SNORKELING

Ok, so here are some of the pictures that I took while snorkeling (some are from Tylers camera as well). They really did not turn out all that great. I'm not sure why I was having such high hopes for a disposable, underwater camera....

And I'm not sure who knows this or not, but I actually am really afraid of the ocean and deep water, such as where I went snorkeling. It took me quite sometime to get warmed up enough to move out away from the beach but once I did I was very glad that I did it. There were a couple times when I might have freaked out a little bit but I was able to overcome that and have a GREAT time!!

I was trying to hold myself down under the water for the picture, but for some reason, as you can see in the picture, my butt kept floating up towards the top and I couldn't get into a normal looking position. Thats why this one looks strange =}

Oh, I forgot to mention that last semester when I went on this cruise I was taking an Ichthyology class (the study of fish) so it was pretty cool to see a bunch of the fish that I had been studying/dissecting. I might try to tell you what some of these fish are but who knows if I'm right or not. It turns out that my weakest part of the class was fish identification, although I ended up with an A in the class!!!

I think this was an Eagle Ray. It waS HUGE. It swam so gracefully through the water but it was extremely hard to keep up with.

This, I believe was a moray eel. This thing scared the crud out of me. It gave me flashbacks of Little Mermaid nightmares with the twin eels that worked for Ursula. It looked just like them. Even though this thing scared me to death I followed it for a little bit until it went under a huge hunk of corral. Once it disappeared I stayed by the corral it went under for sometime, partly wanting to see it gain and partly not wanting to turn my back on it thinking it was going to attack me or something. Man it gave me the willies...

These were just some different stingrays and skates. I really enjoyed finding these guys. If you can see in the first picture he tried burying himself in the sand.

I'm not even going to try to identify the rest of these. We'll just call them "colorful fishes"

The CRUISE

Ok, so this is a long time over due. These are the pictures from my cruise with my two buddies over Thanksgiving break. The pictures aren't really in any order, I didn't feel like messing with them all that much. I did try to put like-pictures together though. Anyways, here we go...

Me and Tyler

Mark (Tyler and Mark were my roommates that I went with, if you couldn't tell =)

These two pictures are in our estate room. It was pretty dang small. These two are taken from the back wall looking forward towards the door. The room door has the mirror and the second picture has me coming out of the bathroom on the left.

These two are looking from the door into the room. The room had 4 beds in it.

The first one is of our ship docked at one of the ports. The second is looking off of the ship towards the Bahamas.

Me, Mark, Gilbert (we stayed with him and his wife in Florida), and Tyler

Mark looking over the port at Key west I believe. The second is of me and Mark at one of the shows on the ship.

Every night when we got back from dinner we had a new type of towel animal. We had left our sun glasses out so they put them on the animal. They were pretty cool.

This was the beach that we went snorkeling at. (I'll do another post of those pictures) The picture of my face is trying to show you the several stings that I got from something in the water. I couldn't see what it was that got me but man O man did it hurt. It got my right side of the fact twice, my chest, and one hand. It BURNED for hours and got puffy/blistered. I was almost at the point where I had Mark of Tyler pee on my face to see if that old myth really works...... JUST KIDDING! I didn't want to risk getting any of it in my mouth :-)

Tyler and me at the rail of the ship. It was really high up. It made my stomach turn when I would lean over and look down. The second is of me and Tyler again in our estate room with another animal creation.

For dinner we randomly got paired up for the week with another family, the picture. It really is a small world because they happened to be members of the church as well. They only came to dinner a couple nights because they didn't like the service. Our waiter was extremely nice, it just took FOREVER to get our food. We probably averaged 2 hours at dinner. The food was pretty good but they didn't have the caviar and lobster like you always think would be there. I did try duck for the first time and escargot which was really good! The second picture is looking down from one of the upper decks to the pool area.

Just some shots of our ship.

The first one is at some dolphin place (Tyler apparently loves dolphins so he paid to go swimming with them. In hind sight I wish I had done it as well. To much money though) But the picture is of one of the trainers running across the water. It REALLY looked like they were running on water but they obviously just had a walkway right under they water surface. It was still funny though! The second is of the port of Miami as we were pushing off the start the trip.

Just some shots of us guys!

So I can't remember who I told my near death story to so I thought I might try to tell it again. I hope it all makes sense. I think it was our last night on the ship I was in our estate room by myself (I think Mark and Tyler were at a show I didn't want to see). It was about 12:30 and the weather was pretty rough. You could really feel the ship rocking. So I thought I would go up to the top deck to look at the wave and see how big they really were. This is the part that will be kind of hard to describe- When I got to the top I walked out onto the deck at about mid ship. This level of deck kind of circled all the way around the ship with a big room in the middle, the room I came out of. It turned out that the wind was blowing from the side, left to right. I was on the right side of the ship. It was really loud because of the wind but because I was on the right and hand the room to my left I was pretty much blocked from the wind. I started to walk up to the front of the ship, you know, needing to do the whole Titanic thing =) and as I was walking I would look over the side into the vast open ocean. Again, it was about 12:30 so it was extremely dark. I could see very far but I could make out some pretty big waves down below. Anyways, I kept walking up towards the front of the ship and right as I came to the part where the deck wrapped around the room I came out of, the wind hit me like a freight train. Since I previously was being blocked from the direct path of the wind I wasn't thinking of what might happen when I stepped out into the open. The wind was blowing soooo hard and it just caught me so off guard, it knocked me off balance and over towards the railing. LUCKILY I was able to catch myself and get my feet back under me before I flipped over the railing. I have never been so dang scared in my life. Once I had a hold of myself, I stood there for a minute looking over the railing realizing how close I was to going over. It would have been something like a 13 story fall (you can see how high from looking at the pictures) into a deep big black ocean. I was the only one up on the deck at the time so no one would have seen or heard me fall. That thought as well scared me even more. But once I calmed down, being the stubborn person that I am, I had to make it to the front of the boat to finish my journey. I managed to shuffle along trying to stay closer to the ground and holding onto the inner railing. But once I made it to the front of the ship it was completely worth it. It was so peaceful and calming (besides the pounding wind that was sucking the breath from my lungs and making me loose hearing from my left ear). But I stayed there for probably 15 minutes just looking out into nothing. It was a very interesting experience to say the least. Once I made it back to the estate room, Mark was there so I told him of my experience and tried to convince him to go back up with me. We made it to the top deck but once he felt the gusts of wind...we weren't going to go any further...

Oh, and on a side note, I know it doesn't look like I am smiling in a lot of the pictures but I really did have a great time and I really did love it. I guess I just need to try harder to smile for the camera! =}