Tiffeven

You 100% have got to stop next time you are near one.

It's soooooo beautiful

Final thoughts on Hampton Inn and Suites Jacksonville South-Bartram Park: It was your standard hotel nothing special. The internet was slow and when I watched a YouTube video this morning, it spent the majority of the time buffering until we switched it to our phone's Hotspot instead. They did offer an upgraded internet package which was an extra $5 a day, but we weren't there long enough to make it worth it. We generally stay in hotels that offer suites with a separate bedroom so we have a space away from the kids, but since we were planning on only staying there long enough to sleep, we compromised on this. It had two queen beds and a sleeper sofa. The setup was different than most other hotels I have seen like this. Instead of all three beds being next to each other, the sofa bed was across the room from the queen beds and there was a good bit of space in between which we appreciated as it gave the kids an area to play when we got ready this morning. The showers had low water pressure and were slippery as they had no type of non-slip material on the floor. I didn't wake up in the middle of the night, so the beds must not have been too bad. They were firmer than I like, but Steven said they could have been firmer (we never agree on beds as he likes super firm and I prefer super soft, but as he said we usually compromise and get super soft ). They offered a hot breakfast with pre-made cheese omelets, hashbrowns, yogurt, cereal, plain bagels, and make-it-yourself waffles (but they didn't have non-stick spray and the waffles needed it). I can't attest to whether it was good or not since I opted for Starbucks instead. Steven tried it and said it was just ok: not really good but not bad either. Nyssa, of course, had something to say about the breakfast, well atleast she did about the froot loops. She enthusiastically told us, "This is really good cereal." As for the other part of her breakfast, she was quiet and just picked through it. Overall, it was an ok hotel. I would give it a 3 out of 5. We might stay there if it were only to sleep; but for anything else, we would stay somewhere else.

We made friends with a couple on one of our other Star Class cruises. They are from Texas and raved about Buc-ee's, so when we cruised out of Galveston on Enchantment before the shut down we made a detour to checkout Buc-ee's. I was just going to walk in for a minute and let Steven know if it was as great as they claimed. Within 5 seconds of walking in the store, I ran out to the car and told Steven he had to come see for himself. Our five minute stop turned into two hours and we were still having to drag ourselves out. Now, if we come anywhere close to a Buc-ee's, we always make it a priority stop. They actually just announced last month, that they are building the world's biggest Buc-ee's about 30 minutes from our house in Sevierville, TN; and we are stoked!

We drove until we had about 5 hours left on the drive for tomorrow. We also made sure we stopped before we passed Buc-ee's so we could make that our first stop in the morning. We ended up getting the first hotel we could find that was less than a 10 minute detour, sleeps six in one room, and has atleast 4 stars on google reviews. We booked Hampton Inn and Suites Jacksonville South-Bartram Park. It probably would not be the hotel I picked if I was doing more than a quick overnight stay on my way to a destination, but as a place to sleep for the night when you are tired, it doesn't seem too bad.

This is actually getting real! Up until now, I've been so apprehensive about this cruise after so many cancellations. Thank you for letting us live vicariously through you on your current cruise. We look forward to meeting you!

@AshleyDillo and @KLA thank you both very much for jogging our memories. We have literally talked about doing both of those after reading it in other people's blogs but totally forgot about them since it's been so long. I think we are leaning towards Maho Beach this trip and downtown and the museum run by the Yoda man on our trip in November.

Looking for some advice. We seem to always do Western Caribbean itineraries and have visited most of the ports so many times that we don't even get off the ship usually. This year most of our cruises are Eastern Caribbean, so we are going to venture off the ship in port. Since the kids are not old enough to get vaccinated, they can't get off the ship unless it's a Royal Caribbean port excursion. Doing a long excursion or an excursion where we can't just leave when we want is not really our style especially with kids, so we are looking for some advice on things for Steven and me to do in St. Thomas and St. Maartin. We don't want to be off the ship away from the kids for too long, so we are looking for something that is doable in two hours where we won't feel like we are rushing off and missing stuff. In St. Thomas, we were thinking about Skyride to Paradise Point or Mountain Top, but we are also open to other ideas. We would like to be able to shop a little bit, take some nice pictures of the view, and of course eat some local cuisine. If you have any advise on these two locations or any other locations you recommend, please let us know. Also, if anyone can advise how long it takes to get to these, it would be much appreciated. The same goes for St. Maartin, please let me know of any recommendations and also how long it takes to get to from port.

Stop being selfish with information haha. I'm living vicariously through you until we board Saturday. Who's your genie?

We are still yet to learn our lesson about jinxing ourselves. Steven bragged that 2.5 hours is the longest we've driven with kids without a bathroom stop... 5 seconds later Nyssa yells "I got to go potty" which was, of course, echoed by Kat. Two bathroom stops in less than 10 minutes... we should hopefully make it there by Saturday lol. Edit: make that a third stop 10 minutes later haha

Oh awesome. Thank you very much! Thank you!

