Brian and Heather: Caribbean Cuise Part 2

Our first day on the boat was completely at sea, so we managed to keep ourselves occupied by rock climbing

Dodge ball. This quickly ended when a ball flew over the net and drifted out to sea. The guy in charge was pretty upset about it, but hey, dolphins play with those types of things right? :)

We spent a lot of time playing games in the game room. I spent 60% of the cruise in sweats. another 30% in a swim suit. Basically I put on real clothes so they would let me into the dining room.

We also celebrated some birthdays!

Holly found some weird statues around the ship.

Our 3rd day was spent in Cozumel, Mexico!
Brian, Holly, Courtney, John, Dustin, Annie, Grant, and I went on an X-rail tour that took us out to swim in a sinote. They said to wear clothes we didn't mind getting a little dirty. little did we know...
Maria and San Juan - they told us we could put whatever name we wanted on our name tags

Juanita and Pedro

Dora and Diego

Surprise! we got to hold various animals they had lying around. Literally. Two snakes lying on the grass, sneaking up on a turtle, while a hawk looked on behind us.
Holly holding one of the free-range snakes

Chameleon!!! That thing had weirdy pinchy toes! (Dear Jenny, we have spent too much time on chat today. How do I know? I just used the word 'weirdy')

We got to take a picture next to this eagle. They said it's the eagle on the Mexican flag. It was intimidating. Brian had to reach out and touch the eagle's feathers after the picture was taken.

Because Brian touched the eagle after the picture, the eagle became untrusting of the next group to take a picture with it - Holly and Grant. The eagle would not take its eyes off of Holly the whole time she was standing behind it.

Our little group, notice how we are still semi clean? White shirts were a BAD idea that day...what were we thinking Annie?!

Courtney and John getting ready to head out. You have to be awesome to ride a dunebuggy

Holly drove for 3.5 seconds before she wrecked her buggy. Grant drove the rest of the way

First of the group to head out!!! our buggy had issues making left turns. It took both of us to turn it at times

Here we are leading the group out into the wilderness!

less than a minute later we tried to turn left, ended up veering right, and drove our buggy up a tree. It took a while for them to get us moving again. Everyone had to wait in a line behind us and think bad thoughts about us for holding up the excursion. It wouldn't be the last time we wrecked either...

They told us we would get dirty. They told us it would be bumpy (mexican butt massage to be exact) What they didn't tell us is that we would be driving through puddles and end up completely encrusted in Mexican mud (our guide referred to this as a 'mexican facial')

This is the last time we wrecked. We somehow managed to high-center our buggy on a tree stump. It took many tour guides to push us off the stump. Thank you John for documenting this and laughing at us for 5 minutes straight.

Meanwhile...
The rest of our cruise group decided to hire a cab and tour the beaches in the area. Their pictures look pretty, but as far as I can tell finding a leftover nativity on the beach was as exciting as it got. Y'all missed out!

After driving through the mud we ended up at our destination - a sinote (spell check?) which i guess is an underground lake that connects to the ocean. It was pretty awesome! It smelled like sulfur though and had a colony of a zillion bats living in it. Some of the guys did a high dive into the lake. I just used the little ladder in.

These were our little excursion friends. The ship lost their luggage and gave them a credit to buy clothes/essentials at one of the stores. This equaled toothpaste, a pair of cargo shorts, and a dress. Their only pair of clothes ended up getting completely covered in mud by the end of our excursion. We felt pretty bad for them.

Eventually Brian convinced me to swim into the 'bat cave' which is an inner cave with no light and a zillion more bats. No one could see except when someone's camera flash went off, so no judgement on people's facial expressions or proximity to others.

I was clearly unimpressed at this moment. Pay attention to mustachio next to me. We have no idea who he is and I don't remember ever seeing him during the excursion.

Brian was caught off guard as I apparently made a move on mustachio behind him.

Then they told us to get close and smile for a picture, So Brian grabbed my arm and pulled me closer to him. Somehow mustachio got between us. Or it was mustachio that grabbed my arm. We don't know.
Don't swim in the dark is the moral of this story.

Just when we thought we had seen all the random animals we were going to, one of the tour guides pulled a baby alligator out of the brush and let us hold it on our way back from the caves

remember when I started out with a white shirt and tank? :( they are no more

When we got back they let us 'shower off' with more dirty-ish water and we all decided our shirts were toast so we bought touristy ones from a nearby shop. They gave us chips, queso, and coke

Then we walked around for a while and found the most delicious tacos in the history of tacos. They happened to come from the back of some guy's blue chevy pick-up. It was all very authentic :)

Us in all of our cozumel shirts in front of the ship before we got back onboard

Later, it was formal night so we all got dressed up and practiced our fake smiles while we waited for our food. Smile with the mouth, never the eyes :)