Carnival Dream Cruise Day 3: Sea Day

Moving on to our first Sea Day...we did just about nothing.  And it was glorious.  We slept in a little bit (so you know, until 8.) We held off on breakfast long enough to check out the brunch in the Main Dining Rooms.  There was a bit of a line to get in but it moved fast enough - plus we were okay sitting with people.

We were seated with an older couple from the same town my parents live in here in Florida - small world!  I had the Eggs Benedict and Geoff had a cereal encrusted French Toast.  Mine was the winner - the cereal (Honey Nut Cheerios) tasted rather stale on Geoff's French Toast.

Carnival Dream Cruise, Day 2: Nassau

We woke up pretty early - the only downside of the first day of vacation is that your body hasn't quite caught onto the idea yet!  It was also the end of Daylight Savings Time, so we fell back an hour the night before.

As we were getting ready, we were pulling into Nassau.  I took a few pictures from our balcony as we pulled in.

As you can see, there were already a number of ships in port today.  We were scheduled to be there from 8am until 2pm.  My family used to travel to Paradise Island about every other year growing up, so I'm fairly familiar with the area.  Because of the limited time, we opted to do some exploring on our own versus doing an official excursion.  It was Geoff's first time to Nassau.

Carnival Dream Cruise: Day 1

The first week in November brought about our long-awaited vacation.  The first actual vacation we've taken since moving to Florida.  Up until now, all of our travel was family/wedding related.  We were looking forward to getting away and relaxing!

I had done a lot of research on cruises that leave from Florida over the summer, and we finally settled on the Carnival Dream in August.  There were two main reasons this cruise won; first, it left from Port Canaveral - yes, we drove 30 minutes and hopped on a cruise.  Second, we got a fantastic deal on a balcony stateroom for being Florida residents.  

We left Saturday, November 2, and returned November 9.  It was an Eastern Caribbean and we stopped at Nassau, St Thomas, & St Martin.

Now that all the details are out of the way, I'll start the adventure!

Epcot Food & Wine Festival - Booth Reviews from 10/26/13

On October 26, I met my Mom up at Epcot for a little Food & Wine craziness.  My standard advice is to avoid attending Food & Wine Festival on weekends if at all possible.  If you must attend, get there as soon as the World Showcase opens (11am, but some booths open a little early) and try to wrap up the Food & Wine portion of your day by 2pm or so.

I got to the park around 10am and my Mom met me about noon.  I did a little exploring on my own and right before 11am, headed over to the World Showcase.  Now, today was also one of the first weekends we had that the weather was comfortable and gorgeous...which meant I was really expecting a lot of crowds.  So I went in with a plan of attack: since I only had one day, I wrote down some of the new things that I wanted to try.  I really didn't want to just go back to my favorites they have every year and be unable to try anything new since I was filled up.  As I did last year, I'll also rate each dish on a scale of 1-5.

Catching Up: How I Let Almost 5 Months Slip By Without Any Posts

I think it's safe to say I'm not meant to be a professional blogger.  In any event, I know we have family from up North that reads this to see what we've been up to, so I'll post every now and then with a recap of whatever time has gone by.

My last post was from back in June when we went to see the new Simpsons area at Universal.  I'll start my recap from May, since I left that out of my last recap.  While we've been busy, a lot of what we've been up to has been pretty mundane stuff - hanging out with friends, visiting family, etc.

Review/New at Universal: Simpsons & Transformers

This past weekend Geoff and I were planning on heading to the Magic Kingdom...until we discovered that his pass is now blacked out until August.  So we went to Universal instead (where my Seasonal is still good to go!)

The last time we went, we didn't really do many rides at the Universal Studios area, so we made that our plan for the day.  We got there shortly after the park opened...old habits die hard I guess! I was a little concerned when we walked in and saw Despicable Me had a 40 minute wait.  I shouldn't have been though, once we walked to the back the waits were essentially non-existant.  We hopped on the Mummy (which was AWESOME) and started wandering when we saw Transformers was open!  And only had a 10 minute wait.  So we hopped in line.  10 minutes was really just the time it took to walk through the queue!  They had just opened it up for the day, we really lucked out!

Entrance to the ride.

The verdict?  It was great!  It was really well done.  It's in the same style as Spiderman at Islands of Adventure.  I was amazed that we were moving down the "road" when I thought we couldn't go anywhere...until I realized it was the 3D effect.  Haha...oops!  About half way through we lost the effects and audio.  It started up again before the end, so we didn't go on again.  It's the risk you take when the ride is in soft opening, so I wasn't too upset.

I'm a bad blogger...

Oh hey there... Sorry to have abandoned my blog.  I promise to do a better job!  I guess I'll do a brief recap of what we've been up to.

For anyone who doesn't know, I lost my job in January.  Womp womp, too bad, so sad.  In all honesty, it was a blessing in disguise.  I was in a position that wasn't really something I cared to be doing and I was super stressed.  By the end of February, I found a position that I think puts me in a better place - at least my state of mind!  In brief, I'm now doing a sort of sales and procurement mix.  I like it a lot.  I like the company, I like the people I work with - and yes, I go into an actual office everyday, which is great for my need of routine.  I've been there for about 10 weeks now and so far, it's going really well.  Hopefully that keeps up!  I also had a chance to visit with Betsy back in January, which I might not have gotten to otherwise.  Totally worth it!

I'll do my best to recap the past few months now.