Time flies when you are having fun. It is hard to believe that it has been 2 months since my last post. So much has happened since then. Amy flew to San Antonio to help with Maddox, leaving Max and me at home. She got home a couple of days before we left for a cruise up the east coast. This was a great trip with our good friends Mary Jane and Chuck Wood. We flew to New York and spent a couple of nights and days sightseeing. We did a hop on/off tour bus trip around the city. We visited the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. Before boarding the cruise ship we had time to hike through Central Park.
We were supposed to be transported to the ship at 12:00, but due to the traffic problems it was after 3:00 before a bus could get to the hotel to pick us up. Apparently President Trump was in town speaking at the United Nations and all the roads were blocked off. We arrived on Friday and noticed that New York's finest were on every corner. We even asked one of them where he would recommend us eating. The place he suggested was right there on the corner, the name of the place was Astro. Good food and very reasonably priced. When we finally did get to the ship there was no line waiting to board, just us. By the time we got to our room we had missed the muster drill. And the ship was ready to sail. On board we ran into two people from Talladega who we knew. We did not see them again until the last day of the trip. The ship was huge. About 3500 passengers and 1500 crew. The Crown Princess, ironically the same ship we were on last year on our Alaska cruise.
Sailing from the dock in Brooklyn, our first stop was Newport, Rhode Island. Since there was no dock for the ship it anchored off shore and we were transported to shore in one of the lifeboats. We then took a walking tour of Newport. The next stop was Boston. Here we took a hop on/off bus tour, but the driver was so interesting giving us all the history of the places we were seeing that we decided not to get off at all. Really enjoyed seeing and listening to our tour guide. Our next stop was suppose to be Bar Harbor, Maine, but thanks to the hurricane there were 6 to 10 meter waves and 40 knot winds. The captain ruled that it would not be safe to go ashore in the small shuttles so we instead headed to our next stop, Saint Johns, New Brunswick (Canada). The final port was Halifax, Nova Scotia. To me this was one of the best stops. We walked to several places around town including a church and the Citadel. Learned so much about the disasters of the Titanic and the ammunition ship that almost destroyed Halifax. We have since bought several books to learn more. This was a great cruise but the seas were rough. Even on the large ship the rocking was so bad that I had to hold on to rails wherever I was walking around. Amy got seasick on the last day because of the weather, but a dose of Dramamine fixed that. We will begin planning our next cruise soon.
On Monday I had cataract surgery and we are heading to Desota State Park for a couple of days in the camper. Looking forward to that. Next month we are camping at Cloudland State Park with Jason and Shelley. The four of us and 3 dogs in the camper should be fun. Before that trip we will head back to Virginia for the grand kids birthday party. I'll fill in all those blanks in my next post.