On our last cruise, we got caught in traffic in the Great Smoky Mountains pretty much as soon as we left our house. This time, so far, so good.

Planned on leaving this morning at 9am. That didn't happen just like the spring cleaning didn't happen last night. Left the house around 1pm and then stopped for coffee and diet coke at Weigels (East Tennessee's version of WaWa) and grabbed lunch to go. We have about a 13 hour drive, so we are going to drive until we get tired today and then stop and get a hotel. If we get to Miami early enough tomorrow and the weather is nice, we plan on going to the beach.

We plan on seeing Hairspray, 1977, and the adult only comedy show. We also are going to watch Hiro, but we will be doing that from our balcony, which I highly recommend to you as it is a different perspective than in regular seating. Honestly, when we stay in the aquatheater suites, we usually watch the aqua theater show all the way through once and then parts of it almost every time it plays.

In my reply to yesterday's email from Sunil, I asked if he could send me the show schedule for the cruise. Usually this is in the app and on the website before the cruise, but it no longer shows up nor are you able to make show reservations in advance via the website. All show reservations are currently booked after you board, but more than likely, this will only be a temporary change. Sunil replied to me today with the show schedule for our sailing.

While cruising was shut down, we spent quite some time at Club Med in Port St. Lucie. We only ventured out of Club Med a little bit, but from what we saw, Port St. Lucie seemed to be very nice.

One day until vacation starts and three days until the cruise! Since we are at the three day mark, today was testing day. Steven, Christian, Sophia, Nyssa, and I all had appointments at Walgreens from 11am-12pm scheduled in 15 minute increments. We arrived at our appointment time and all of us were done within 15 minutes. It was quick and painless. We did the Rapid Diagnostic Test (ID NOW), which promises results within 24 hours, but we all had our negative results within an hour and fifteen minutes. I worried how Nyssa and Sophia would do with the nasal swab, but they did great. It only requires you to stick the swab half an inch into your nostril, so it is much better than the previous test we took. For the test, it requires you to swirl the swab in one nostrils for 10 to 15 seconds and then the other nostril for the same amount of time. I will definitely be looking into doing this same test for our November cruise. We weren't sure how long it would take at Walgreens, so we scheduled Kat's appointment at the urgent care center for 1pm. Since we were done by 11:15am I called the urgent care center, and they told me we could do a walk-in appointment before 1pm. We decided to go on and get Christian's hair cut first. We arrived at the urgent care center and checked in at 12pm. We waited in the car until they called us in at 1:15pm. Kat did a rapid antigen test, and we were told to wait in a room until they come back with the results. After an hour, they finally came back with her negative result. Of course the worrier in me hated sitting at an urgent care center for that long. My comment to Steven when I got back to the car was something to the affect of, "I hope we didn't catch Covid while we were waiting for Kat's results." The urgent care center apologized for the long wait, and told me that they are slammed with patients right now. They even told me they had 25 patients waiting in the parking lot before they opened this morning. There has got to be a better option for testing two year olds than exposing them to an environment where Covid runs rampant. While we were there, we kept our mask on, didn't touch anything (which was super difficult with a 2 year old), wouldn't even sit on the chairs in the waiting room, and probably dried our hands out with hand sanitizer. We weren't taking any risks that could potentially jeopardize this cruise. Now that testing is over, we are back home supposed to be doing a spring clean but being lazy instead. I mean we have to update our blog, get stuff done in our video game, catch up on our tv shows, and rest before a long trip... so cleaning will happen... later... probably.

Today marks two days until we leave our home and start our journey to the beautiful Symphony of the Seas. We are going to be wrapping up any last minute to-dos such as getting an oil change, vacuuming the car, CJ's haircut, picking up our clothes order from Kohls, any last minute packing and cleaning, and getting our Covid tests (tomorrow). We also got an email today from Sunil. He addressed everything that was listed in the pdf that we sent to him, sent us our dinner schedule, and told us we can book shows on a day-to-day basis. He let us know that we can "just let him know the same day which show we would like to watch and he will reserve the best seats for us in the house." He also let us know that he will have our mini bar stocked with all the diet sodas we requested; and he informed us that he has already spoken to Adventure Ocean, and we will have no issues getting whatever hours that we need. Here is the dinner schedule that he sent us:

It's always great when something good comes from a bad situation. I can't wait to hear your take of Star Class.

Congrats! That is awesome. I am a little jelly of your A1, but I am very happy for you.

Of course, not! Curiosity has got the best of me now though, and I have to know which one haha.

Fingers crossed ! Can't wait to hear what room you may have scored!

We found the leak... jk. Hahahaha hadn't even thought of that. We'll just say it was genie magic as you said .

Haha. That's the impression we got too. We figured it was either him reading it (if so, hi Sunil haha), Royal Caribbean PR, or another blog reader telling him.

Aww... this makes me so happy. Really enjoying your blog and looking forward to hearing more about your amazing week.