I uploaded pictures from the wedding and the honeymoon to my photo site, for all who are interested. More pictures will be going up (like pics from Nacho and Lisa's wedding) later in the week, too.

Today was our last full day on the ship. Today’s lunch theme was chocolate, so we had a chocolate buffet after we got up. Ah, only on a cruise can you do stuff like that without feeling bad about it. I mean, we also had lunch food (like, soup and sandwiches), but what fun is that when your lunch buffet is chocolate?

After lunch we went up on deck and did the “On Deck for the Cure” walk/run to benefit the Susan G. Komen breast cancer foundation. It was nice to see some other people who care about supporting that kind of thing, although I think there were about 10 of us total, not including the two staff.

We then had our dinner. I had some sort of salmon (what, you expect me to remember the specifics?). We headed over to the Carnival Legends show. Basically throughout the week auditions are held for guests to be in this show, and they basically do musical numbers by famous artists, sung by guests on the ship. Most people were pretty good, but there were a few that were extremely bad. Nonetheless, it was fun.

Since we have to be up for breakfast early before we get off the boat, it’s time for bed.

We slept in again this morning. We are officially on our way back to Miami, but it is a two day trek, so today and tomorrow are “fun days at sea.” We got up, Erin hit the casino early, so I went and found breakfast, watched a movie (How to Eat Fried Worms), got showered, then went and hunted Erin down. We came back to the room, decided what we were planning to do today, and then decided it was time for a nap.

I read a bit while Erin was napping, then I crashed out for a little while, too. We got up, got dressed up (tonight was a formal night), and headed out to eat. Tonight Erin had Chateaubriand and I had a pumpkin pot pie. She had been wishing all week for them to have baked Alaska for dessert, and tonight was that night. It had Neapolitan ice cream in it, and it was awesome.

After dinner we headed to the theater show. Tonight they were doing an 80s themed show. It’s all dancing and singing, but the costume/stage changes, along with the amazing talent made it rule all. They had a couple of break dancing guys who did a show after it was over. Erin joined in the fun when they asked for volunteers, too.

We were going to figure out what else to do until the “ultimate buffet” opened for pictures at 11:30, but the show was so awesome, we decided to go see it again for the second show. This time we were up a lot closer, and it was even better the second time around.

Once that was done, it was 11:30. We headed up to Rosie’s Restaurant to take pictures of the ice sculptures and awesome desserts, and then stood in line to get the eats at around 12:15 (yes, AM). After we stuffed ourselves full of food and desserts, we are now back in the room. It’s almost 2:00 now, Erin’s writing in her diary, and I’m writing this. Martian Child is about 3 minutes from being over, so I guess it’s about time to call it a night. Tomorrow’s our last full day on the ship.

Last night we decided that we were totally going to relax today, not doing anything in particular. We woke up here and there, but stayed in bed till after 2pm. It was awesome. Erin went out and got us some lunch and brought it back to the room, so we relaxed and had a light lunch.

After that we got ready and went to have some sushi from the free sushi bar. That’s right, they have a sushi bar where you can just walk up and get as much as you want, and you don’t have to pay. The only downside is that you can’t order just anything that you want. They have about 3 types of sushi that they make each day, so you really can only get those 3 each day. But still, free sushi.

We walked around for awhile, and then went to dinner. Tonight I had black bean and vegetable enchiladas, and Erin had a seafood feast of shrimp and scallops, then we had dessert (tiramisu and a dark/white chocolate cake thingy respectively).

After dinner, Erin had a massage and facial scheduled, so I headed over and watched a ventriloquist and comedy show. It was pretty good, but I think tomorrow night’s “R rated adults only” comedy show might be a bit funnier. It’s going to be hard to decide between the comedy show or the “ultimate buffet” that is going on at the same time (midnight, for those keeping track).

After the comedy show, they were going to have a big party on deck, but we finally caught up with some of the storms that are happening out here, so it was raining like crazy, so they had some dancing and stuff on a few of the other decks.

I walked around and checked out what was going on, and considering it was 11:30 and we hadn’t eaten since 6 (as you’ve probably noticed, and was pointed out in the comedy show, we have about 8 meals a day), I went and checked out the Mexican buffet that started at 11:30pm. I tried the chile rellenos, some nachos, a taco and some “tostadas” (which were really just nachos). The rellenos had potatoes in them, which was weird, but I did have a bite that had a tiny bit of chile heat, which was nice.

And now that it’s like, 1:30, I suppose I should think about sleep. Erin just crashed out, so I guess I’ll lay down.

