from a box and try to make the biggest belly flop splash they could! Above is after the contest, they had them all jump in the pool at the same time. Now, that was a big splash! They had each man step up on a box and jump in on their belly. Then everyone around the pool deck would hold up a rating from 0-5, the cruise director would go around saying everyone's numbers and his assistant (it was her birthday!) would "tally the votes" and average them. It was quite hilarious. Then there was Bob. Bob was a larger, elderly man, and everyone cheered for him when he stood up to get into the pool. He then preceded to step in the pool, and slip and fall over. The poor guy. He got up and was fine. So naturally the drunk college students loved him even more. He got up on the box and jumped and made a huge splash! I think almost everyone gave him a 5. He did indeed win. This was him pre-splash:

After the belly flop contest was over, it was nap time again. Need to rest up before dinner and the rest of the evening festivities. We got a surprise at dinner! The waiters all came out and paraded through, then sang for us. I've seen it done on each ship I've been on, but usually the waiters tell us before hand, this time it was truly a surprise. This is them singing:

After dinner, we went back to our room to change. We came across a towel bunny with Kevin's sunglasses on! Kevin said he purposely left out his sunglasses so our room steward could use them. He had broken them at Coco Cay earlier in the day. He likes to lose/break his sunglasses all the time, it wasn't surprising. But he wanted to try and find some new sunglasses, and ended up getting some new ones in Coco Cay and in Key West.

After dinner we went to the comedian show. The comedian was Mike Wilson. He had been on a reality show. He was pretty funny and did some really good impressions. We spotted some of our table mates down on the first floor (we were in the balcony) and decided we would join them after the show for the Love and Marriage game show!

Our whole table ended up sitting together for the Love and Marriage game show. :) This game is based off the old time show the Newly Weds. It is where there are three couples, a couple JUST married, a couple who have been married for around 50 years, and a couple in between. The host would ask the men questions with the ladies out of the room, and then have the ladies try and answer the same questions. And if they were similar answers, they would get a point. Same goes the other way around. It's so hilarious the answers the men think up and the responses the women give to them when the men are wrong. It's great! This time around, the middle couple won!

After the game show, a few of us went up to the Quest which was a few flights up in the ship. We got there and it was PACKED! We had to literally sit on top of each other. The Quest is a game where you get in groups and try and get your number counted by bringing to the center of the floor whatever the host wants you to. It's a type of adult scavenger hunt. For example, one of the items was to bring a picture of the white house. A lot of people would be like...yeah, like I carry a picture of the white house around with me. But in fact you do! Well, some people do, a $20 bill has a picture of the white house on it! So you'd have to think of that, get the $20 bill up to the host in the middle for your group, and shove your group number in his face so he'd call it out and you can get points. It's basically major ciaos! I took some video of one of the rounds, the items to bring up was three belts.

It was so crowded and ridiculous in there, we ended up leaving. I had never seen the Quest be so crowded before! Kevin and I went to Johnny Rockets to get a late night meal. Another couple from our table, Jeremy and Catherine joined us a little later. I could hardly eat my grilled cheese since it was so greasy and it was so late. But, I did get to see the Johnny Rocket waiters dance! Apparently they do that in all the Johnny Rockets.

Then it was time to pass out!

~Taylor~

Our last port of call was Key West, Florida. We had plenty of time to spend at Key West so we took our time in the morning, and gradually made our way off the ship toward the town. We had already decided we definitely wanted to walk down to the southernmost point of the continental US! So Kevin used his trusty iPhone (which he FINALLY got to use again, poor baby had to be without it for an entire two days!) to navigate. We hopped on a road which would take us straight to the marker. Along the way we passed by mile zero of interstate 1! Awesome! I knew it existed on the island, but I didn't know where. We passed by an awesome post office and a huge Kapok Tree that had a sign under it stating that Key West was the end of the rainbow...and route 1. Some of the houses along that road were just gorgeous. I had never been out of the downtown area, except for I did go on one of those train tours the first time I was in Key West, but that was like...5 years ago. We finally got to the Southernmost Point and there were a bunch of people there taking pictures. I clicked a quick shot of the marker before someone else stepped in my shot and didn't feel like waiting around so Kevin and I could get a picture with it. There was more of the island to explore!

We went a block over from the street we went up, and went back toward town on Duval Street. We ran into Dave and Sue on our way back! They were another of the couples we sat with at dinner. We told them where we just were and that it wasn't too far back if they wanted to go, and went on our different ways. They pointed to a art gallery they had just been in that had different pieces of the old Hollywood Sign and they were painted with different stars on them. Really cool. Naturally we went in the gallery to see them, there was some amazing painting in there, and crazy 3D looking images. I forget what it is called, but if you're ever in Key West and see a gallery on a corner, go in! Then we found Irish Kevin's, which every time I came to Key West...like two other times...I took a picture of it for him, and in December I got him a shot glass, so naturally he needed to see it and I wanted a picture of him with it! At first we didn't see it, but on Kevin's GPS it said it was right by us. If it had been a black snake, it would have bit us! (I don't understand that saying...) Anyway, as you can see we got the picture!

