Cruise 2014 - Day 1, 2 & 3

Well, our honeymoon cruise is complete! We left on Tuesday as soon as Josh got home from class. We packed up the car and drove down to Las Vegas! It was such an amazing drive! We passed through the corner of Arizona and right past the Grand Canyon because we were driving right up close and personal to some awesome mountains!!!

Josh and I were jamming nonstop to my iPod. Our cruise theme song, you ask? "Danza Kuduro" from the Fast Five movie! It's awesome! Anyways, the drive was a long 5 hours, but it was definitely beautiful! We also passed through St. George, which I've always wanted to see. We stopped at a Wendy's and had lunch. We passed the St. George Temple and I can't believe how white it is! I'm glad we got to see all those beautiful mountains! Pretty soon, we were heading into Las Vegas and we could see the Strip! Finally, we got to our hotel, the Excalibur, and we checked in. As soon as we dropped our stuff off in our room, we headed out to see the Strip! We walked up and down the Strip for 3 hours! We got to see the Bellagio Water/Light Show and all the lights of the Strip. The Bellagio Water/Light/Music Show was really cool to see. Josh didn't enjoy it as much as I did, but it was definitely neat.
The worst thing about Vegas is that there are people all over the sidewalks on the Strip flicking these cards with their finger. Later, Josh and I saw these cards all over the ground and with one glance, we knew not to look again. There are full-on naked women on these cards!!

We couldn't believe it! Apparently these people work for some escort service business and they hand out these cards to people passing by on the Strip for advertising. Crazy! Yuck! Anyways, we quickly learned what the clicking noise meant and knew to look away. Anyways, after 3 straight hours of walking, we were absolutely pooped! We walked back to the hotel and had some dinner. Our hotel was pretty cool; it's called the Excalibur Resort and Casino. It was pretty cheap to stay and Josh got to try his hand in the slot machines. :)

Our hotel looked like a Princess Castle and it was right next to the New York New York Hotel, which was also pretty cool. There's the Hershey's Store in that hotel, which was super cool to see. Anyways, so we were so exhausted from all our walking up and down the Strip, so we went to bed. We knew we had to be up early the next day for our flight, so we went to bed. However, we were both wide awake at 1 in the morning! The airport is so close to the Strip that we had airplanes flying over us all night. The noise woke us up every once in awhile during the night, and the bed/pillows sucked. So we were both wide awake at 1 am and neither of us could sleep. After we tossed and turned and no luck, Josh turned the TV on. "Legally Blonde" was on so I watched that. Josh finally drifted back to sleep, but I finished watching the movie. I finally fell back to sleep around 3 am. I was up at 6 am, and Josh a little later. We got ready, packed up, checked out, and drove to the airport. We hopped on our flight and arrived at LAX!!! We got on our shuttle and it took us to the LA Cruise Terminal Port. We checked into the cruise, went through security, and after they took a million pictures of us, we finally boarded the ship!

It was so cool to see the gigantic ship waiting for us at the pier! It was absolutely incredible! We went to our room, Deck Emerald, Stateroom 615. When we checked in, we both got our cruise cards, which is linked to my debit card. So the cruise card works like a credit card while you're on board. The cards also gets you into your dining reservation every night. When the cruise is over, the cards are deactivated and you get to keep them! They have your name, dining information, and stateroom on it so it's kind of a cool souvenir from our trip!

As soon as we dropped our stuff off in our room and checked out our room a little bit, we ran off to explore the ship! We were both really excited to explore all the adventures the ship had in store for us! :) As we came on the ship, they told us that the Horizon Court was serving a lunch buffet. We also knew from our research that our ship, the Golden Princess, had a place to get pizza whenever we wanted, and a place to get ice cream whenever! Wow...our dream come true!

We explored and explored and explored! About an hour later, we finally found the Passenger Service desk and I asked for a map of the ship. They were so kind enough to give me a handy little map and that helped so much! We walked around the ship for awhile trying to figure out where everything was. We weren't leaving the LA port until 4 pm and we got on the ship around 1, so we had lots of time to explore. At 3:15, we had to grab our life jackets and go to our Muster Stations for the muster safety drill. The muster drill is like on an airplane, but for boats. They told us how to properly put a life jacket on and we got to practice. They went through all the safety information of what to do in an emergency and then we were done! We went out on the deck and sat on a bench to watch as we left port.

