While this Christmas Vacation may not be as hilarious and absurd as the one we all know and love starring the Griswolds, we did have a great Christmas Vacation ourselves.
Wednesday 12/17- Bright and early this morning at about 7am we asked Skye if she wanted to go for a ride and have a slumber party. Of course she is always excited to have a ride. As we drove down the road, she must have started to recognize where we were going and began whimpering with excitement. As we pulled into Paola’s (the pet sitter), she got even more excited and once we were stopped in the yard she just couldn't wait to get out. Normally we put a leash on her to make the short walk from the car to the gated yard because there are so many other dogs there that she gets over-stimulated. This time we decided not to, though, and when she ran to the gate she was greeted by all of the barking dogs on the deck, probably 8 or more dogs of various sizes, all barking up a storm! Paola opened the gate and Skye ran in to greet all of her old (and new) friends, and did amazing! We just chuckled and told Skye “ok, then see ya later!” and handed Paola the dog food before heading back to our truck. Knowing that Skye was in good hands for the next 11 days or so, we headed back home to close up the house and get on the road.
At about 7:45 Loren and Nancy came to pick us up and drive us to Quepos where we would catch the little regional airline that would bring us up to the San Jose airport to catch our flight to Miami. We figured that we would try this little regional airline this time instead of driving/shuttling the whole way. Luggage is very limited on this airline because the planes are small (about 15-20 people), so it probably wouldn’t work when we go to/from MN, but we were traveling fairly lightly for the cruise so we decided to give it a go. Our flight was scheduled for 10am and we had to be at the airport by 9. Since Quepos is only about a 45 minute drive we figured that we had plenty of time to make it there. Unfortunately, about 15 minutes into our drive and before we made it even to Dominical the highway was at a complete standstill. Ok, this shouldn’t take long to clear out, right?
WRONG!!!
After sitting on the highway not moving an inch for more than 20 minutes we started to get a little bit uneasy. There was very little traffic coming from the other direction and we saw a few trucks that passed all of the stopped traffic in the oncoming lane, so we decided to give this a try and see how far we could get. We made it nearly to the Dominical bridge where we could see there was a big roadblock, police, and lots of people. I grabbed my phone and searched the local Facebook groups to see if anyone had posted anything about what was going on, but didn’t see anything; I made a post of my own asking WTF was happening because we were at risk of missing our flight. At about that same time, a guy who was stopped on the highway somewhere behind us had walked to the front of the roadblock, asked the police and people there what was going on, and was walking back past our truck. I rolled down my window and asked him what he had learned, and apparently there is a national bicycle race today and the bridge would be closed until 9am to allow them to pass.
WHAT?!
We had to be in Quepos by 9am, and that was still at LEAST another 30 minute drive past this bridge! Luckily for us, Loren has connections and he called the lady that operates the logistics at the Quepos airport. He told her what was going on and that we would be running late. We knew that there were flights running hourly today, and asked if there would be any way to get on the next flight instead of the 10am one we were scheduled on? She said that she would see what she could do, but all of the flights today were booked full. We kept our fingers crossed that she could work some sort of magic and get us on the next flight between Quepos and San Jose. Fortunately, we had some wiggle room, as our flight from San Jose to Miami didn’t leave until about 3 this afternoon. We had booked this 10 am flight early in the event some unforeseen circumstance happened. Good thing Ramie was thinking ahead!!
Finally, just before 9am the bicyclists started coming over the bridge in their race to somewhere south of here. By a little bit after 9am all of them had gone through, and sure enough they opened the bridge, but now there was ALL of this backed up traffic that had to get going again and it took us a little while to get up to highway speeds and on our way toward the airport.
So, let me take a break here and ask this question. Why did the bridge have to be closed for more than an HOUR before the first bicyclist came through? That makes absolutely no sense, but this is Costa Rica, and when do things here ever really make sense? And why wasn’t this more highly publicized over the last week? We are part of all of the local Facebook groups and didn’t see anything about this. If we had, we would have left the extra 30 minutes or so early to make it over this bridge before they closed it.
Ok, so it was a bit after 9am now and we were supposed to be at the airport at 9am. We were trying to get through traffic as quickly as we could, and Ramie may have broken a few traffic laws along the way (you see, Ramie was driving our truck up to Quepos with the 4 of us, and Loren and Nancy would bring our truck back to our house so it was there for us when we got home in a week and a half). We got to the airport at about 9:40, and no plane in sight. Did they leave early? That's another thing about this regional airline... sometimes they will leave early if they choose to, we have had friends miss flights even when they were there an hour early because the plane decided to leave when it wanted to. We got to the check-in counter to speak to the lady that Loren had called earlier only to be told that we were too late. NOOOOO!!!! What do you mean!? The plane hasn’t left yet, you said that isn't even HERE yet!? Well, apparently the flight "check in" closes about 20-30 minutes before the plane lands so they can finalize the manifest, and after she told us that, sure enough, here came our plane taxing into the little airport.