I asked Kevin where Ernest Hemingway's house was, I thought we could go by and peer at it without going in. It was, of course, a mile back in the direction we had just come from. Oh well, we have time, lets go back! So we did, and I saw a sign that it was only $12 to go in. That's not bad! (On the ship for the same thing, it was around $50!) We go to pay, and they were having a special for Spring Breakers -- show your Student IDs and you'd get in for $6! Sweet! I was so excited to go in. (Mainly because of the cats, I don't think I've read one of Ernest Hemingway's books, but I might have to now) We get to the house and they are about to have a tour. Awesome.

I highly recommend the tour, you get to learn so much about Ernest, the house, and his wives. I did learn quite a bit! On the tour we got to see where he wrote a lot of his books:

From his porch you could see the lighthouse sticking up above the trees. Our tour guide told us that he bought the house so that after he had been out drinking and forgot where he lived, he could just follow where the lighthouse was, and then he could find his house that way!

One of my favorite stories had to do with a sequence of events due to a pool...

The Hemingways looked into getting a pool, however, because the island is made out of hard coral rock, the pool would have to be carved out and couldn't be blasted out. It would cost a lot of money to do that, and Ernest decided against it. Well, Pauline (his wife) really wanted that pool, and when Ernest went out of town with a women who had been "interviewing" him, Pauline put that pool in. When Ernest got back and saw that pool, and knew how much it cost, he pulled out a penny from his pocket and told her that was their last penny!

She took that penny and stuck it in the concrete. After they got divorced and Ernest Hemingway ran off with that interviewer, she could always say she got his last penny.

This is our tour guide with what seems like a pretty fountain. There is a bar in town called Sloppy Joes, which Ernest loved to go to.
It found out that it was moving locations and asked the owner if he could have the urinal. He took that urinal and put it right next to Pauline's precious pool. She demanded he move it, and he said he would when she moved her pool. So she tried to make it look nice with spanish tile. Then one of the groundsmen put that big spanish vase up there and made it into a fountain, and you'd never know the difference. The cats of the house like to use it as a water bowl, except for Archibald who only will drink from the water fountain.

Speaking of the cats, and Archibald who is the cat in the upper left corner on the master bed:

I enjoyed seeing the cats! They were all so adorable. Only about half of the 45 cats on the property have the six toes. I saw a lot more than above, but those were some of my favorites. It was a hot day, and I'm sure most of them were hiding and sleeping in the shade. There were a couple that let us pet them. Kevin was excited to be touching a cat that was directly a descendant of Snowball, Ernest's original six toed cat.

After the Hemingway House, we went back to town to visit the Key West Lime Shoppe. I wanted to show Kevin how Tom Green had once been there for the Tonight Show, and I have always gone there every time I've been to Key West (four times now), so naturally we had to go. Kevin got some Key West Lime Pie and we sat out by the fishes. He was amazed how big their gold fish were! And I still am, even though I've seen them many times now. Then we went over to the Key West Winery to try some of their unique wines. They have wine that is made out of anything put grapes...grapefruit, oranges, strawberries, bananas,etc. We got some Hurricane wine which was a blend of many different fruits, it is REALLY good. Kevin also got a Key Lime Wine from the Key West Lime Shoppe.

Then we trotted back off to the ship for some lunch, and probably a nap.

~Taylor~

It was so sad that it was our last night on the cruise, but we were definitely going to make the most of it! In the picture above from left to right: Juan -- our assistant waiter; Dave and Sue -- from New Hampshire, they got everyone at the table a round of drink! Which was promised if we didn't make them go up on stage during the Love and Marriage game show; next is just Kevin and I; then there is Mike and Allison -- they're from Michigan and DROVE to Miami, that makes me and Kevin's drive seem like nothing; Derrick and Cristina -- from Orlando, Fl and they were celebrating their two year anniversary, Congrats!; Jeremy and Catherine -- from NOVA, they flew, however, which I think Kevin and I should try out next time! They had been drinking wine all cruise, and the last night they brought the table a bottle of white wine and red wine, so we all ended up with three drinks in front of us!; Jose -- our head waiter who was fantastic and hilarious! The waiters on Royal Caribbean ships are always so awesome! (below is Jose and Juan when they performed for us again on the last night!)

We went back to our room to change and pack (our suitcases needed to be out by our door before midnight) with the plans to meet back up with our table before the farewell show so we could all exchange information and sit together for the show. On our bed was a towel heart. That wasn't an animal! We also realized our steward took his tip envelope, which I had hid because we weren't exactly ready to give it to him yet. He always had seemed to be rummaging through our things. Oh well. We got all packed up, put our stuff out by our door, then headed to the Schooner Bar to meet up with our table mates for one last time. We had such a good time with them and since getting back home we've been emailing each other! We then watched the show, Signed, Sealed, Delivered.

Later that night we also went to the adult show by the first comedian we saw on the first night. We then passed out, we had a long drive ahead of us the next day, and had to get up early to eat breakfast and get ready to leave. It was a great night though!

~Taylor~