I soon found my favorite part of the ship...the back! I'm standing on 2 decks above the pool and right behind where I'm standing are 2 Oasis hot tubs where Josh and I spent a lot of our time. The sun was the best in this spot so I laid out quite a bit in this area. It is really windy directly at the back of the ship, but it was perfect where the hot tubs were.

An important part of a cruise is the choice of dining you decide upon when you book. The agent that helped me when I booked our cruise suggested that since we were first-time cruisers, we do the Traditional Dining. This means that we have a specific assigned dining time, dining room, and the same dining table we eat at every night. We were assigned to eat in the Donatello Dining Room at 5:30 pm every night and we sat at Table 151. It was really great. The other choice would be to do the Anytime Dining, which is super simple. You can eat whenever and wherever you want, but you also would have to wait for a table to open. I'm really glad we did the Traditional and the food was so amazing in our Dining Room! :)

The one thing I wish we would have done is to pack more fancy and classy clothes for dinner. Our dining room was super fancy and even though I took a couple of skirts, I still felt under-dressed. This is Josh holding the menu, which was different every night. We also had a separate Dessert Menu every night and let me tell you...the desserts were AMAZING! We had ice cream sundaes, strawberry cheesecake, and cobbler! The food was absolutely divine! :)

For lunch, on the other hand, that was more of an Anytime Dining situation. We could eat whenever and wherever we wanted. Since they had the pizza bar, we had pizza most days for lunch. That was definitely Josh's dream come true...pizza...whenever he wanted! :)

On Thursday, it was Thanksgiving! This was our sea day, so we were just sailing on the ocean all day. We had reserved a couples massage at the Lotus Spa onboard for Thursday morning. It was Josh's first-ever massage so I'm glad that I was there to experience it! :) Our massages were good, but I have to say, not as good as my dearest sister, Jill! :) I'm not just saying that because she's my sister either! They definitely liked to use their elbows a lot and we were both a little sore afterwards. We spent the day eating, swimming, laying out in the sun, etc.

The view was absolutely amazing! The weather was beautiful and heck yeah I was getting my tan on! :) I learned that Josh is not much of a tanner. He's so much like my father, it's scary. He would rather sit in the room and watch TV than lay out in the sun and enjoy life. I was definitely not wasting good sunshine in the room watching TV. I was laying out in the sun, relaxing, and soaking up some rays! Also, I knew my sisters would kill me if I wasted such awesome sunshine! hehe.

Josh did lay out in the sun with me for a little while. I told him he had to for a while before he could go watch TV in the room. :) From my hair, you can see a little bit how windy it was. It was definitely more windy than I expected it to be. The sun was still good and warm though! :)



Since Thursday was Thanksgiving, we had some good Thanksgiving Day meals for dinner! Josh had turkey and stuffing while I had ham and potatoes. I almost got pumpkin pie for my dessert, but I just couldn't pass up a carmel sundae.

This picture of my meal definitely shows you a little bit of just how fancy the place was. All the food had a definite place and nothing was out of place. Our waiter was awesome! Josh is a freaking camel and he drinks so much water. I have no idea why restaurants choose to give you a little wine glass for water, but our poor waiter had to refill our water glasses like 20 times every meal! That's a bit exaggerated, but really.
Also, Thursday night, we went to see the comedian they had onboard. The cruise had so many shows going on all day and all night. The comedian was hilarious! Josh and I were a little nervous about it because we wanted it to be clean and good humor. It was exactly what we wanted! There was no bad language or bad jokes and it was absolutely hilarious! His name is Derrick Cameron if you have time to ever look him up!

We were really excited for Friday because we were going to be going to Santa Barbara. We woke up Friday morning and we were anchored outside the port of Santa Barbara. We found out that the ship doesn't pull up the port; not really sure why. Instead, we board this little boats, called tenders, and they take us to shore.

The boats were kind of crazy, but we sat up top so we could see everything better. There were lots more seats inside the boat. We enjoyed about a 5-minute ride to shore and we were warmly welcomed to Santa Barbara! We walked around the port area a little bit, just looking out at the ocean and the waves crashing on the sand.



We walked along the beach and then walked up State Street along the shops. We found a pretty cool hat store and tried on some crazy hats! We walked along the pier called Stearm's Wharf and got ice cream as we walked. I'm just going to post a bunch of pictures of Santa Barbara and then I'll repost about the rest of the cruse. Enjoy! :)

This was our view as we left the ship and headed to shore! I also took some pictures of us riding in the tender! :)