some cruise pictures

I'd like to share our cruise with you through pictures. I still haven't gone through all of them and edited them like I should, and I can't wait to start digiscrapping them, but I'll put some up here as I can.

One of my favorite parts of the cruise is the cute little towels animals that show up in our cabin every night while we're at dinner. It's strangely exciting to go back from dinner and see who is waiting in your room. Can you tell what all of our animals are?
We booked this cruise 194 days in advance. I know this, because we started counting down from that day. After 194 days, we were pretty excited to finally get on the ship in Tampa.

{just to clarify: my hair doesn't normally look like that, it was pretty windy}

We knew before we left that there was a good chance our ship would cross the path of Tropical Storm Ida at some point early in the week, so we crossed our fingers and hoped for the best. As we went to bed on Sunday night, the ship was rocking a little bit, but I just figured it was normal to feel it so much since we were not used to being on a moving ship. It was nice to be rocked to sleep. That is, until I woke up in the middle of the night to more than gentle rocking. The waves and wind were fierce at that point, and I didn't sleep well at all. This was the view out our balcony door when we woke up Monday morning:

It took me 2 hours to get out of bed that morning. I would get up and try to move around, but I would eventually find my way back to bed. Rodney wasn't bothered by the movement, and waited it out with me, but finally encouraged me to get up and leave the room. Mind over matter, right? It did seem to get better the longer I was on my feet, and by mid-afternoon the waves had calmed significantly. By that point we had passed the storm and were hoping for better weather the rest of the week.

Tuesday we woke up to slightly better weather. We were really hoping to see some sun that day since we had plans to spend some time at the beach. We saw sun mixed with clouds, an occassional shower, and eventually dark clouds and wind that sent us back to the ship earlier than we had hoped.