BUT, this story does have a happy ending!
Because Loren had called in advance and let them know what was going on, and some people scheduled for the 11am flight arrived at the airport early enough, the airline swapped us out, so those people would go on our early flight and we would get their seats on the later flight. And it just happened to be that those people were Darrell and Jamie, some friends we met through Val and Marshall. Somehow, Darrell and Jamie knew about this bicycle race and made the very wise decision to get on the road super early, and for this we were very thankful. We did have to pay the airline extra for a change fee (which was about half the cost of the original ticket), which was unfortunate, but at least we would still have a flight to San Jose and didn’t have to find a way to drive all the way there.
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| The waiting area consisting of about 4 rows of chairs |
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| Walking out to the plane |
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| Looking down the run way. |
Since the plane was so small you could hear everyone else’s conversations, and it turns out that there was a party of 3 guys from MN that had just finished a visit here, and separately, a single woman from MN who now lives here in Costa Rica and was going home to visit for Christmas. So, on a plane of 15, there were 6 of us from MN, in 3 separate groups. Small world, huh!? We opted NOT to chime in that we were also from MN… sometimes we just aren’t in the mood for conversation. 😉
The regional airlines don’t land at the international airport gates, and there is a smaller terminal for these tiny plans and private jets right next to the international terminals. We had just a short walk through the parking lots from the little terminal to the international terminal.
After an easy check-in, we made it through security quite quickly we got to the gate where we needed to be with plenty of time to spare. We were both hungry so we grabbed some expensive airport lunch that wasn’t really that tasty, and then waited for our flight to Miami.
We arrived in Miami around 7:30pm and made our way outside to wait for the hotel shuttle to pick us up by about 8pm. Ramie made a call to the hotel and we were told that we would have to wait until 9pm for the next shuttle, so we stood outside where we were told to wait. I will say, people-watching in the arrivals area of the Miami airport is hilarious. So many people were illegally parking and there was so much angry honking, arm waving, and yelling that really made our wait entertaining.
We finally made it to our hotel at about 9:30 and were starving. Fortunately, there was a Subway in the hotel so we could grab some food before we went to bed. It was a long travel day today, but not as long as the ones that we have when going to MN!
Thursday 12/18- We weren’t “scheduled” to board the cruise ship until noon today, so we hung around at our dumpy hotel for a while in the morning. We’ve stayed at this hotel once before, years ago, and it is convenient for being close to the airport, but it is super trashy. During our first stay here years ago, when we arrived at the check in counter the police were in the lobby arresting someone. This time, when we walked to our room last night, which was in a building disconnected from the main hotel, we had to pass a couple of people that were sitting on the step smoking some illegal substances. Thankfully, they were polite enough as we walked by, but this is a pretty sketchy area so Ramie was on guard all night. Anyways, that's how dumpy it is and we have both agreed that this would be the last time we would stay here. This morning while we waited around until it was time to leave we watched Die Hard 2 (no discussion about whether this is a Christmas movie or not), and decided that we just couldn’t take it any longer and scheduled the Uber to come pick us up.
We had about a 45 minute Uber ride from the hotel in Miami to the Port Everglades cruise terminal in Fort Lauderdale, but the cruise line paperwork said we couldn't check in until noon, and it was only 9:30ish now. We figured that we might as well sit around at the cruise terminal instead of at the hotel because at least there was a chance they might let us on early (and we were really tired of this dump!). When the Uber driver arrived, it turned out that our driver was a native Spanish speaker who didn’t seem to speak much English (his map was speaking to him in Spanish and everything). Ramie used his Spanish skills to ask where he was from, and it turns out he’s originally from Cuba. Even now that we are out of Costa Rica and back in the US, we still get to use our Spanish skills!
The first scheduled boarding time for the ship this morning was at 11am, and we probably made it to the terminal at about 10:30am. Even though we knew it wasn’t our turn yet, we decided to give it a try and see if they would let us into the terminal to wait. We had no problems at all; they let us right in along with all of the other passengers. That worked out well! We were directed to some seats and we just sat around people watching the other guests in the waiting area, which was not so different from an airport. WAY better than watching Die Hard in a trashy hotel!!
