MikeServe

Mike and Buffy's Honeymoon

For our honeymoon, we decided to take a Western Caribbean cruise on the Carnival Victory ship. We left Des Moines on December 17th and returned on Christmas day. We were supposed to get back to Des Moines on Christmas eve, but thanks to Northwest airline, we didn't make it and had to spend Christmas Eve in Memphis, Tennessee. Other than the travel issue at the end, we had a really fun time, as you can probably see from the pictures.

Our cruise was 7 days long and we visited Costa Maya in Mexico, Georgetown in Grand Cayman, and Ocho Rios in Jamaica. Out of all the destinations, we liked Costa Maya the best. When we were shopping around, a guy started talking to us about a private beach that he worked at. For only $25 each, we went to a private beach that had free food and drinks for as long as we were there. Unfortunately, I forgot the free food ticket in our room on the ship after we went back to grab our swimsuits. Oh well, at least we got an afternoon on the beach with free drinks.

Grand Cayman seemed like a big tourist trap and there were 8 cruise ships docked there the day we went. We walked around and shopped for most of the day and stopped at Jimmy Buffet's Margaritaville to get some $10 margaritas. That place was a huge rip-off. I did come away from the island with a couple bottles of Appleton rum which I got for about 1/3 of the normal price.

Jamaica was really fun, but there were too many people trying to sell you something or give you a taxi ride. It was very overwhelming. We ended up taking a taxi ride around the island to see a little bit of the jungle and a waterfall which took about an hour and a half. I talked the guy down to $45, which was very good considering the first guy I talked to wanted $100. After that, we found a beach and relaxed for a couple of hours before going back to the ship.

As far as our return home went, it really sucked. We got to the Miami airport at 8:30am and our flight wasn't supposed to leave until 4:00pm, so we were in the airport for a LONG time. When we finally boarded our Northwest airplane, they figured out that the toilets wouldn't flush while we were on the ground, but would work fine in the air. I didn't see a problem with that, but they still tried to fix it for 2 hours and eventually gave up and we flew out anyway. We only had a 1 hour layover, so we missed our transfer in Memphis by about 40 minutes. They didn't have any flights to Des Moines, so we had to stay in a hotel and catch a 6:00am flight to Minneapolis, wait 2 hours in the airport, and then take a flight to Des Moines. What a wonderful way to spend Christmas Eve. Overall, I was very disappointed with Northwest airlines and will be making a formal complaint to their customer service supervisors.