Today we got woken up by an announcement that we needed to get to the “One Small Step” disco to go through US Customs. It was almost 9:00, but that still woke us up. We were already docked in St. Martin, Virgin Islands at that point (hence the customs), but our excursion for the day didn’t start until 12:30.

I was kinda surprised we got to St. Martin as early as we did, considering the “man overboard” yesterday caused us to turn back 200 miles, and it turns out it was a barrel in the water. So after we went through customs, we had breakfast and got ready to head out.

Today we were doing a “helmet dive” in St. Martin. Basically the way it works is this: you walk around a designed course on the bottom of the ocean with a helmet on your head (kinda like SCUBA, but only the helmet). When we got there, we got to check out all the other things in the park before we went underwater. They had iguanas walking around all over, too.

After looking at the turtles, sharks, stingrays and a collection of smaller ocean animals, we finally headed underwater. It was awesome. We walked around looking at different reefs, and every so often the leader would bring some creatures around for us to hold.

One of the people that did the dolphin swim with us the other day was with us on this one too, but this time her boyfriend was with her. Right near the end, when we were about to go back to the ladder, he pulled a ring out of his pocket, dropped to a knee and showed her the ring (you can’t hear anyone else inside the helmets). That was awesome. When we got out of the water, we were talking to them, and he said that he wanted to do it on the dolphin swim, having one of the dolphins bring the ring to her, but for some reason he wasn’t able to do the swim with us. Either way, it was an awesome way to propose.

St. Thomas was an interesting place. The roads are all very windy and narrow, and they all basically have drop-offs at the edge that are a bit scary. A lot of people walk in the roads, and drivers honk a lot. It reminded me of the videos I’ve seen of the roads in India.

After we got back to the ship, we had a few minutes to relax and then went to dinner. Tonight we had filet mignon, followed by a chocolate, raspberry and vanilla crème cake with raspberry sorbet. It was crazy tasty.

Erin hit the slots again, so I went up on deck and watched as we left dock, drank a beer and watched Don Henley Live under the stars, then had some hot chocolate since it started raining, and hit one of the shops to get some aloe. We were both hurting really bad today. Alright, bed time.

Today was a “fun day at sea,” so we basically didn’t do anything. This morning we slept in a bit. When we got up, we went to one of the onboard restaurants for breakfast. After breakfast, Erin played some slot machines for awhile, so I hunted down some coffee and walked around. After that we went up on deck and listened to music, laid out in the sun and read books and magazines.

At some point while Erin was hitting the slots, we got an announcement by Ryan, our cruise director, saying that they thought they might have a man overboard, and that we were going to be turning around to go investigate.

Having eaten breakfast late (around 10:00) and then laying out, we didn’t have lunch until around 3:00, which caused us to not want to eat dinner at our 6:00 time slot, but dammit, we had to try. I had salmon while Erin had braised short ribs. We pretty much were only able to finish half of it, but that didn’t make it taste any worse.

By this time, our sunburns from lying out in the sun for hours really started to hurt. We went into the room to lay down and relax. Erin fell asleep while we were watching some movie. At 10:00, they were showing Transformers on the “seaside theater” (IE the gigantic video screen out on the deck), so I headed out there, drank a beer and watched that until after midnight.

That’s it for today. Really, that’s all we did. Review: ate, coffee/slots, laid in sun, lunch, rest, dinner, movies.

We got to Nassau, Bahamas this morning. We got into dock around 7am. Our big (and by “big” I mean the one that was most important) shore excursion was in Nassau. We met on shore at 8:30 and left for Dolphin Encounters. We took a boat, picked up more people from the Atlantis resort, and then headed to our destination. Somehow Erin talked me out of the pirate expedition and into the dolphin swim. Hey, she really wanted to do this, and who am I to deny my wife something that makes her extremely happy. Which dolphins do.

Shortly after we got off the ship (uh, the Carnival one, not the one that took us to Dolphin Encounters), it began raining. The whole boat ride over it was raining. But right before we got there, it stopped. We got a tour of dolphin life from one of the employees, and then headed down to see the dolphins.

We learned that dolphins live to an average age of 25 years old in the wild, and that we would be working with Princess, who is currently 41 years old and pregnant, along with a few others (Chippy, Gussy Mae, and some others). There were 10 of us in our group, and we all jumped in the water. We started out by having our pictures taken with a dolphin. Then the dolphin kissed us on the cheek. After that we got to feed them, which was an adventure for sure.