Our initial observation was that this would be a much different passenger crowd than we are used to. Celebrity Cruises is our preferred cruise line and it typically consists of an older crowd decked out in their yacht club attire. This time we noticed a lot more families with kids (babies to teens), people that looked like they came out of the TV show “The Vikings”, people that just SCREAMED “redneck”, and just so many different types people! I guess a Holiday cruise brings out a different type of crowd. At about 11 am, they started letting people board without asking them what time their scheduled boarding was. We waited until they got to our section, got our boarding passes ready and were super excited when they let us pass along with everyone else. They never even checked to see what our “assigned” boarding time was. SCORE! Good thing we arrived early and didn’t wait around to arrive at noon like we were “supposed to”.
Vacation Mode Activate!!
We were seated at a table for 8 with a group of 6 other people who were all together. We made some small talk and learned that this was their first Celebrity cruise, but they had been on other cruise lines before. They looked over the menu and decided that since the names of all of the dishes were things that they didn’t recognize, they were going to leave and just go to the buffet. In our opinion that was very closed minded as all of the dishes did have a description, but whatever… Anyhow, so here we sat, just the 2 of us at a table for 8. We made jokes with our waiter and his boss about this big empty table (that they never did end up refilling with additional guests) and had an absolutely delicious lunch. That group sure didn’t know what they were missing out on! We enjoyed the waitstaff so much that we asked for his name and if we could request to be put in his section for dinner.
We spent the rest of the day getting reacquainted with the ship; we have sailed on the Summit 3 times prior but it went through a refit since then and is looking better than ever for a 25ish year old ship. Since it was a Christmas cruise we were excited to see how they decorated the ship as we were walking around. Since cruises tend to be “over the top” with a lot of things, we didn’t know what to expect for the festive season and had to check out the decorations. It was nicely decorated with garland, Christmas trees, and lots of gingerbread houses, but wasn’t as big and flashy as I thought it might be.
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| The grand staircase was used for the gingerbread house display. |
Friday 12/19- Key West
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| Pulling into port before sunrise. |
Unfortunately, Home Depot was kind of a bust as Ramie didn’t find a hammer drill that he wanted, which was the main goal, but he did find a few other things to make this trip less useless. Since we were over on this end of town we used the opportunity to also stop at Walgreens, Auto Zone, and another CVS. When we were done with all of these stops, we caught an Uber back to Old Town where the ship was docked and walked around the cute little “historic” and boutique-y area for a while before going back to the ship.
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| Ramie on the far right |
Saturday 12/20- Day 3 was our first sea day.
We were up and at ‘em early enough that we got some good chairs on the pool deck and relaxed there for a few hours before moving on to some of the other activities that they offer throughout the day. For those of you who have never been on a cruise, I can’t speak for other cruise lines, but Celebrity does a pretty good job of offering a lot of different types of activities throughout the day in different areas of the ship. They have fun competitions on the pool deck, and inside activities like trivia, games, and arts and crafts for people who don’t want to spend time at the pool or are looking for something to do out of the sun. Today I wanted to go participate in their “adult coloring” activity, but after a few minutes, I wasn’t really into it and decided that we should move on and find something else to do. They also had a craft thing where you could make your own paracord bracelets, that was much more fun than coloring! We’ve been participating in the trivia as well with each "event" being a different theme.
Tonight was what Celebrity calls “chic night”, which is the fancy night where everyone gets dressed up in their formal suits and dresses. We always used to get really into this with Ramie in a full suit and tie, and me in a fancy cocktail dress with all of the jewelry and accessories that go along with it. Unfortunately, we don’t have that kind of stuff here in Costa Rica, but we pulled together enough outfits together to make it work. We do miss dressing up all fancy and for future cruises will try to have more of the things to make this fancy night more like it used to be for us.
After dinner we decided to hang out at the Martini Bar and watch the flair bartenders. These guys are amazing to watch; they are the ones who do all of their fun bar tricks, plus, when you are sitting close and you can hear the banter between them, they are really funny! After ordering a few drinks and watching their “show”, we felt obligated to tip them… which then earned us free “upgrade” drinks for the rest of the night.
One unique thing about the Martini bar on Celebrity ships is the ice bar. This is the most snow that we’ve seen in about 5 years, so Ramie built himself a snowman! He didn’t last long before he melted, but it was still kind of fun to “play in the snow” without having to get dressed up for the cold weather!
