When I finally got that (Facebook) invitation to my 10 year high school reunion (about a month before the event, a month!), all of those stereotypical thoughts rushed into my mind:

“Are we really that old?”
“Ugh. I’m not ready for this yet.”
“What have I done with my life (so far)?”
“Great. This is catching me in the middle of a career change!”

Then I remembered that I received the reunion invitation via Facebook, so everyone attending already knows that I’ve gained at least 20 pounds since high school and that I spend most of my days sitting at my computer or running around with a camera attached to my hip.

How things have changed for us, thanks to social media.

After a few weeks of debating, and although it would be nice to visit my hometown again. I do make a trip there at least once a year, usually around Christmas time, to spend time with my family. But, I rarely visit during the fall, or any other time of the year. It’s just been easier for everyone to gather at our home in Atlanta. Bigger city, bigger airport, more things to do… you know.

Thanks to Facebook’s event page, I could see exactly who was going to be there and when I saw that most of the people who I was actually friends with in high school would not be able to be there, I decided at the last minute that I really didn’t want to make the 6.5 hour car drive up to Virginia to see people that I barely even talked to while we were still in high school.

I figured, if we didn’t talk back then, are only friends on Facebook in order to stalk each other and (still) don’t have anything in common… then this reunion wouldn’t be much fun for me.

Again, thank you, social media.

But, the travel bug in me wouldn’t stop biting. Since Paul had a trip down to Auburn planned for the weekend. I decided to tag along for one evening. In my mind I had visions of photographing a sea of RVs, a shrimp boil and just some good ol’ Southern football tailgating.

This is where the “Lessons Learned” comes into play. We got into Auburn on Friday evening right at sunset, and by the time we got to the RV park the sun was well on its way down the horizon. I was able to catch this shot of the sun setting with some gorgeous Auburn U colors in the sky.

And this was the shooting conditions that I was left with after the sun had set.

Dark, dark and dark… with a little bit of light from the RV to light up the area. I couldn’t help but feel only feelings of despair when looking around and trying desperately to figure out what in the world I would be able to photograph in these conditions.

Turns out, not much. Or perhaps, I need more practice shooting in the dark with not-great sources of light.

So, I ended up putting the camera away and just enjoyed visiting with some great friends in Auburn.

Although it’s unfortunate, sometimes we I have to make mistakes as a photographer in order to learn or reinforce some important photography lessons:

Plan ahead. By this I mean, really plan ahead. Especially if the assignment or project involves travel.

What went wrong for me in this instance?

1. Poor timing. We left Atlanta for Auburn after Paul got off of work, and arrived right at sunset. Which left us no daylight time.

2. Not enough planning. The shrimp boil didn’t start cooking until after sundown. So, all hope of getting any great photos of the prep, cook and serve were out the window (or down the horizon with the sun).

3. Get a dog sitter. Since this was a last minute trip, I had to bring all three of our dogs along. Having three large, excited, energetic dogs on leashes while trying to photograph in the dark is no easy task.

Next time, I will be planning for a weekend trip to Auburn that will last for 3 days instead of 3 hours so that I will be able to get some shots in during the day. Oh, and get a babysitter for the furry babies too.

Our fourth port was at Costa Maya, Mexico on Thursday (Sept 9).

We had nothing planned for this port, but we did know that we wanted to try and get our open water certification in scuba if we possibly could. We were already in the Caribbean, in crystal clear blue water, so of course we wanted to go scuba again.

We debarked our ship in hopes of finding a dive shop that would be willing to take us in on such short notice. And… we found one! A PADI certified instructor to take us on our dives 3 & 4 so that we could get our Open Water Certification. Score!

We hopped on a taxi and off we went to the beach. We met up with the boat captain, Gaby, at the dive shop. It was an interesting hour of attempting to communicate through a strange mix of English and Spanish to each other.

I mean, geez, I took four years of Spanish in high school and I could barely remember anything. Yo estudio cuatro años Español en escuela.

Yikes, embarrassing. I was ashamed of my lack of Spanish speaking skills.

When the dive master Nestor arrived, we headed out to the open water for our dives. The waves were rolling and our tiny boat was rockin’. I’m amazed that I didn’t start hurling the contents of my stomach off the side of the boat, again.

On our first dive, we saw two giant stingrays. We circled one that had buried itself halfway in the sand at the bottom of the ocean. Did you catch that? We circled it. The whole time I was watching it’s beady eyes watching us as we circled it. I was envisioning the giant 4 foot in diameter sting ray coming at me and flinging its huge ass tail at my throat.

