Family // Vacation Photos // Cruise 2014

Vacations are truly wonderful, magical things.
Combine time away from the stress of “real life” – with my absolute favorite people in the whole wide world – an endless supply of free ice cream – rock-climbing – snorkeling – fancy food that you don’t have to make reservations for – your bed being made for you every day – shows every single night – 24/7 hot tub & pool access – and you’ve got .. heaven, right? Heaven, or a week on board Royal Caribbean’s Explorer of the Seas cruise ship.

Derrick & I went on a cruise for our honeymoon 4 years ago – so we already knew how stress-free and relaxing a cruise vacation can be – but this took things to a whole new level. In fact, I’m almost nervous of ever planning another vacation again for fear that it won’t measure up to how incredibly awesome this one was! Dead serious!

We sailed out of New Jersey, and stopped at 3 ports-of-call: Port Canaveral in Florida, Nassau & CocoCay in the Bahamas. Once we got out of the storm we sailed through when we originally left New Jersey, the weather was absolutely perfect – we honestly couldn’t have asked for better! We all got wonderful tans [and some got, oops, awful sunburns].

Words simply fail to adequately describe how heavenly wonderful this vacation was. And I think, as incredible as the ship was with all it’s amenities & fun activities the BEST part was spending almost every single moment with my family. Living 5 hours away from them is rough – some days it’s just rough, but some days it’s super-duper-duper rough. It was so magical to wake up & have them right next door, to have breakfast plans with them, and to spend each day running around the ship or around an island with them. That was the best part.

I honestly didn’t take an overload of photos – I really wanted to mentally be IN the moment instead of so caught up in capturing it for later. But, that simply means I only took a few hundred photos instead of a few thousand. Following is just a super small smattering of my favorite images – there are more & I’ll probably post random others as time goes on – but this is meant as an overview of our wonderful week.

Emma drew 2 of these amazing pictures for our lovely waitresses we had each night. They were so sweet & we felt like we were going to see our friends for dinner every night.

Did I mention there was a mini-golf course on the ship too? I’m pretty sure we played at least one game [sometimes multiple games] every single day.

It was a few weeks early, but we did celebrate Derrick & I’s & my Mom & Dad’s wedding anniversaries on the ship. My Mom really wanted a silhouette picture of her & my Dad – and the ship was the perfect place to oblige!

On the last formal night – I took some “formal” photos of Steve & Amy – not sure where everyone else was at this point?

See more “whole” family photos here!