The Dominican Republic has a LOT of amber deposits and the next stop was the Amber Museum. Spanish is the native language here, and at the beginning of the tour, we were greeted in Spanish by the museum tour guide and we replied in Spanish. The tour guide was impressed and asked us if we wanted the tour in Spanish or English, so we told him that our Spanish wasn't great, but we knew some. He told us that he would give us the tour in Spanish and would clarify things in English if we needed it. It turns out that even after the rum, we could follow right along with the whole tour in Spanish!! We still can’t get away from the Spanish, and it turns out we are better at understanding it than we thought, but it was helpful that this guide spoke slowly, clearly, and probably tried to use simple words for us! The next stop was the chocolate factory which was another very short tour that ended in their gift shop. We did buy some Dominican chocolate to bring home with us as we don’t particularly care for Costa Rican chocolates (except at the chocolate tour with Deiner’s family). We stopped at a few other “scenic” places around town before heading to our last stop, the original Spanish Fort which was very close to the cruise ship.
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| Umbrella Street |
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| Pink Street |
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| Whats in there? |
Monday 12/22- Puerto Rico
Tuesday 12/23- St. Maarten
We’ve been to St. Maarten before, so today we would just enjoy a beach day at the beach that is walking distance from the cruise port. There were 7 ships scheduled to be in port today with one of the largest in the world, over 7,000 passengers, being there with us. We knew this ahead of time, so several months ago we reserved a chair at Big Bastard’s Beach Bar and it turns out that this was a great idea! Now we were guaranteed a space on the beach and didn't have to fight with potentially thousands of other tourists for a spot!
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| Had to represent Taylor and Dylan |
We sat around, relaxed by the calm Caribbean waters, swam a little bit, maybe drank a lot. We had a laugh because a drum line came through playing Christmas carols, and at home we can hear the high school drumline as plain as day from our house. It was like it was following us! Tracy and I always joke about the drums, so of course I recorded a few seconds and sent it to her just for the laughs! After a long morning and early afternoon at the beach we headed back to the ship to clean up, grab a light lunch, and then headed to the Sunset bar at the back of the ship for sail away.
We weren’t up for dinner in the dining room tonight, so we went to the buffet instead, and afterward that we sat in the hot tub for about an hour or two. We had almost the entire pool deck to ourselves while everyone else was at dinner or the shows so it was nice and peaceful.
Wednesday 12/24- St Croix USVI
Today was Christmas Eve and we didn’t even leave the ship today. Many weeks ago when we were trying to decide what we wanted to do at each of our stops, Ramie decided that he wanted to go to Cruzan Rum distillery here on St. Croix for a tour. Unfortunately, being Christmas Eve, the distillery and nearly everything else we could think of were closed. We talked about doing an excursion through the ship, but nothing really caught our attention so we opted to stay on the ship and do whatever was going on onboard today.
It was nice and quiet while everyone else was out doing all of the off-ship activities that they booked as we sat by the mostly empty pool for most of the day. At one point the activity by the pool was the “question of the day” How many cans of club soda do they typically go through on the length of our cruise? There were only a few people playing, and after numerous guesses by everyone, and the host kind of telling us if we were too high or too low, I won the rubber ducky prize. The answer was 2,184 cans. I joked that with me being on the cruise ship they could increase that by about another case worth.
When we had enough sun, we headed to the coffee shop for our afternoon coffee, and then to our room to make phone calls to our families to wish everyone a Merry Christmas. This evening was chic (fancy) night, so we dressed up again, and after dinner headed back to the Martini Bar.
One of the things happening this evening were Christmas Carols with the Captain and officers. This would be happening in the Martini bar area too, so we were in the right place at the right time. They handed out the lyrics to the carols that they would be singing and everyone in this area participated; well almost everyone!
There were some people standing next to me, who were complaining about all the Christmas decorations, Christmas Spirit, and Christmas activities on the ship and definitely did not like this Christmas Carol thing... Ummmm, you do realize you booked a Christmas Cruise right? What did you expect?! Fine you don't celebrate Christmas, then why did you come to the one area of the ship specifically where this was ADVERTISED at a specific time to have a CHRISTMAS Activity!? I just don't get it! Bah Humbug yourselves and move away from me, I am here to enjoy!
Thursday 12/25- Merry Christmas!!
Today was a sea day, so what do you do on a sea day? As we mentioned, there are tons of scheduled activities all of the time, and since we enjoyed the paracord bracelet making a few days ago, today I wanted to go do the macrame activity in the morning. It was fun, but unfortunately the people who planned the supplies for this Christmas decoration that we were making didn't have the sting cut long enough to finish it. Oh well, we learned how to make it and spent some time doing an activity, that was good enough for me.
The seas were a little bit wavy this morning and since this activity was taking place at the bow (front) of the ship on the very top deck, I could really feel the motion of the ship and started feeling a little bit queasy. The best way for me to avoid feeling like this on a wavy day is to hang out mid-ship. Our options were to either go back to our room or the pool deck where the motion of the ship is more stable. We chose the pool deck.
