Nassau, Bahamas

The kids had never been to the Bahamas, so they were excited to visit a new country. Our first stop was in Nassau. We booked an excursion to take a catamaran out to a coral reef to go snorkeling.

It was a nice ride out. We liked looking at all the 

luxury condos,vacation homes, and yachts on the way.

When we got to the reef, the water was a little choppier

than we are used to in the Caribbean.

It was not bad, but Caroline did NOT like it.

And she couldn't get her mask to fit right.

She was stressed out and just wanted to go back to the boat.

Poor girl.

The view was beautiful for the rest of us.

This was the most unique fish we saw,

a long, skinny thing.

After what seemed like a too-short-of-a-time,

we were back on the boat and heading back to the ship.

Do you LOVE my farmer's tan neckline??? 

Andrew and Care Bear dancing on the catamaran. 

This sign used to say "The Islands of the Bahamas."

Here it is in 2012:

So beautiful and pristine.

By 2014, the stickers had started taking over.

And in 2018, you can't even read the sign anymore!

Crazy.

We stopped at the ship to get changed out of our swimsuits,

then headed into Nassau to do some shopping  window shopping. :)

B train had fun looking through the Gucci store.

Cool statue of Queen Victoria,

who ended slavery in the Bahamas.

This was a fun market to look around.

Caroline wanted to get back to the ship for one of

the kids' club activities. And Brandon had done

all the window shopping he could handle.

We walked him back to the ship.

Then Whitney and I came back to do some more
shopping off of the main strip.
I love to buy a small piece of artwork from our vacations.
I used the wifi at Starbucks to look up a couple of places.

Both of them were closed.

(Even though Google said they should've been open!)

So, we didn't get our artwork.

But we get to walk around some cool parts of town.

That evening, the teen club had a speed climbing

competition at the rock wall. Uh oh.

Watch out, teenagers!

When we got there, only two other climbers were participating.

It was a brother/sister pair.

I think the fastest time between the two of them was 30 seconds.

Here's B's run:

He makes that look easy, doesn't he?

I think it took him a little over 4 seconds. Wow.

I don't know why I didn't film him reaching the top! Oops!

But, at least you can hear him ring the bell.

Winner!

That evening, we watched Coco on the poolside screen.

I love that movie!

The girls enjoyed their ice cream cones as we lounged and watched.

Look at the gorgeous sunset that night!

I had to get up from the movie to watch it.

Spectacular.

Ready for dinner in our tropical clothes. :)

Brandon made friends right away in the teen club. If we were on the ship, we hardly saw him. He was off hanging with the other teens. It's funny how at home, he's a total homebody and rarely goes out. You get him on a cruise ship with a bunch of strangers, and he's all of a sudden a social butterfly.

Whitney was actually in the same teen club as B. So she was on the very young end of the spectrum. She tried out a couple of the activities, but didn't love it.

Caroline had mixed feelings about her kids club. Sometimes she was bored and sometimes she had a blast. It depended on what the activity was. Luckily, RC allows her to check herself out, so she could just leave if she wanted to. 

One of the other BIG downsides about this ship, is there was no affordable way to contact each other. On Carnival, there was a plan for $5/person for the whole cruise where we could text each other. It was perfect. When I had researched before the cruise, RC offers a similar service. But OUR ship (being so OLD), wasn't equipped for that. Ugh. It would have been $15/day/person to be able to text each other. Ummm... No, thank you. Our Disney cruise actually had phones for each stateroom that you could carry around and call each other. Nothing like that on RC, either.