Cruise Day 4 (Jan 14) Roatan, Honduras

On day 4, we were on the island of Roatan which is of the coast of, and part of Honduras. I had read about Roatan and have been wanting to go there for quite some time. The island was beautiful. It has lush green jungles and the scuba diving is world renown. We booked the scuba shore excursion with two dives. The bus took us through the hills and jungles to the cruise operator, Anthony’s Key Resort. Their website is: (http://www.anthonyskey.com/en/index.html

This is Joseph, John and Mark after the first dive.

Jon Paul and John took over a hundred underwater photos with Jon Paul’s camera. I wanted to post a few of them to give you an idea of what we saw. I know this is still a lot of photos, so you can scroll past them if you get bored. There were so many amazing fish and other creatures; it was hard to not post them. John Upside down.

Joseph

This is Mark and Joseph coming up after the 2nd dive.

When the boat returned to the dock, it felt good to rinse off in the fresh water shower.

By the dock, there were some pretty flowers. I believe they were bougainvillea. The flowers were even prettier when Mom was next to them.

Back on the ship, we had real showers and changed clothes. These are Mom on the balcony with Roatan in the background.

When we got off the ship there was a group of local people singing and playing local native music in traditional costume. They stayed there all day and continued to play as our ship was departing. This was taken as we were leaving.

Cruise Day 3 (Jan 13) Cozumel, Mexico:

We had planned on scuba diving in Cozumel, but they were sold out by the time we signed up. For some unknown reason, the ship was only allotted half the normal scuba diving openings. So we decided to do the ATV Jungle Tour instead, which turned out to really be a lot of fun.

When we got off the ship, we were photographed with one of the descendants of a scary Mayan. We were docked next to Grandeur of the Seas, which was the ship we were on for the first cruise for most of the family when we had the big family

We arrived at the ATV Ranch in the jungle all nice and clean.

After watching the video on how to drive the ATVs, we were given orange bandanas to put on our heads before we put on our helmets. We got on our ATVs and we were ready to go.

Since it had been raining, there were lots of muddy puddles. The information about the ATV tour said that we should expect to get muddy. In spite of that information, at first we were cautiously going around the mud puddles to keep from getting our clothes covered in mud, but after a while, we went right into the puddles and got lots of mud on ourselves and had a blast.
We had two breaks where we stopped at some small Mayan Ruins. With our helmets off, you can see our cool bandanas.
They also had goggles to wear when it was dusty. We did not really need them because the road was wet, but Mom wanted to try one on. Doesn’t she look like the coolest mom ever?
We were still pretty muddy when we got back to the ship. Our clothes were so dirty that we used the ship laundry to get our clothes cleaned. We had a lot of fun and would do this tour again.

Cruise Day 2 (Jan 12) At Sea, somewhere in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico:

After sleeping in and having a late breakfast, we had lunch at Johnny Rockets. After lunch, we went up one deck to the miniature golf course. It was cold when we left Galveston, but by afternoon the next day, the temperature was quite pleasant. We all had a good time playing golf.

After golf, four of us climbed on the wall.

When Mom climbed the wall, several people were impressed. I then told them that she was a grandmother and they were really impressed.
Our final activity of the day was shuffleboard. Of course every activity began and ended with food.

January 11, 2009 Cruise - Day 0 and day 1

We went on a cruise departing Galveston, TX on Sunday, January 11, 2009 (Day 1) On Royal Caribbean Voyager of the Seas. Our group of 6 people consisted of Mark, John, Joseph, Jon Paul Anderson, Mom and me. We arrived in Houston the day before on Saturday (Day 0) after driving for 14 hours from St. Louis.

We had originally booked a room in Galveston for Saturday night, but the Hotel contacted us and told us that they still had 60% of the rooms occupied be FEMA workers and displaced residences, so only 40% of those with reservations would actually be able to get a room, so they recommended that we get another room. Mark and I booked rooms at the Super 8 next to I-45 in South Houston.

After Mark, John, and Jon Paul arrived, we were getting ready to go eat dinner and Mom casually asked if everyone had their passports. John said he forgot his. We of course thought he was kidding, but he wasn’t. His passport was still in San Jose, with the cruise departing the next morning. After some investigation, we found the only solution that would work was to have Jimmy get John’s passport and take it to Continental Air Cargo window at San Francisco airport before 11pm and it could go out on the 12:30am flight and arrive in Houston on a direct flight at 6am. The cost was $78 but that was better than not going on the cruise. Fortunately, John talked to Jimmy and he took care of getting the passport to the airport and then John and I picked it up at the Houston airport early the next morning.

Once we got the passport problem resolved we went to a local BBQ place that was pretty good. We could tell the locals liked it because it looked like most of the police in the area ate their. The baked potato they served with the BBQ was huge and probably weighed 2 lbs before adding butter and sour cream.

After we got John’s passport, we ate the continental breakfast that the Super 8 had. It was not very good, so we really looked forward to the lunch on the ship. We attended Sacrament meeting at the Clear Lake 2nd Ward near the Johnson Space Center Southeast of Houston. We enjoyed the ward there.

This is Joseph and me with our backpacks on as we were leaving the hotel to go to church. Joseph looked like a missionary, but my hair was the wrong color.

This is John on the parking shuttle very happy to have a passport in hand. We kept church clothes on for boarding.

This is picture of the single men checking in. Dozens of people asked if we were coming from a wedding when they saw that we were all dressed up. There were a lot of older people on the ship and almost all of the older women thought Mark, John, Jon Paul, and Joseph were amazingly handsome and enjoyable to be around.

A photo of our welcome aboard photo.

Once on the ship, we had a really good lunch. After lunch we went to our rooms. This is Mom enjoying an ice cream cone after lunch in our room while she talked on the phone.

Dinner was a few hours later. It was really good too. The after dinner snacks were also good.

Christmas Decorations

In preparing for the Home School Christmas activity at our house, Mom put up more Christmas decorations.
Stockings are hung by the chimney with care, and a fire is lit to singe Santa's hair.

Many of the women coming to the home school Christmas activity a few days ago had heard about Mom’s nativity sets and had asked if she would have them available to see, so Mom set some of them up in displays. They look really good, so I thought I should take a few photos and post them.

I also shot close ups of several of the sets, but I did not want to post all of those here. I will include one clos up of one of my favorites:

Next to most of the nativity sets are signs that read "from Italy" or Germany, Peru, Russia, Kyrgyzstan, South Africa, Spain, Jerusalem, Holland, etc indicating where they came from.

This one is labeled "from Uncle Mark"

Christmas Tree

On Saturday, we got a Christmas tree. This first photo is Joseph holding the tree up on our deck. You would think it was cold the way he is holding it.

Once in the house, we put lights (400) and ornaments on it. Not all of the ornaments are on yet so it looks like we do not have enough on the lower portion of the tree.
This is what it looks like with the lights on in the room and using the flash on the camera.

This is what it looks like with the lights off and without the flash. The only light is from the 400 little lights on the tree.

I also took some close up shots without the flash of two of my favorite ornaments.

Mom got a new ornament this year of Captain Kirk and the Tribbles. This is photo of it.

When the button is pushed, tribbles fall from the overhead hatch and Captain Kirk speaks three different excerpts from the TV show. I recorded all three quotes, but the macro focusing ability of the camera does not seem to work in video mode.