As Michelle and I are off for a weeks vacation cruising in the Atlantic Ocean I'm going to write a series of absentee blog posts relevant to what we are doing that day. There are two deck cams on the Pride, the Bridge and the Aft where you can watch to see if you see us. Watch the Forward Cam as that is where the ice cream machines are that I tend to find.
Today we hit our third and final Port of Call as we visit Freeport in the Bahamas. This is the port of call when we usually get off the boat and do our shopping. Right at the Port is where all of the locals set up to sell their wares. One thing we always buy from this port is a Christmas Ornament made out of Sea Shells made by the same lady. Her name is Queenie and she does some fabulous work.
After we pull out of this port, we'll be starting our journey up the coastline and returning to Baltimore. Tonight also is the second formal night of the cruise in the main dining room. We will once again get dressed up and eat dinner, no lobster on the menu this evening though.
As Michelle and I embark upon our fifth Cruise and enjoy our vacation, I will also be taking a little break as a blogger and writing some pre-written canned blogs. You can check more of what we are into on mine or Michelle's Facebook Page.
Today Michelle and I will be visiting our third and final port of call, Freeport the Bahamas. This year we will definately stop by the shops right outside of the port. We always go there and buy a new hand made Christmas ornament every year to add to our Christmas Tree. This wonderful woman here with my wife is the woman we buy our ornament from every year.
We are going to switch it up a little in Freeport this year. In years passed we have traveled to Port Lucia, spent time around the local shops shopping and this year we are are going to do a little catamaran snorkeling in Freeport for the first time. This will be the first excursion that we will have went on other than the Faster to the Fun we purchase every year for priority boarding and tendering.
Hope it'll be a great day, I'm excited about exploring new waters to snorkel for the first time.
As Michelle and I are on Vacation this week aboard the Carnival Pride, you can track our Ship Location and watch for us on the Ships two cameras in the Aft or in the Forward Cameras. I am obviously absentee and will be writing my blogs absentee as even bloggers need a vacation.
Today will be our third and final port of call before he start heading back north to Baltimore.
We are in Freeport the Bahamas and all we usually do here is a little bit of shopping. A couple of years ago we headed into Port Lucia, but they had the same shops there that we had here and they opened much later.
There are a number of small shops around Freeport, one of which is a place that makes hand made Christmas decorations that we have one made every year. Each and every one of them are different, and when we hang these on our tree as we do with many of our special place and moments and recall where we got that particular ornament as we hang it. That however is Christmas and I'm in the Bahamas right now.
One thing that everyone always seemed to ask me for was a tour of the Carnival Pride. Mind you this years Video Blog was done a year ago, a couple months prior to the Carnival Pride going into dry dock last November and getting all the new upgrades to Funship 2.0 that we are enjoying this year.
This is my second attempt to publish the video, the initial attempt was nearly 60 minutes long and somewhere there was some corruption in the file, so this is part of the tour.
As always, have yourselves a great day, a relaxing Friday and enjoy yourselves, because you know we are and we will be.
We waited long enough, I was waiting to hear something about our contract, but something tells me that there is going to be another extension and waiting so we went ahead with our Cruise 2015 booking.
We are now once again booked for our 2015 cruise which will be in 189 days (let the countdown begin) and we will be taking the same cruise once again for the fourth year in a row. We absolutely love this cruise and the ports of call, and the Carnival Pride was just updated to a Funship 2.0 this past fall, so we are once again setting sail to Grand Turk, Half Moon Cay and Freeport the Bahamas this September.
Dani and Roy Marsh
We are also taking a couple of first time cruisers with us as Michelle's Sister Dani and husband Roy will be joining us for this years cruise. We both booked and paid for our cruise last night and we are all set to go. We helped them through their booking last night as we booked ours and we will be in side by side rooms, meaning we can have the partition on the deck between the two rooms opened up and we can have one big deck to all share. Because we booked this weekend and Carnival has a special going on, we already have $50.00 worth of on board credits to use.
Michelle and I are all set to go, agreed to everything and filled out all the information including our passport information and our online account. All we have to do is print out our boarding passes and luggage tags and get ready to go.
We will be assisting Dani and Roy as they prepare for their first cruise. Our dinner companions from two years ago Jim and Pam have also booked once again on this cruise and we are looking forward to meeting up with them once again.
This year the Carnival Pride has installed not one, but two deck cams for everyone to watch.
Cruise 2015 is set and ready to go and we could not be any more excited. Anyone else want to join us?
During our 2013 vacation we did a video log each day. This year instead of writing about where we are or what we are doing, I thought I would share with you our previous years experience. I am on vacation this week and since we are doing the same trip and are staying in almost (next to it) the same room, I'm going to post the previous years video blog. Enjoy.
I will be writing a series of absentee BLOGS while Michelle and I are on vacation. I'll be letting everyone know where we are and what we will be doing each day.
Well today we will visit our third and final port when we dock in Freeport Bahamas. Last year we didn't venture very far from the boat as there are a bunch of local shops around the dock. So when we visited last year it was raining and you have to travel to the local town to really do anything.
Last year we enjoyed the little shops, but this year as of the time of me writing this blog, I'm exploring options on things to do for this port. I'm still exploring excursions for this port, knowing we were planning on snorkeling at the previous two ports, we'll have to see what we can fins here to spice it up a little.
Tomorrow is a day at seas as we start to head back to our home Port in Baltimore.
We enjoyed ourselves so much in 2012, that we booked and paid for our 2013 cruise yesterday afternoon. Carnival Pride here we come again this fall. We will be doing the same trip during the same weekend, on the same boat we went on last year, only this year we used last years experiences to determine exactly what we wanted.
Yesterday afternoon we booked and paid for in full our 2013 vacation. We had contemplated a few other options, but this is what we wanted to do and it really is the most cost effective vacation you could ever do. We semi-considered departing out of other ports, but that would have shortened the actual cruise time and made it more costly. We were in heaven last year at Half Moon Cay (shown in picture) that we really wanted to return this year.
We changed a few things up this year, with a little first hand education last year we realized that the back end of the boat really is not the view that you would think. The Sun rises on the port side and neither sun up or sun down was visible from our room. We didn't make that same mistake this year. We're not on the top level this year, but we opted for midship, that way you are not far away from anything.
Disclaimer: This week I will be on a week long vacation with my beautiful wife. These blogs were pre-written to keep a flow of my blog going and to let people know where we are that today and what we plan to be doing.
Today we will be making our third and final port of call when we arrive in Freeport at 7:00 AM. We will once again spend most of the day here, but we will be scheduled to re-board the ship by 1:30 this afternoon.
Just take a look at this picture, and tell me you would not want to spend the day looking at this beautiful scenery. White sandy beaches and crystal clear water is always some thing that I have seen on TV and only imagined, today Michelle and I get to stick our toes inn this sand one more time.
This has always been one of the locations I have wanted to visit in my lifetime. I guess you can call this part of that dream accomplished.
