BABY BAY BEACH
St Thomas 2020
St Thomas 2020
St Thomas 2020
St Thomas 2020
St Thomas 2020
TRAVEL WITH MITSUGIRLY
mitsugirlys cruise ( and land) adventures
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MITSUGIRLYS DAWN TO BERMUDA NOVEL (or review and pictorial as some may call it)
Day 2: Getting on the ship
FRIDAY MORNING:
I sat our alarm for 7:30am and got dressed and headed straight outside to check the weather. It was still chilly and the weather channel said it would be 57 degrees today. Sigh. Not exactly the "cruising weather" I had hoped for.
While I was outside, I noticed the street traffic lights and noticed they were "unusual" compared to ours. I'm not sure if they're like this in the entire state, but I found them interesting because they flashed either red or green instead of constantly staying on like ours do.
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We headed down to the breakfast room to eat. (Pictures taken the day before and during non-breakfast hours)
It was a pretty decent sized area and they had your normal offerings for most hotels with a free hot breakfast. The food was decent and served it's purpose to keep us tied over until we were on the ship.
After eating breakfast, we went up to pack our luggage and head down to check out. Kendra and family was finishing their breakfast and headed up to get their luggage as well.
I stopped at the front desk to confirm that our shuttle would still be taking us and she pointed outside saying if we wanted to leave early we could and he was out there. It was 9:45am and we were still waiting on Kendra (of course) to come back down and officially "check out". So we passed.
Shortly after that another shuttle pulled up and we thought it was ours. We pulled all of our luggage outside to load and the people that were outside hopped in the shuttle and the driver put their luggage in. I stopped to ask him about the shuttle and to let him know that we had an appointment for 10am. He said "they'll have another one coming back shortly, I'm only going to the airport".
At 10:10am, our shuttle driver arrived back at the hotel and loaded us up. We headed to the cruise port and this was my first sighting of the Dawn:
Our driver let us out and the porter took our luggage. We inquired (just to double check) if it was ok to check our pop luggage and he said yes. Woo hoo...score!
This port itself was not the most appealing place I have to say.
You take an escalator up to get in line to check in. The lines were not too bad at all...that is the lines to check into...and only those lines. ;) After checking in we headed over to do the obligatory pictures.
Then off we headed to find out where our "section" was for our number, which happen to be #16 boarding. YIKES!!! There was not only no place to sit, but hardly any place to stand either. This place was beyond packed...like sardines packed.
We ended up squeezing by everyone and made it over to the window where we leaned up against it while we slowly started slithering our way down the window as time went on like our legs had become jello. Before long, we had made it to the floor where we would remain until they called our boarding number.
They started calling the suites and VIP's at 11:30ish and then the numbers soon followed. After they started calling the numbers, it moved along pretty quickly. The place was still packed though because even more people were coming in and it was still standing room only.
We headed up?....wait, we're not going up! This is weird. The gangway went straight across to the ship. Weird. I'm use to the pathway going up and up and building excitement. Where's my "building excitement" path???
Sakari was getting a free ride from Kendra's bf and loving every minute of it. I yelled at her once to take a picture and she just put her head back for this pose.
I took a quick shot of the ship we were about to call home for the next week as we passed by:
We made it to the ship finally and were welcomed on board. One of the ladies handed Sakari some balloons and she was so excited...too excited for me to get a good picture of her.
We headed upstairs to the pool deck and had to take a few selfies to post for those back home. You know, those at home in the hot 89 degree weather while we are here about to take a cruise in 50 degree weather with our winter coats on and freezing.
The hubby took a picture of us when we first pulled up at the dock and was now posting it online, trying desperately to cut out our coats/clothing so that others back home could not tell it wasn't the perfect warm weather here.
We hung out for awhile, ate a little at the buffet, then headed to our rooms to put our stuff away.
At 3pm we headed to the Stardust theater to check in for our "mustard" drill. Since we had Brayden (my grandson) booked in our room, that meant he was with grandma for this event and grandma was prepared for giving brutal punishment if needed. You see Brayden is not the most "well behaved" kid. He doesn't mind his mother, he gets away with a lot and he does things that are sometimes (well most times) down right embarrassing. You know that saying..."if he was my kid I'd...." yea, that's me all the time. Sometimes it's hard to be around him. I love him to death but...if he was my kid.... sigh. Sakari is such a well behaved child, quiet, polite and respectful. You put the 2 of them together and let's just say she feeds off him and doesn't act as she normally does. We (I) split them everywhere we go just to avoid this. However, I have found that if Kendra isn't around, he normally acts decent for me. This would be no exception and he was fine...even to the point that he was hugging me and leaned over and said "See mawmaw, I can be good if I want to, I told you so" in which I replied "then why aren't you like this all the time?" and his reply is "because I don't want to"....sigh. The drill was so quick and easy and took about 10 minutes and we were on our way to have some FUN!
We headed up to the pool deck getting ready for the sail-away party.
I snapped a few pictures of the port from the ship:
I grabbed my first drink of the cruise (dirty monkey, dirty banana or dirty primate something or other) and was ready to get this party started.
We started our Sailaway party and pushed away from the dock at 4pm. The Norwegian Dawn dancers...