The way it worked is that the trainer would give the dolphin a fish to bring to us, we would take the fish from them, and they would go back to the trainer. Then the dolphin would come back to us to eat the fish. Well, there were seagulls, and lots of them, all with their eyes on free fish. Some of them snatched the fish out of the dolphins’ mouths, some got them from the people holding the fish, but overall it wasn’t bad. I think the gulls only got about five fish total.

We also got to hug the dolphins, and got kisses (on the lips). But all of this lead up to the best reason to swim with dolphins: the foot push. We laid out flat in the water (face down) and two dolphins (one for each foot) would come up and put their muzzle on the balls of your feet and then swim fast. When you start moving, you slightly arch your back and you’re basically water skiing using dolphins for skis. It was definitely an experience I never thought I’d have, and it was awesome.

After we were done, we ordered some pictures to be shipped back home, and got back on the boat to take us back to the cruise ship. Right when we got on the boat it started monsooning again. It was like the weather said, “Fine, go have your fun, I’ll wait for you.” We thought about going shopping in Nassau, but we only had about an hour till the ship was to leave, and we were starving, so we just got back onboard and got some lunch (it was Mexican food lunch day, although the only thing that really resembled Mexican was the chile con carne. I mean, come on, dirty rice with chicken is Cajun, not Mexican. The seafood quesadilla was really good, I just wouldn’t consider it to be too Mexican).

Having gotten up at 6:30 to have breakfast and get ready for an 8:30 departure, followed by as much stuff as we did, we were beat, and took a nice long nap. Hey, honeymoon, we can sleep whenever we want. We got up and got dressed for dinner. Tonight we had lobster and shrimp.

We went shopping after dinner. Erin looked at jewelry and I bought some new flip flops (my old sandals were hurting my feet). Erin played some slots and I drank some alcohol, and we just basically relaxed. We hit the hot tub for awhile after that, and now it’s about time to go to bed, maybe. Erin’s already asleep (granted, it is 12:35am), but I am not quite tired yet, due to a 3 hour nap and free coffee everywhere I go.

Guess what time we got a wakeup call this morning? If you said 5:45am, give yourself a cookie! That’s right, our wakeup call for dinner last night woke us up at the crack of dawn today. Which is awesome since we didn’t have to get up until 10. Oh, speaking of which, we looked at our paperwork last night and it said we had to be ready to leave at 11:30 in the lobby, so we didn’t have to sit in the lobby for 3 hours, which was nice. We only had to sit there for half an hour (checkout was at 11:00).

We got on the bus at about 11:31. They were on the ball. We had to go pick up a bunch of people from the airport before heading to the ship, but the airport pickup wasn’t going to happen until about 12:15, so our driver, who was badass, asked if we wanted to stop at Starbucks on the way to the airport. We picked up 53 more people at the airport and headed to the dock.

Holy shit, guys. If you ever go on a cruise, get there as early as you are allowed to get on the boat. Seriously. We stood in line for 15 minutes just to get our luggage tagged, which didn’t bode well for the rest of the check-in process. When we finished getting our luggage tagged, we got in line to get on the boat. Or so we thought. No, we weren’t in the wrong line, but we still had a few steps to go before we could get on the boat.

We stood in this line for upwards of an hour, although it may have been longer. I lost track of time standing in the 100% humidity and 100 degree weather. Once we got to then front of this line, we found out that this was the security checkpoint. They made sure we had our tickets and sent us through the metal detector. Then we got in the next line, which was significantly shorter.

This one was where we showed our ID and got our room keys/payment cards. Since these lines were broken down by which deck your room was on, we only had to stand in line for about 5 minutes, after which we got our embarkation picture taken, and got in, you guessed it, another line. Luckily this was actually the line to get on the ship. Finally.

It was now about 3:15 or so, and the ship was scheduled to leave at 4, but we knew that wasn’t going to happen by the sheer number of people behind us. We headed to our room to drop everything off and found that our room had been decorated in “Happy Honeymoon” decorations, courtesy of Erin’s dad and step-mom. There was also a plate of awesomeness (chocolate covered strawberries, brownies and a white chocolate/puffed rice squares courtesy of my wife.

Considering we hadn’t eaten in about 19 hours (breakfast from Starbucks doesn’t really count), we figured we should hunt down some lunch. We ate lunch around 4:00, which was good since we had dinner scheduled for 6:00. But, hey, we’re on our honeymoon, we will eat everything we want and not worry about it.

