Caribbean Cruise - Half Moon Cay, Bahamas - Day 1 - 12/18/2012

Overnight, we sailed to Half Moon Cay, our first stop on the cruise.  The Cay is on the island of Little San Salvador and is said to be near where Columbus landed in 1492.  A number of places in the Caribbean make this claim.  The island was formed by limestone and coral reefs and is featureless aside from the lagoon and the beaches.  There are no permanent residents on this island....just HA employees.

Holland America (HA) has leased a strip of land from The Bahamas and has set up a play ground for it's customers/passengers. They invested millions to create a small harbor for the ferry boats to off-load and re-load the ship's passengers.  The harbor is no where big enough for the cruise ship so you have to take the tender/ferry boats to the island.  Glass bottom boats, deep sea fishing vessels, and para-gliding boats also dock here.  The island has a few shops, bars, dining facilities, and all sorts of water sports and beach equipment and buildings.  Passengers purchase "shore excursions" like deep sea fishing, jet skying, horseback riding, etc. and HA provides the personnel and equipment to make the activity happen.....happy customers and HA makes money.  This island is all about sun and water fun.  The beach is beautiful and the water is clear.  If you are looking for history, culture, wildlife or scenic beauty, you are on the wrong island.

Before we got on the tender, we took a few photos in the Main Atrium of the ship.  It was nicely decorated for Christmas.

We took the Eco Lagoon Glass Bottom Boat tour while on the island....a real mistake.  You can see the boat docked by the jet skis.  The water was too shallow and there was far too little of interest at the bottom of the lagoon to look at so we won't bore you with many photos.

This is as exciting as it gets.  HA excursion are usually pretty good, but they got us on this one.

We motored by the Sting Ray petting area where you can get up close and personal with the sting rays.  I guess they love people.  Our tour guide said the "Lucy" the sting ray really likes to nibble on people.  That didn't cause us to sign up for the adventure.  Anyway, we didn't bring our swim suits with us since we are not beach people.

The water is beautiful.

A conch shell.  They are plentiful in the waters here.  They are a source of food for the locals.

The shopping plaza.

Yes, that is Sigrid on top of the building.

As I said, the beaches are great.

The Mother Ship.

A small chapel on the island.

One of the ferry boats moving people to and from the island and the Noordam.

A few sunset shots as we headed out for Grand Turk Island, our next stop.

Life is good.

Caribbean Cruise - Embark - 12/17/2012

We flew to Fort Lauderdale via Houston on 12/16/2012 for our cruise that embarked the next day.  It was a tough day for travel not due to winter weather, but because of strong thunderstorms in the Houston area.  IAH was shutdown for about an hour as the storms passed though.  We sat in KC waiting to take off.  After dealing with the delays and gate changes that got us all too familiar with the Houston airport, we finally arrived in Fort Lauderdale a couple of hours late....no big deal.  That's why we traveled a day early.  If I had it to do over, I think we would go two days early since we were just one extra delay away from being in trouble getting to the ship on time.  If there is one thing you don't want to do, its missing the sailing of your ship.

We had a little trouble getting the shuttle bus from the airport to the Holiday Inn Express due to inadequate instructions from the hotel and poorly marked buses.  We did arrive at the hotel about 8:00 pm after getting up a 4:00 am to get ready to leave that morning....we were tired and hungry.

Having scouted the area surrounding the hotel on Google Earth, we knew that there was a German restaurant about three block from the hotel.  Old Heidelberg turned out to be a really nice place.  Sigrid and I both had Jaeger Schnitzel and enjoyed the live music.  We were just worried that the place would be open that late on a Sunday evening so the music was a real treat.  Most of the staff in the restaurant spoke German so everything was authentic.  It was a very relaxing way to end a long day.

We took 5 Guys Transportation limo service to an from the airport for this trip.  It cost $65 each way without tip for both Sigrid and me.  For a 22 day trip, it is just about a break-even compared to Economy Parking at MCI.  It sure is nice to have someone waiting for you with a sign when you get back exhausted from a long trip.  You don't have to worry about parking lot dings and whether the car will start after sitting in the December/January cold for three weeks.

