Cast of characters: Me, the 52 year old dad and my 18 year old daughter. Wife and 19 year old son do not cruise with us, so this has become an annual Father/Daughter cruise. All have taken place in August.

This was the 8/15/04 Western Caribbean cruise with stops at Labadee, Ocho Rios, Grand Cayman, and Cozumel. This was our first cruise with Royal Caribbean. Our previous two cruises had been the 3-day on the Disney Wonder and the 7-day Eastern on the Disney Magic, so I will used them as a comparison. I didn't make any notes, so details are fuzzy at times.

We started out on this trip in a tense frame of mind due to hurricane Charley. Due to the unreasonably high airfares from Richmond, Virginia, we drove on Saturday August 14 to Newport News to travel via Airtran. The flight was delayed due to Orlando being closed. We did arrive in Orlando at about 3:10 in the afternoon. Ours was the second flight to land. Once we collected our luggage, we entered the chaos that was caused by many airlines canceling outgoing flights. This caused a run on the rental car lines. We finally got on the road at 5:00 PM. We stayed in Cocoa Beach and did some shopping at Ron Jon and had dinner at a nice little Italian spot. Read more