For dinner I had a New York strip steak and Erin had tilapia. We were about to ask for a dessert menu when the waiter brought us some new forks. I made a comment about us apparently looking like the kind of people who wanted to always eat dessert, when they walked around the corner with a heart-shaped chocolate cake that said “Happy Honeymoon” on it.

Oh, at some point during dinner, we actually left the dock. Yeah, you read that right. Dinner started at 6:00, and we were supposed to leave at around 4:00. After dinner, Erin needed to lay down because the motion was starting to get to her. So I headed off to check out the ship. I walked around all of the decks, checking out the shops, clubs, bars, etc. I went back to the room to see how she was doing, but she was asleep. I know she hadn’t been asleep too long since Pirates of the Caribbean was on the TV, so I headed back out.

I sat on deck where they have a giant movie screen (and two swimming pools and hot tubs), drank a beer and watched some of the Olympics closing ceremonies. Around 11 I headed back to the room, and Erin was awake and feeling better, so we finished watching the closing ceremonies while eating the Plate of Awesomeness.

Today we left Albuquerque on the 6:35 flight to Ft. Lauderdale (via Dallas and Nashville). It was a fairly uneventful flight, overall. When we got to Ft. Lauderdale, a bus picked us up to take us to our hotel for the night. The people that picked us up were outsourced from Carnival, and were very helpful and nice. Because they were outsourced, we didn’t expect them to know, but asked when we would be picked up the next day. We got two different answers (11:30, and “be out there at 10:30, but if nobody is there by 1:30, you might want to call”). That didn’t really give us any answer, but we figured we’d get the answer one way or another.

The mood completely changed once we got to the hotel. It seemed like they were going to be awesome by the greeting at the door, but things took a turn. We found out that neither Erin nor I were registered in the hotel. After about 20 minutes, the manager was able to figure out that we were registered under Erin Hrizzo and Michael Hmoya, which would explain why they couldn’t find us under our actual names.

During this whole ordeal, we asked the hotel employees if they knew what time the bus would be there to pick us up to take us to Miami for the cruise. We figured they might know since people stay there “all the time” (according to the employees) before going on Carnival cruises. One lady said she’d never seen the bus come by, and the other said that they don’t come by, and that we’d have to take a taxi. Nevermind, we told her, we’ll figure it out on our own.

Now, that’s not so bad, but when you’ve been traveling for 7+ hours on a whopping 3 hours of sleep, it tends to get bothersome really fast. So we were very happy to have our room keys, and planned to go up and take a nap before dinner. So we hiked the approximately 16.2 miles to the room, luggage in tow. When we got there, the keys didn’t work. Neither of them. With either of the arrows pointing in to the door (yes, the logo of the hotel is an arrow, and it points away from the way you have to stick the key into the door, but there are two other (tiny) arrows to show you which way it goes).

So I ran the marathon back to the front desk to tell them the keys didn’t work, and she proceeds to tell me that I put the key in wrong, and that I had to put the small arrows into the door. Without ripping her a new asshole, I was able to tell her that I tried that, which was pretty impressive, if I can say so myself. So she condescendingly said sorry and reprogrammed the keys, and sent me on another hike back to the room.

Finally we were able to relax. We decided we had to get some sleep since we were grouchy and had been awake for far too long already. So Erin called the front desk to set a wakeup call for about an hour from then (5:45pm), since we had reservations at the restaurant downstairs. We woke up nearly two hours later (6:30pm) and called to change our restaurant reservation.

The people at the restaurant were very snarky, explaining that they are always busy and we should make sure we get there at the time of the reservation. We got there (7:15 or so) and there were approximately four tables that had people at them. So we sat down, ordered some drinks and ate some sushi and strip steak. It was good, don’t get me wrong, but it wasn’t as good as the price would indicate.

Since we slept all afternoon, we were awake till the wee hours of the morning. We decided it was time for a late night snack, and called for room service (according to the brochure, we still had 45 minutes till room service stopped serving). We were told that they stopped serving over an hour earlier, but we could call the restaurant (the one where we ate dinner) and order for pickup, since that’s where the room service comes from anyway.

So we called. No answer. We called back to the front desk and they told us that we couldn’t call the restaurant, but would have to go down there to order food to pick it up. The annoyance and stupidity of the hotel staff killed our appetites, so we just watched I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry and went to sleep.

Alright, for those of you (read: all of you) who have been asking for more information, our wedding site is officially up. I don't have time to type more right now, but you may go check it out.