A Great Week Indeed!

I am coming off of a great week!

First of all, I finally, after four years of being a nurse, got my ACLS certification!  That stands for Advanced Cardiovascular Life Support.  I feel all nursey and ready to save a life now!  Just have to keep myself refreshed on the material so I'll remember it.

Second, I spent a few days in Orlando at Universal Studios with my wonderful friends Bela, Priti (and her husband Brad), and their mom Miss Gita.  Bela is my best friend from nursing school, one of the few I've kept in touch with.  She has become one of my very best friends for life, and we had such a great time hanging out in Orlando!  I was sad to come home, but there are always lots more good times to come!

We picked a great time of the year to go.  The crowds were minimal (for a theme park) and the weather was hot but not too hot with very little rain.  You can't win with Florida weather even in September, so you take what you can get.  I have to say, after this week I can finally say I love Universal Orlando.  I am a Disney girl through and through, so it was difficult for me to love Universal even though I've been three times before this.  I was always comparing it to Disney in the past, but I think it takes being with the right people to learn to love something like this.  I had a blast!

Here are some pictures from our time there.

 The first night, at the hotel getting ready to go to dinner.

 Me and Miss Gita, Bela and Priti's mom.  One of the most genuine, sweet ladies I have ever known!

 A pretty typical moment for us.

 Enjoying yummy nachos and queso.

 Miss Gita, Bela, and me.

 All aboard the Hogwarts Express!  The conductor declared us to be his wives, upon which Bela and I were excited to discover we are now sister wives!

 Flying brooms.  Or trying to.

 In front of Hagrid's Hut

 On a ride (similar to Teacups at Disney) with Miss Gita.  I got called out over the loudspeaker on this ride to put away my cell phone.  It was worth getting this picture!

 Hogsmeade.  Wish this was a real-life place!

 I feel like I could join the Ministry of Magic with this hat.

 Just goofing off

 I've always wanted to take a picture with these since the first time I went to Universal.  So we took one.

 Getting photo-bombed by a t-rex

 We went to the Animal Actors show.  It was pretty cute!

 Just before the Despicable Me ride.  It was one of my favorites!

 We got to meet Lucy Ricardo!  She was slightly drunk.

 We had tons o'fun at Universal Orlando!

Our last meal out before leaving at Pastamore at City Walk.

Disney Cruise: Day 7

Enjoying great barbecue at Castaway Cay 

 Allison enjoying a Corona on the beach

Allison's yummy food 

One last picture before boarding the ship 

Our last meal that we ate all alone.  Sad. 

Baked Alaska... delicious! 

Allison is sad.

We are both sad to be home.

The last day of our cruise was awesome!  We spent the day in Castaway Cay, Disney Cruise Line's private island in the Bahamas.  The highlight of that day for us both was parasailing, though we didn't get any picture proof of it.  I signed us up for parasailing, as that's something I've always wanted to do.  I was scared TO DEATH to do it.  We ended up being the last in our group to go up, and I was working myself up the whole time about how high up it was and how unsafe it looked.  It ended up being so peaceful and so beautiful.  Then I wondered what I had been afraid of after all.  We spent most of that day just laying on the beach and relaxing.  Castaway Cay is really neat.  We wished we could have spent more than just the one day there.

One thing we finally treated ourselves to that night was room service.  I ordered a glass of wine, Allison beer.  And we wondered why we hadn't done that earlier?  We were just too tired to go to any of the lounges for a drink.  I ended up falling asleep early, and we had to be off the ship the next day by 9:00 am.  It's kind of sad how quickly you wake up and are kicked off the ship.  Already we were planning when and where our next cruise would be.  Who knows?

Disney Cruise: Days 5&6

Wednesday Beach Day in Cozumel! 

Isn't this how you want to spend all your days? 

Just goofing off at the beach 

Beautiful Cozumel Beach 

Yummy Mexican lunch 

Whenever we went on excursions at the ports, we would wear these stickers so that we always knew who our group was.

"We're having so much fun!"

 Animator's Palate- my favorite place for supper.  It was so Disney!

We became official Disney animators!

I drew myself, how original.

Our masterpiece drawings.

Javier was a great stateroom host!  Loved all the animals he would make out of the towels every night. 

Our table mates.  On two different nights, the photographers came around to take our pictures, and thought we were all family.  They'd ask Mark to take pictures with his granddaughters (meaning me and the girl, Kayley, on the right), and call us sisters as well.  We tried explaining that we weren't related but it never seemed to make sense to the photographers so finally we would play along and just laugh the whole time.  I actually ended up buying this picture, because I really enjoyed our time with our table mates and regretted not finding a way to stay in touch, especially with Mark and Pat. 

That night was the pirate party, as well as the fireworks, which we really didn't get any good pictures of.  However, there was a huge buffet and once again we ate more than our fair share. 

Thursday was another day at sea, always my favorite.  We meandered around the ship a lot of the day, and looked through the shops. 

Yummy coffee from the Cove 

Getting ready to play bingo... although, we ended up not playing bingo due to the ticket prices being ridiculous. 

Taking one of our many walks on deck 4.  Here I was trying to imitate Lucille Ball in the episode of I Love Lucy when she tries to learn ballet. 

Allison enjoying a walk on deck 4. 

We saw Lincoln that day.  Great movie!  At first I didn't like the idea of watching movies in the theater on the ship, because it seemed like a way to waste great vacation time.  But by Thursday I was so tired, it seemed like a great idea.

One of the cool bathrooms on the ship.  We just had to take pictures! 

 Ok, so I didn't actually eat that.  I had high ambitions to try to be adventurous with food choices.  Not even Allison would eat it, though, so I don't feel so badly.

 And we ended Thursday by seeing Oz premiere at midnight!  Good movie, though I wished they had based it off the actual Oz books.  Most people don't know that there was an entire series based around the land of Oz.  The story we are all familiar with was just one of many books.

By Thursday we were starting to get really exhausted.  I can kind of see now why people only do 4 or 5 night cruises, though I still say I wouldn't want to do any shorter than what we did.  Having the day at sea helped a lot, because there is so much less pressure to do a lot of things in a short amount of time.  By this time we felt very at home on the ship, knew our way around, and really just enjoyed simply being on the ship and relaxing.  We were ok with spending time in our state room watching an on-demand Disney movie (or the documentary about Walt's life... *sniff*) or sitting at the coffee shop by the pool.

For the next cruise, I'd be totally fine with fewer excursions and just more relaxing, but we'll figure all that out when the time comes.  Anyway, only one more post left and I'll be done documenting it!