We left on
Wednesday morning and drove straight through to Clearwater Beach to stay with our friends Ron and Irmi. On
Thursday we hung out at their pool. Their beach was too windy that day.
Cathy always
wanted to visit Siesta Key, a place her parents frequently visited years ago. Since it was only a little
over 80 miles away, seemed like a good day trip. Wrong! We arrived at Siesta
Key Beach, supposedly the #1 beach in
the USA, almost 4 hours later. Terrible traffic all the way down. To make
matters worse, the parking lot which holds hundreds of cars was overflowing and
there was no place to park. We decided to go to lunch and ended up a very nice
German restaurant that specializes in cakes and sends almost 1000 a week to
places all over the world. Lunch was good and the cakes were delicious. Zach’s favorite was the Carmel Vodka Cake. After lunch,
parking had improved and we spent a
couple of hours on the beach. It has the
nicest, softest sand of any beach we
have ever been on.
Saturday morning, Ron and Irmi dropped us off at the
Tampa cruise ship terminal where we boarded our ship, the Radiance of the Sea. We
followed another ship out of Tampa Bay
and into the Sunset.
Since
Zach was going to have his right
Achilles surgery two days after our return,
this was not going to be a very active cruise. The 1st day was a sea
day. We did play trivia several times a day and came close to winning a number
of times, however this was our 1st cruise without a trivia win. We
did enjoy the shows every evening and dancing after. Even though Zach had to
moderate his movement on the dance floor, we enjoyed it greatly and every night
the band played our special dance song, All of Me, just for us!
Our 1st
port of call was Roatan, Honduras. The vendors
were swarming us in the port, so, we decided to take a private car tour
around the area. The area is very poor and there are not a lot of highlights, but,
our driver took us to all the highlights.
The next day
we were in Belize City, Belize and took
another private tour of the area. Our driver was great. He took us where ever we wanted to go and even took us by
his house too see his granddaughter.
Day 3 we
were in Costa Maya, Mexico. We opted for an all inclusive beach that day and ended
up drinking too many Long Island
Ice Tea’s.
Our last
port of call was Cozumel, Mexico. We had spent a week there some years ago. We
were surprised at how much it had grown
and how many shops were there selling
the same stuff. We tried to go snorkeling. It didn’t work out because they wanted cash payment and
we didn’t have enough.
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Our last day
on the cruise was a sea day and it ended up being the only bad weather day of the cruise.
The next
morning Ron and Irmi picked us up at the terminal. We spent the afternoon at
their pool. Sunday we drove.
This was our
least favorite cruise, in part, due to Zach limited mobility.
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