We have booked a room toward the back of Deck 6 on Royal Caribbean’s Independence of the Seas for the 30th – 4th!!! It’s kind of a deluxe suite. A superior oceanview stateroom with a private balcony.

On the site, there was a diagram of the ship’s various decks with little blinking red dots indicating the rooms that were still available. I picked the one furthest from the elevators and that would get fewer people going by on the lowest deck available. Sam’s had tech issues, so we eventually booked through Cosco and got a better deal from them in the end anyway. So it ended up saving us a little bit of money. Was surprised to find it’s more expensive the higher up you go. I don’t know why most people would rather be on higher decks. I like being lower so I’m closer to the water’s surface.

• The plan is to fly from Sacramento to Fort Lauderdale on the 29th.
• The ship embarks at 4:30 pm on the 30th and we will spend the 31st at sea.
• We dock in Cozumel at 8am on the 1st and set sail again at 5pm.
• We arrive at 7am in Costa Maya the next day and leave at 4pm.
• We spend the 3rd cruising and return to Fort Lauderdale on the 4th at 7am.
• On the 8th we return home.

We will then rent a car and drive up to Tammy’s where we’ll check into a nearby hotel. We’ll probably call her later on today to discuss the details.

We opted for My Time dining as we don’t care to dress up for a formal fancy dinner at a set time with the captain. We prefer the food courts that have a variety of cuisines as well as room service.

As for excursions. Besides the obvious… shopping and swimming, I’m not sure I want to swim with dolphins or see the ancient ruins. A dolphin swim would be okay, but I’d much rather go helmet diving. That’s where you wear a helmet that provides air and that sits on your shoulders. You go down 20’ and a tube extends up to the surface. You have scuba divers with you at all times, of course.

As for the ruins… I could see pictures online of that sort of thing. I know there are underwater pics as well, but that’s not quite the same to me. Tom was really impressed with the pyramids in Mexico which he saw long before we met. He said it was really neat how they carved each individual stone over centuries to fit together, and he stood on the platform on which many were sacrificed all in the name of twisted beliefs. Oh, the crazy acts and delusions of those into religion and the whole God fantasy thing. Ah, if only believing something could make it real, huh? LOL Oh well, to each their own when they’re not actually killing people.

We don’t yet have the flights booked or the details mapped out precisely, but we don’t want to book excursions too far in advance anyway in case we don’t feel up to doing a particular thing on that day.

Glad my 4-day late period is starting now to get some of this water off me, but I was really hoping it’d wait another week so I wouldn’t be PMSing or on it during the trip. Figures, though. I was on it during our last cruise, too.

Our Fitbits arrived, but tangerine? Mine looks red to me. Makes me wonder what the plum I almost got would have looked like, but red is fine.

In last night’s dreams, I was stepping into the street and saw tons of giant snakes all over the place. Some weighed hundreds of pounds.

Then I was living with someone who wanted to add another roommate. I expressed my doubts at first, knowing how many dishonest people there are out there, but the woman was very confident that she could find someone trustworthy and that people were still basically good.