A Day at Sea and Jungle Island

I figure it's time for me to finish up the posts about our New Year's trip to the Caribbean.  I apologize in advance about the length.  But, if you make it to the end, you'll find two great videos from our trip!

Our last day of the cruise was spent at sea, as we sailed back to Miami from Grand Turks.  The cruise provided a ton of entertainment throughout the day and Tim and I wanted to take full advantage of that!  Of course we forgot our camera for some of the most entertaining parts, which included an ice carving demonstration (the carver created a two doves and a heart in a huge block in less than 30 minutes and it was AMAZING!) and we had the "pleasure" of witnessing the Hairy Chest contest.  I'm sure you're all really disappointed you don't get to see those pictures.  :-)

 When we got back to the cabin, Tim decided we needed some pictures of our surroundings.  This included the hallway outside our room:

Our balcony, as viewed from our room:

 The lobby of the ship, as viewed from the glass elevators:

 This was on our way to a Towel Folding class!  While we waited for the class to start, I made an artistic representation of Mt. St. Helens:

This is what the class looked like, and while it does look like it was mostly children, we were not the only adults there...not by a long-shot!

 Here I am putting the final touches on my Elephant:

 Aren't they cute!?

 What could this possibly turn in to?

 Bulldogs!

 Of course that night was also the big New Year's celebration!  We went to dinner in the formal dining room and then caught the last big Vegas-style show in the Palladium theater:

Then we went back to our rooms, where our awesome steward surprised us with New Year's hats and noise-makers! Laurie and I went a little crazy with our noise makers!

We headed to the big party on the Lido deck with the rest of the boat, where they were streaming the live-feed from NYC.  It was the first time we had been in the same time zone as the "actual" ball drop!

 I don't know if you can tell from this picture, it's pretty dark, but the deck was completely full.  It was insane!

Laurie and I celebrated with more noise making...

Fun was had by all and we ended the night with a midnight buffet and then headed straight to bed for our early departure from the boat.

The next morning we were supposed to disembark with the other excursion groups, Patti had booked us a morning at Jungle Island to occupy our time between disembarkation and our flight later that afternoon.  Unfortunately for us, the boat docked an hour ahead of schedule and everything got bumped up earlier.  Without warning.  We got a call telling us we had 8 minutes to get down to our meeting point.

8. Minutes.
We're smiling in this picture, but we were all a little p.o.'d...

 We did make it to Jungle Island and we had a great time!  Unfortunately I don't have any of the "official photos" from the day, we didn't buy any, but imagine us holding parrots, an alligator, and a skunk.

 They have a lot of flamingos and the feeding time is definitely a frenzy and activity!

 These white birds kept landing and sitting on the flamingos like they didn't want to get wet.  It was highly amusing!

 Tim with a statue of a snapping turtle:

 Now for two videos:

Yes.  We did do that.  No. We won't do that again.

Are we the only ones that think this is hilarious?!?

We got a little animalistic towards the end...

But not nearly as much as this girl!

After our tour was done, we headed back to our bus and went straight to the airport!  Unfortunately our flight from Miami to Houston was delayed, but not enough to interrupt our flight from Houston to Seattle.  We were very thankful for that cushion time in Houston!

And now you're completely caught up on our trip to the Caribbean!  We had a fantastic time and it only took a few days to get rid of the rolling feeling from being on the ship.  Bonus!