Home again

We are back home after spending a week, really 6 days, on our cruise.  We departed from Miami January 23 in the afternoon and arrived back in Miami at 6:00 AM on Saturday the 30th.  We made stops in San Juan, Puerto Rico--Philipsburg, St. Maarten and Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas.  From St. Thomas we took a ferry to St. Johns to visit the national park.  It was a fun trip and my first ever cruise.  Would I like to make a habit of going on cruises, not really but this one was fun.  The food was good, not great, visiting different places was fun and just the whole experience of a cruise was very interesting.  We had a stateroom which was very nice.  We could open the sliding doors to the outside and sit on our own private deck.  I did spend much time on the deck reading and just enjoying the peace and quiet of the ocean.
I did have a bit of a setback as my back and right leg starting acting up the day before we departed.  It was difficult to walk much so that limited what we did.  I bought a cane on the ship and that helped a bit but it was not an answer to the pain in my leg.  Our stateroom was about 200 feet from the elevator so what ever we did it meant that I had to walk a ways.  I will have to do something with that darn lower back issue but as of now I do not know what.
It was really fun to get to the Virgin Island National Park.  Our ferry docked a very short distance from the visitor center so that was good.  After we had spent some time at the visitor center we decided to catch a taxi to Trunk Bay which was a short distance away.  Almost as we stepped out of the visitor center a taxi stopped and said they were on their way to Truck Bay.  It was about a 10 minute ride.  The bay was beautiful with fine fine sand and a long beach.  We had brought our snorkel gear with so we quickly got into the water.  Well the bay was not the ideal place to snorkel.  About 10 feet from shore the waves would break and if you were standing in the wrong spot you would be washed up to shore and then as the water receded you would be washed back out!!!  Needless to say we did not snorkel very long but we did it!  After about an hour at Trunk Bay we caught a taxi back to our ferry.
Some interesting things for me was to learn a little bit about the ship we were on.  Terry and I went to a program about the ship.  It was pretty amazing.

• the ship is 1047 feet long (3+ football fields)  and when loaded weighs 175,000 tons.  Even with that size it can stop in less than 4 minutes.
• it travels about 21 mph and EACH MILE it uses 2220 gallons of fuel.  It has a fuel tank of 1.1 million gallons.  The fuel is used to propel the ship, make electricity for all the lights etc, take in ocean water and purify it for use on the ship.  The propellers are run by electricity made on the ship and they rotate 360 degrees.
• it can accommodate 3027 guests and for that they need 1500 employees
• most of the employees work 7 days a week for 7 months
• I did not count them but I am guessing that there were a dozen + places to eat/drink.  You could eat at a restaurant where it was a sit down meal or you could eat where there were perhaps 10+ stations of different kinds of food.

One of the things that was interesting was ALL the shopping at ports and on the ship.  Of course everything was the "best deal ever"
So, I have experienced a cruise, we took in our 55th national park and now we are set to settle in for the rest of the winter at home in Naples.  I have scratched tennis until I get this back/leg thing settled.  I will contact a dr tomorrow and see a PT on Tuesday.  I do want to continue playing tennis but a cane and a tennis racket just do not work together very well!  We will see what happens.
Enough for now, my FP was gone a long time ago.