Because of the waves and wind, they had the top deck closed this morning, so we found some chairs in the shade at the pool level, and spent nearly the entire day here. Being in shade, we actually felt kind of chilly today, as it has been cooler than we were expecting for most of this trip so far. Ramie checked our position on the map and saw that we were actually out in the Atlantic ocean today, hence the waves we were experiencing and the cooler weather. Regardless it was a very low-key day.
We also got a message from Paola (our pet sitter). She was dressing all of the dogs up in Christmas outfits and taking their pictures. Skye was all dressed up and looking so pretty.
Friday 12/26- Sea Day-
There wasn't really anything on the schedule of activities planned for today that we wanted to do, so we sat by the pool again all day just enjoying it. We were still out in the Atlantic, and today we even noticed that others on the ship must have been chilly too, as they were wrapping up in pool towels while sitting out at the pool deck. Truthfully, one thing that I did notice that was probably the biggest difference from what we remember from when we used to cruise, is that we’ve been spoiled by the warmth of Costa Rica. We used to cruise in February, often the coldest part of the year in MN. The temperature difference was huge and it always felt soooo warm. Now, it was noticeably cooler here in the Caribbean than it is in Uvita, and I would have been happy in warmer clothing than we had brought onboard with us!
One thing that I haven’t mentioned previously is that every morning I wake before Ramie, and in order not to be noisy in the room, I would quietly get dressed, go get a coffee at the coffee shop, then to Guest Services to get the daily crossword, sudoku, and word search puzzles for each of us. I would sit in the coffee shop and work on one of the puzzles or read until Ramie woke up join me or text me that I should bring a coffee up to him. Today we worked on all of the puzzles that we hadn’t finished yet and ventured around to do some other random things on the ship, but it was just another nice relaxing day. We have also been feeling much better since we stopped stuffing ourselves full of food 3x per day. We ended the day by sitting at the very back of the ship at the Sunset Bar again, one of our favorite late afternoon/evening spots if we aren't eating dinner in the dining room, as we sailed through the Bahamas on our way back to FL, watching the sun go down before having dinner at the buffet and going back to our room to pack.
This was the overall cruise route for this trip
Saturday 12/27- Disembarkation, travel home
Disembarkation day is always the worst day of the cruise, mostly because it means the cruise is over. They want you off the ship pretty early so that they can get it ready for the people getting on the ship in a few hours. Instead of one of the scheduled departure times like we used to do, this time we opted for the self walk off. Most people pack their luggage and put it outside their room the night before, the staff takes it away and when you get off the ship in the morning you’ll pick it up in the large warehouse to go through customs. That morning you wait in your designated area on the ship until they tell you to get off and go find your things. For the self walk off that we are doing you keep your luggage and take it off the ship yourself, and you can leave as soon as the ship is cleared in though customs. For us, that meant we could leave at about 7:45 am. We were up early at 5:30, got ready and watched the sun rise from our balcony.
When we heard the announcement that we were “good to go”, we grabbed our luggage and made our way off the ship and through customs. Outside the terminal Ramie scheduled an Uber to come pick us up and bring us to the Miami airport. Our flight was at 1:30pm, but we can't wait here so we really have no choice but to head to the airport and wait it out. This morning in Florida it was 60 degrees, all we had were our shorts and t-shirts, and I will say, we were both COLD, wishing for jeans and/or a hoodie. Boy have we been de-sensitized to the chill by living in Costa Rica!
After a mostly uneventful travel day, we arrived in San Jose around 3:30pm and Paola, our pet sitter, was waiting to pick us up. We originally had scheduled her husband to come get us, but he wasn’t feeling well today, so he was on dog duty and she was driving. We hadn’t eaten all day (and still had cruise-stomach) so we asked her to stop along the way at Burger King in Jaco (we didn't want to waste time at a regular restaurant) for a bite to eat and eventually got home around 9pm. We will pick Skye up tomorrow since it's too late tonight to get her all excited.
Since we had scheduled this cruise, we have been wondering how we would feel about it now after not cruising for so many years and living here for the last 4.5. I will say, after completing this 9 day cruise, we absolutely do miss it and still love cruising. So much so that we put reservations down on 2 more future sailings. We didn’t have to pick which cruises we’d be going on yet, but have 6 months to decide which ones we want to go on within the next 2 years. We are absolutely already thinking about our next one (or more) and want to make it longer than 9 days. We are strongly considering trying back-to-back cruises so that we can spend a couple of weeks on the ship. Who wants to join us for our next one? (Real time update: we have booked back-to-back 7 day and 9 day Caribbean cruises for January 2027. Who wants to join us?)
Pura Vida!
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