Adventure of the Seas - July 2002

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Adventure of the Seas, Southern Caribbean, June 30, 2002 - July 7, 2002

Skip the reading, take me to the photos right now!

We have been closely following the new Royal Caribbean International ships known as the Voyager-class ships. The original ship in this series is called (surprise!) Voyager of the Seas. These ships are by far the largest cruise ships ever built. They can hold up to 3,800 guests and 1,200 crew members and each costs over $675 million to build. They have amenities like no other cruise ships: indoor multi-story mall, rock climbing wall, ice skating rink, inline skating track, miniature golf. This ship is so groundbreaking there are even at least two television shows on Discovery channel about it.

Since Voyager of the Seas was so successful, Royal Caribbean International has decided to build four additional Voyager-class ships using the same plans. At the time of this writing, two of the four sister ships have already been completed (Explorer of the Seas and Adventure of the Seas).

We knew we wanted to try sailing on a Voyager-class ship, but had no idea when we would get the chance. Well, the chance dropped into our laps in late May when our employer announced it would close for the entire week of the Fourth of July. This left us with exactly one week and no plans. Teri said "Find us a cruise!" and Allyn didn't need any further encouragement.

There was a ship leaving from San Diego going to the Mexican Riviera that looked promising but it was an older ship (not Voyager-class). But the Voyager-class was calling to us. We had to experience it.

The Voyager-class ships only sail the Caribbean since they are basically too big to go anywhere else. Two depart from Miami and one from San Juan, Puerto Rico. It turned out that Royal Caribbean was running a promotion on the Adventure of the Seas out of San Juan, PR for both the cruise AND the airfare for exactly the week we needed to go! It worked out quite well for us; we saved quite a bundle by going a little farther to San Juan rather than taking one of the Miami-based ships. And Adventure of the Seas is practically brand new: only 8 months old!

So it only took a couple of days to plan our vacation.

The cruise left on Sunday, June 30 from San Juan, PR, and visited the following islands:

Aruba
Curaçao
St. Maarten
St. Thomas

Royal Caribbean was choosing our air flights so we ended up on the red-eye from LAX, leaving at midnight on the night before the cruise, changing planes in Atlanta, and finally ending up in San Juan about noon the next day (9 hours travel time, 3 hours time zone change). Of course, that's not including the travel time from our house to LAX and back again. We left the house around 6pm to meet our midnight flight from LAX!

Royal Caribbean messed up our reservation, which we had made over the Internet, so we ended up with a slight room upgrade. We ended up with Cabin 1390 on Deck 10 overlooking the back of the ship. The perk with this cabin was the giant balcony. It was probably more than triple the size of the balconies on the side of the ship, and had one lounge chair in addition to the two regular chairs and cocktail table normally found on balconies.

In looking over the photos that include us, we had one overwhelming thought: Look At Our Hair! Indeed, most of the trip was very windy and you will see many photos where our hair looks silly. These are pointed out with the code phrase LAOH! for Look At Our Hair!

Warning: there are a lot of photos. You can view them two ways, either as pages of thumbnails or as a (manually-advanced) slide show of the larger images. Click a thumbnail to get to the slide show level. Then click the arrows at the left side of the screen to go forward, backward, or back up.

Helpful hint: If you're using Internet Explorer at 800x600 resolution you will have an easier time with less scrolling if you switch to full screen mode (press F11 key).

Ok already, show me the images!