We arrived in Miami, Florida and enjoyed the hospitality of my aunt, uncle & cousins.  This is their beautiful backyard garden.  They have mango trees and lizards!  And their tomato plants had red tomatoes–in March!

My aunt & uncle’s sweet little dog, Jakie.

They took us out for a sushi feast!  The sushi boat we ordered was about 5 feet long.

We went for a romantic walk on the beach.

Miami’s my home town.  I’m a tropical girl at heart.

Found a jellyfish.

The first day on the cruise ship–choosing our shore excursions from the book!

First formal night, looking dignified.

Kevan gave me sparkly jewelry.

Amazing mosaic in the dining room.

Second formal night–my “mermaid dress.”

At dinner every evening, we shared a table with a British midwife named Joy and her partner, Chris.  I spent a lot of time talking to the midwife about pregnancy things.  They were a sweet and charming couple.

This is our waiter Cengiz, pronounced “Chengiz” from Turkey (far right) and his assistant Henry (far left) from Korea.

Ceiling of the dining room.

All the waiters serenading the dinner guests.

Lovely sculptures & paintings filled the entire ship.

Ice sculptures adorned the late-night buffets.

There was a cool glowing glass staircase.

The “centrum” of the ship–12 floors of beautiful architecture.  Incredible!

Here’s our ship, Royal Caribbean’s Jewel of the Seas.  We had about 2,000 passengers onboard.

I think they said each life boat could hold about 150 people.

On deck.

Being silly.

At our first port of call, Labadee, Haiti, unfortunately we didn’t take any pictures.  We were too busy lounging in hammocks on the beach and floating in the blue water.

Here’s our second port of call, Cartagena, Colombia.  We saw an old fort.

We climbed up onto the roof of it.

From there we looked off the edge and saw the highway and the ocean.

Then we went to see a monastery on the very top of a tall hill.  On the drive up there we saw families living in one-room shacks with no electricity or plumbing.

From the top, we could see a view of the whole city.

In Puerto Limon, Costa Rica, we rode a bus into the jungle.

Our driver was fantastic and told us a lot of interesting things about Costa Rica.  It was so beautiful there.

We reached our destination.  The bamboo was enormous.

Lots of tropical flowers and foliage.

We got outfitted in safety equipment in preparation to fly on zip lines through the tree canopy.

They had wooden platforms way up in the tops of the tallest trees.  We flew from tree to tree like Tarzan and it was great fun.  I think there were 13 different zip lines–we got to rest on the platforms for a moment between each one.  We heard the jungle birds and saw a few monkeys.

Afterwards, back at the port, we walked around the city for a few hours and drank coconut juice.  It was a fun day.

Then finally we arrived at the Panama Canal!  We woke up at 4 am to make sure we didn’t miss a thing.  The little lights in the distance are a long line of ships queuing up to go through the canal in the pre-dawn darkness.

It was a spectacular sunrise.  Hundreds of passengers crowded every inch of the rails on deck to watch the action.

We approached the opening to the canal just as the sun was rising.

Just like a road, the Panama Canal has 2 lanes.  As we entered the right lane of the first lock, we watched another ship coming through the other way.

The gates of the first lock opening up for us.

In the canal!

We all got completely soaked by a sudden cold rain shower.  It was short lived, and when the sun came back out, the air was hazy.

Going through the canal, we looked down on the rain forest beyond the adjacent road.

Our cruise ship was designed to be the largest possible vessel to fit through the canal–I think the captain said there was about a foot of clearance on either side of the ship while in the locks.  Looking down from one of the decks of the ship, we saw other people leaning out to look, and below them the wall of the canal!  We couldn’t see any water–pretty wild!

The rain forest was so lush and blue-green.  It was very quiet and peaceful.

A row of workers in hardhats walking across the top of the gates.

These gigantic tires are meant to help guide the edges of ships into the canal and prevent them scraping on the concrete.

This is taken from the back of the ship when we were in the third lock.  Down there in the first lock, next in line behind us, was an American submarine.

We finally came out the other side into Gatun Lake, the man-made body of water that separates the Atlantic half of the canal from the Pacific.  We did not go all the way through the canal to the Pacific–if we had, we never would have made it back to Miami in time.

We hung out in the silent, peaceful lake for a few hours before turning back to go through the canal the other way.

At several points while we were in the canal, we were able to look down onto the tops of smaller ships going the other way.  We could see the tiny faraway shapes of the sailors.  Some of them waved up at us and took pictures of our huge cruise ship from their vantage point.

We stopped briefly at the nearby Cristobal Pier.

Ohh, morning sickness.  Unfortunately for me, the day of the Panama Canal was clouded by constant severe nausea.  (I am happy to report though, that over the entire vacation I only actually threw up once.)

Nothing like the Caribbean sun to make a white person look even whiter.

There were endless souvenirs at pretty much every port.  Cristobal Pier was no exception.  (In Colombia, our taxi driver took us to one tourist trap after another, saying, “You’ll like this next place; it’s very big shopping!”  The funny lady we were sharing the taxi with, a New Yorker, replied, “Yeah, yeah, big shopping of little junk, right?”

Our last port of call was George Town, Grand Cayman, where I was blown away by the surreal colors of the seascape–blues, greens and aquas more vivid than photos can depict.

The water was crystal-clear and warm.  We went kayaking and then snorkeling.  We saw a variety of gorgeous tropical fish of all colors.  The shimmery silver-pink fish were as long as my arm and fat.  We fed them bread crumbs and got nibbled a few times by fish teeth.

We spent the rest of the day lounging on the white sand beach.

Kevan is very good at hand stands.

We soaked up a lot of sun but managed not to get burnt at all, and we were filled with relaxed contentment.  It was just what I needed after a long cold winter in gray Baltimore.

After one more day at sea, we arrived back in the Port of Miami on a pleasant morning and enjoyed looking out at the urban skyline before disembarking.

We got back home from our vacation just in time to watch the trees beginning to bud.