I ♥ Faces...Come Sail Away!

This time around over at I ♥ Faces, they're taking a week off from their usual contests and asking interested participants to share pictures of one of their family vacations and tell all about it. Well, count me in...sounds like FUN to me!

Today, I'm sharing pictures from our family cruise that we went on last summer aboard Royal Caribbean's Freedom of the Seas. To say that we had an unforgettable week is an understatement!

Here's the Freedom of the Seas in all her glory! She holds a total of 3, 634 passengers and is currently the largest passenger ship ever built. One of our first ports of call was San Juan, Puerto Rico. It was raining lightly when we disembarked, but we still wanted to get out and see some of the sights. Here's some of the brightly colored building we saw as we were walking around town.
We made our way to El Morro, which is a 16th century fortress that was designed to protect San Juan from seaborne invaders/enemies. In the early 1980's, the United Nations declared it a World Heritage Site and it gets over 2 million visitors per year. Right before we took this picture, there was a huge downpour and we had to seek shelter in one of the passageways. It was a very interesting tour. The walls were unbelievably massive!This is a cemetary on the other side of El Morro, looking out into the ocean.
Here's the girls posing in front of the ship prior to boarding after our day of sightseeing.These next pictures were made on our first formal night at dinner. The food would put Paula Deen, Bobby Flay, and Rachel Ray to shame! Take my word for it, it was to die for!

Here's Brittany...
And Abby...
Just us girls...
Chris and Abby giving us their "introspective" model poses...
Another day, we went to St. Maarten, Virgin Islands. The island was much busier and more crowded than what we had anticipated. Still beautiful, nonetheless.
The girls walking along Maho Beach...it's the famous beach where you can what 747's come in for a landing just yards about your head. The only airplane we saw while we were there was a little prop plane.This is an actual picture I found on the Internet, just to give you an idea of how close they get to you. I bet that's a pretty scary thing to experience. Can you imagine how loud it must get?Our final port of call was St. Thomas, Virgin Islands. It was absolutely gorgeous and so clean! As we were docking, we began getting "attacked" by a bunch of hungry seagulls. Chris and the girls would hold out food for them from our balconey and they'd dive in and snatch it right out of their hands! I wasn't quite brave enough to try it myself...they were very aggressive! Doesn't this look like a scene straight out of the movie "The Birds"?Here's some of the pastel colored buildings that lined the mountainside. We went on a catamaran snorkeling tour in St. Thomas and the water was so clear! We saw all sorts of tropical fish. Here we are heading back to the ship after a fun day on the water.
Every night, we'd come back to our room to find another "towel creature" left behind by our room steward. It was something different every time. It was the highlight of the day for the girls! So, as you can see, we had a wonderful time on our cruise! We were a bit depressed when we got home and there were no 5-course meals, our rooms didn't get made up by someone else, and we didn't find our beds turned down each night with a chocolate left behind on our pillows. We were spoiled rotten...and we loved every second of it!

“The great difference between voyages rests not with ships, but with the people you meet on them."~Amelia E. Barr