We took a shuttle bus from the hotel to the ship the next morning.  Check in with Holland America was fairly easy and quick even with the number of people being processed.  Being experienced cruisers, we were able to find our room on the ship rather quickly and began enjoying the day.

Home sweet home for the next three weeks.  Our cabin is a veranda model.  We look at the cabin as a master bedroom and the rest of the ship is our house.  I got in trouble with Sigrid because the cabin I selected is just one deck up from the life boats so we can see all the hardware for the boats as we sit on the veranda.....something to think about on the next cruise.  It didn't bother me.  I was intrigued by all the cables, pulleys, hydraulic cylinders, and other hardware for lowering the boats into the water.  I tried to figure it all out in case I had to get a boat in the water all by myself.  That is just the engineer in me.

  There were several other cruise boats in port the day we left.

The is the "Liberty of the Seas" cruise ship owned by Royal Caribbean Lines.  It is about twice the size of our ship with a capacity for 3,600 passengers.  It is a beautiful ship so I had to take photos.  They departed from port right after we did.

Lots of food and other supplies being loaded for our cruise.

 

I can see one of our suitcases in the container.  It's the black one with the red strap around the middle.

There is always a drug sniffing dog on hand to check the cargo.

The stern sundeck on the Noordam.

The Lido pool.  The ship has two large pools and at least four whirlpools.

Ocean going chess set.

There is always a party as you embark.  Note the Christmas decorations.  This is a holiday cruise for Christmas and New Years.

The Pilot Boat getting ready to lead us out of the harbor.

Nothing but high rises all the way down to Miami from here.

The inter-coastal water way runs along the eastern shore of Florida.

Already in the Christmas spirit.

Sigrid has her first Pina Colada of the cruise....way too sweet but refreshing.

Nice steel drum music for the sail off.

Next up is Half Moon Cay.

Caribbean Cruise - Introduction

Every year, Sigrid and I try to find new and exciting places to visit.  We have talked about Africa, South America including Antarctica, or another Asian cruise covering areas that we hadn't visited yet.  As we looked at the travel brochures, we realized that we were overlooking the fairly close by part of the globe that we hadn't been considering....the Caribbean.

I had been on a Caribbean cruise back in the summer of 1994 but Sigrid has never been to that part of the world.  After studying our options, we selected a Holland America cruise the covered most of the best known eastern and southern islands.  Our plan was to visit one time and see as much as we could before moving on to other parts of the world.  The cruise we selected was for 21 days.  Here is the itinerary information.  The cruise was actually two cruises fit together.  That is why we visit Fort Lauderdale in the middle.  We actually did the reverse of what is shown below in that we did the Half Moon Cay, Grand Turk, etc. part of the cruise first.

Our ship was the Noordam.  It was the third Holland America ship we have cruised on with the first two being the Zandam and Volendam.  The Noordam is slightly larger that the other two.  On our two part cruise we had 1,859 and 1,857 passengers on board.  The other two ships can only handle about 1,400 passengers.  The Noordam had a crew of just over 800 taking care of us and the ship.  The Noordam was built in 2006 so it is a fairly new ship.

There will be about 21 posts following this one.  Each one will cover the activities of the day with photos and commentary.  As each new post is created, it stacks on top of the previous one so to follow the posts in order, you start here and then click on the "Newer Post" link at the end of each post to proceed.  You can use the Blog Archive on the right side of each post to skip around by island if you don't want to look at all the posts.

I will reference island types in the blog postings.  There are two types: Limestone/Coral and Volcanic origin.  The Limestone/Coral islands tend to be flat and featureless since they were, at some point, part of the ocean floor.  These islands have little soil so the vegetation is scrubby with few naturally occurring flowers and limited wildlife.  The Volcanic islands look more like Hawaii with the large mountains, lush rain forests, tropical fruits and flowers, and interesting wildlife.  All the islands have beautiful beaches and great snorkeling/scuba diving although the Limestone/Coral islands probably have an edge here.

We hope you enjoy the posts and can use the information for planning your own trip to the Caribbean.