After that...we all joined in and it was time to get funky and wobble. My girls dancing... Slide to the left, slide to the right..."no Sakari, my right not yours". Right foot let's stomp, left foot let's stomp...ok, I'm now convinced it's Kendra that don't know her left from the right.
I was actually out there with them dancing the entire time, but would run up the steps every so often to snap a picture of my girls so don't think this little lady was missing out on all the fun...no way!
We were passing the airport area and planes were flying over us
At one point I went back to grab another drink Kendra's boyfriend had bought for me (Miami Vice this time around) and we must have been right in line with the air strip and a huge plane come flying right over top of us....if any of you have ever been to Maho Beach in St Maarten...THIS is what it was like. By the time I put my drink down, grabbed my camera and got out from under the roof area around the pool deck it was too late. Sniff sniff. I missed the opportunity darn-it. Well, I think I'll need another drink after that and a little more dancing to soften the blow of missing out on the perfect picture opportunity.
The music kept going for what seemed like hours...and so did Sakari. Sakari dancing is like Sakari swimming...you have to literally pull her away from both.
By this time we had all given up and she was still going strong, but she had now moved up to another level and had the floor to herself. Brayden joined in with her for a little while, but he was more interested in climbing the railing there and jumping down. Sigh
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Mommy insisting on her stopping for just 2 seconds to give me a pose
Around 6:30pm we decided it WAS time to pull her away from the dancing and get a bite to eat. We stopped by the buffet to find something to snack on, but I totally forgot about the food porn picture that time around.
We decided to have a look around the ship, take lots of pictures and then head to the gift shop to "browse" at the goodies.
There was a show at 7pm that we decided to head to, which was the Welcome Aboard Variety Show. Now we have never went to the first show because I have always heard that it's basically a small version (sneak peak) of the shows you would be seeing in the week ahead. My logic of thinking is that if it's something that I want to see during the week, why bother with it on the first night and only get a portion of it? But for some reason we decided to go this time. To be honest, I really must have not been too impressed with the show because I don't even recall what it was about and had to look at the dailies just now to see what it said...which reads Jose & Pati singing and the dancers from the production cast...then introduction of the Hotel Senior Management. I know it wasn't anything Sakari was interested in and she was ready to sprint toward the door once it was over. Oh well, now I know I will go back to my normal "not gonna do that show" on the first night. However, there was a familiar voice on stage and this guy looked familier...yep, it was Bobby the cruise director. I know we had him on another ship, but I could not remember which. I would later remember it was on the Getaway last year in May (at least I think so).
When we returned to our room, we had this laying on our table:
I can only assume that this is from NCL and it's what they consider part of your latitudes?
The bad part is...I don't like chocolate. So, Sakari had a piece and I passed the rest out to Kendra and the family when they showed up at our door.
Sakari had been begging to go meet her new friends at the kids club (she absolutely LOVES NCL's kids club) and we were ok with that. We dropped her off at 8:15pm and made a bee-line for the casino.
I only took $20 (each) for us to just "test" the waters and we ended up doubling our money and decided that was good enough for us.
We went around taking pictures (for you guys and this review of course) and then we picked up Sakari around 10:15pm and headed to the buffet for our "dinner" for the evening. I call it our dinner because this is normally the time we eat at home.
I was so hungry by this time that I dug right in despite everything I have taught not only my husband but Sakari about not taking a bite of your food until I have THAT picture for my review...I broke all the rules. So here's what was left of my food after remembering to take the picture. Some Alfredo pasta from the pasta bar, some other noodles and cheese, fries, some type of sandwich, and some yummy pound cake...which I would continue to eat during the rest of the cruise.
Obviously the hubby decided to eat a little healthier than I did with my weird mixture of food.
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After Sakari ate, she discovered some weird looking "cream" with sprinkles and marshmallows in it. We had no idea what it was but she was loving it! I just had to try it and it happened to be my all time favorite yummy whipped cream that NCL makes as a topping for things like waffles, crapes and so on. I have absolutely no idea what they had these out for and didn't see anything you would use them for, so I came up with my own thing...pretzel burgers and whipped topping! HAHAHA Hey it worked for me.
After getting our bellies full, we headed back to the room for the evening. Kendra called me and said "hey mom, your mans on tv"...Dirty Dancing was on and although I have seen this show so many times and can probably recite the lines in it, I still watched it again. I can never get too much of Patrick Swayze.
We also received a notice on our bed that tonight we would need to set our clock up 1 hour. I'm just glad we did it tonight and lost that 1 hour on a sea day.
It was almost time for bed and time to charge my camera...um, where's my camera charger??? Anyone seen my camera charger? I would spend the next hour completely tearing apart the room, the luggage I had already put under the bed that was empty...but I wanted to make sure and checking everything a good 3 times and then having my hubby double check everything as well just in case I had lost my 1) eyesight and just wasn't seeing it or 2) lost my touch senses and didn't feel it.
BOO HOO HOO....I HAVE NO CHARGER!!!!
COMPLETE FAILURE #1 Now what???? Losing/not being able to find my camera charger was devastating to someone like me and all I can say is things went downhill after that in various ways. :(
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I thought I would share the daily for our first Day.
Next up, our second day on the ship (Day 3 of our vacation) or you can check out the ship tour pictures from around the ship.
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Both links are below...you decide. :)