HOT!

Well, summer has definitely arrived in Florida. Most of last week, we had temps in the 90's with humidity to match. And me outside right in the thick of it slaving away. I had thought that spending the last two summers working on the trailer would have gotten me acclimated, but I don't think it worked. I start at 7am, and most days I look like I've been playing in the sprinklers by 8am.

So, this cruise thing we did a couple weeks ago:

The Carnival Sunshine is a refurbished ship. Everything was redone and a couple new decks added, making it comparable with some of the newer ships tonnage-wise. Our stateroom was quite unexpected:

I've been in hotel rooms that were smaller. We had an ocean-view room on the lowest passenger deck. We tried to steal a peek into the inside rooms across the hall, but never managed to see if they were as large as ours. I'm pretty sure this is the largest stateroom we've ever had other than the suite we got because Debbie booked my entire extended family for my parents 50th wedding anniversary. I didn't get a good picture of it, but even the bathroom had a full-sized shower and a sink with actual counter space.

The waterfall and pool was part of the Serenity Area. I think whomever named it that needs to buy a new dictionary. Opposite the waterfall are the 30-foot speakers on either side of the drive-in-movie-sized TV screen that blasted music from early morning until midnight. Not sure how that is in any way "serene". However, the furniture was comfortable enough, and most of the music was at least something that we didn't hate.

Debbie found a hammock to relax in, and I "relaxed" the same way I always do on one of those death traps. When we retire to our beach in St. Kitts, Debbie can have the hammock. I'll take a chair thank you very much.

We did find some weird pod-type thing that seemed comfortable at first, but got annoying after a while. We stayed in it long enough for a selfie, then went looking for more comfortable place to sit.

Great place to eat if you don't mind listening to your arteries harden. The food on the ship was good, but we were a little disappointed in the selections both on the buffet and in some of the restaurants. I counted what was on the buffet our first night; if I included all three kinds of bread as separate items, there were exactly ten items on the buffet. It also seemed like there wasn't the usual number of crew, and what there was seemed like the second string. Everything got done, but sometimes an area would look neglected for a substantial time before things would be tidied up. We've never been on a two-night before, so maybe this is normal on the short cruises? Anyway, it seemed odd to us.

Some blah, blah, blah about a red frog. Live Thirsty.

In any case, it was a good couple days away from here and jobs and drama.

And that's all for now: 5am comes early.