Vaction Blog VI: I don't know how it gets much better that this

Friday, April 1st

10:00 AM – Up at a reasonable hour and off to breakfast. We are not even in port yet, so we are still not seeing anything but water from our balcony. Breakfast is good as always, what a high quality buffet this is. Really well done.

11:00 AM – Back in the room and now we can see the Bahamas. All we can really see at this point is the port and surrounding areas but man do they ever look nice.

12:50 PM – Off the ship to meet with our tour group. We are whisked away on a boat ride of around 20 minutes where we pass by some of the huge houses owned by some of the richest mega-celebrities imaginable; Beyoncé and Jay-Z (man did he ever out-punt his coverage when he married her), Michael Jordan, and Oprah herself.

Oh, and we also go by Eddie Murphy’s island. Yes, Beverly Hills Cop 1-4 paid for an entire island.

At one point today, a fly lands on my arm. Why would I mention that in my blog? Because we have been gone a week and that is the first insect OF ANY KIND that I have seen. We took all the necessary precautions to avoid the Zika virus and never saw a single mosquito or anything else. Not one. We could have been dancing naked covered in honey and not had to worry about getting Zika.

We arrive at the island where our excursion is happening and it’s gorgeous. Lots of white sand, nice water, and lots of lounge chairs to sit in as well. Our particular excursion doesn’t need any of these things but maybe we’ll have a bit of time to lounge after our event is over.

What is the event I’ve been teasing for a couple days? This.

Best kiss I’ve had in years. Soft and tender, yet wet and fishy. Best of all, I’m told she is single.

So that’s our big event this cruise, a fully interactive experience with Sea Lions. What a bunch of incredible animals. So smart, so friendly, and so magnificent. We are in the water with another Sea Lion named Maggie for 20-25 minutes where she prances around, does a bunch of tricks, and splashes the heck out of Tracey J

After the Sea Lion encounter is done we have about a half hour to enjoy the sun and sand before the boat returns to take us back to our cruise ship. Tracey remarks on the colour of the water, which she calls “the greatest colour on Earth”. I think she’s right. It makes all the other amazing water we’ve seen in the Caribbean look like swamp water.

I can’t describe this colour of blue, except to say that if Paradise were a colour, this is what I’d imagine it to look like.

How could this trip get any better?

5:10 PM - We get back to the ship, now completely intending to come back and take a bigger bite of the Bahamas someday. We have time to shower the sand off of us and then get dressed for our last dinner of the cruise, back at our favorite haunt, the Manhattan Room.

6:00 PM – We get a table right up front for the show, which features the exact same group we saw last time we were here, but they are doing an entirely different set. This time, it’s all 70’s soul. The show is short, only about 20 minutes, but they are really good and it’s nice to hear some live music while we eat. Tracey and I order the exact same appetizer and same entrée tonight, which works out well because both should pair nicely with the wine we brought, the other Pinot Noir from Hartford Court. You may recall I said that the last one (which we opened early in the cruise) was going to get a really high number when I did my wine blog report. Well, honey, this one absolutely blew it away. Not to spoil the review for those of you who also read my wine blog, but something tells me this one might put every wine we’ve ever had to shame. It’s that good. Tracey’s first question of me was “how can we get more of this????”.  Good thing I’ve got a connection or two.

In fact it was so good we asked them to bring us a third wine glass so we could pour a sample to take to the wine bar and let Richard, their wine steward and our newest wine buddy, have a taste. Turns out he doesn’t like Pinot Noir.

 But he liked THIS one!

We bid our farewell to a really good wine steward, and a really nice wine bar, and head back to the room to get ready to disembark tomorrow. We are both devastated to be leaving, which would make sense if our vacation was over….but for chrissake we are on our way to an incredible resort in Orlando for two weeks in our Happy Place! It goes to show how fantastic this week has been that we are actually sad to be going to Disney World! LOL.

I fell in love three times today. Once with that saucy little Sea Lion above. Secondly with the water of the Bahamas. Third with the wine I just mentioned. Three times in one day seems like a little bit piggish to me but I’ll live with it.

8:00 PM – Back to the room where I am writing this blog; not going to be able to upload it until tomorrow as I’ve gone WAYYYYYYYYY over budget in my internet expenses. The only downside to cruising in the middle of nowhere is that internet access is incredible poor and ridiculously expensive. I won’t be back online until we get into our resort tomorrow night. We always set detailed budgets when we go on trips like this to try to keep things in line; that doesn’t usually work out all that well. Luckily for us, we are in a position where our budgets are “let’s try to stick to X”, more that “we can ONLY spend X” on a particular thing. So far this trip, we are pretty much on budget. It helps when your food spend some days is pretty close to 0.

While I’m writing the blog, Tracey is opening up our last bottle of wine; the second bottle of the Hartford Court Chardonnay that we brought. Wine blog readers may remember that I said this was the best white wine I’ve ever tasted when I first reviewed it. So now, tonight, after just tasting the (spoiler) best red wine I’ve ever had, I’m now about to taste another bottle of my 97-point rated white. Boy my life is really rough.

We certainly did a great job of estimating our beverage consumption on this trip. As I mentioned, we are leaving here with 0 bottles of wine, and there is one can of Diet Coke left which I will have with tomorrow’s breakfast. And no bottled water left either. We can actually leave here with one suitcase less than we came with!

Time to pack up most of our stuff and then get to bed, we are going to be walking off the ship early tomorrow and starting the next leg of our journey, the drive from Miami to Orlando.