On the second dive, I got stung by jelly fishes. Tiny ones that I couldn’t see… if you were wondering whether I saw a jellyfish and swam at it. No one had to pee on me either. But I did finish the dive with a lovely rash looking thing on my left arm.

We also found a remora, a tiny fish that swims along with larger fish eating their leftover food particles. Apparently the remora was on me first, awesome… I’m a big fish.  Then it moved on over to Nestor.  The remora followed us all the way to the surface, kinda freaked me out untill Nestor finally was able to tell us what it was after we got on the boat.

But all in all, success!  We passed our fives 3 & 4, and now we’re Open Water certified!  Woohoo!

The third port of our trip was at Isla Roatan, Honduras on Wed (Sept. 8). Our excursion at this stop was called Zip-and-Dip with Bodden Tours.

After a 25 minute van ride – with a photo op stop in the middle that was really a tourist trap – we arrived at the zip line location. The zip line area was almost like zip-lining in someone’s very large backyard.  It was nothing compared to hiking through the jungle when we zip-lined in Hawai’i.

Nonetheless, it was still a fun time.  The guides were pretty laid back, likely due to their younger age, but they were very nice and fun.  And they let us flip over and zip upside down if we chose to.

After zip lining, we got to spend some time playing with the capuchin monkeys at Victor’s Monkey Business.  For me, this made the whole excursion worthwhile.

See that monkey that was on my arm? It bit Paul a few minutes later. Bad Marcelle! All the guide said when it happened, “Don’t squeeze the monkey!” And me? I was laughing my ass off.

Then we got to see the baby monkeys – O.M.G. They were the cutest, most adorable things ever. The guide handed two of them to Paul. Those two babies were clinging to one another like they were long lost lovers. And they didn’t bite him, I think Paul liked that.

I fell in love. If I never have children, I’m going to get a pair of capuchin monkeys, but only if they stay babies forever.

On Tuesday (Sept 7) we docked a few miles off of the coast of Belize City because the waters close to shore is too shallow for cruise ships.

We hopped on a tender boat for the ride to Belize City. The high speed tender boat ride was quite fun in itself. So, if you’re going on a cruise that ports in Belize City, I would recommend taking the tender boat ride to shore, even if you don’t have any excursions planned.

When we arrived at the port, we got on a bus for our ATV and cave tubing excursion with Cave-Tubing.com which was not through the cruise ship.

Just like our scuba diving excursion in Cozumel, we chose to book our cave tubing trip on our own. If you decide to book a cave tubing excursion through the cruise ship, you may not get the full “Belizian” experience. And… it’ll be more expensive *wink*

There was an hour long bus ride to the ATV site, and at the beginning, I was dreading it. I mean, an hour long ride just doesn’t sound exciting, at all. However it was as if we were on a party bus and our tour guides, esp. Keith aka Speedo, did an amazing job entertaining us during the ride, we learned a lot about the local culture, as well as had a ton of fun sampling some local cashew wine. Delicious! Wish we had gotten a bottle to bring home.

Here’s Keith handing out shots of cashew wine.

We were stoked to be getting some tasty, free alcohol at 10 in the morning.

We loved that the guys on our bus kept making fun of the cruise ship excursion people. They played a game to find the sleeping person(s) on the cruise ship’s bus. Paul won himself a Belikin beer for finding a sleeping one.

Now this was probably want you would think of when you think of true ATV’ing – mud, mud, more mud and then stuck.

Here we are all muddy, but super happy, after our ATV ride:

With our guide buddy, Phillip!

After our ATV ride we rode over to a park for cave tubing. On our 20 minute trek to the start of the cave tubing area, Philip carried Paul’s inner tube so that Paul could carry mine – heck yeah, I loved that.

The cave tubing through the tubes was not the most exciting thing, you float slowly through the caves. But it was pretty cool to see all of the formations. I learned that Belize has the most caves in the world, cool, eh?

My favorite part of the tubing was the open river section when we just floated down the river, through the jungle. Make note of this, you will only get to do this part if you do the excursion with Cave-Tubing.com, not through the cruise ship.

“Butts Up!” was the tagline of Cave-Tubing.com. Meaning.. when they say “butts up” we needed to shift our bodies so that our butts were out of the water, to avoid the pointy rocks on the bottom of the river.

Paul taking a leap into the river, something he’s always wanted to do… jump off of a big rock into water.

After the tubing we got a lovely local lunch of stewed chicken and rice. So yummy!

While we were eating, the owner of the company (Cave-Tubing.com) came over to our tables and personally asked each one of us if we had a good time and thanked us for coming – I thought that was just awesome.

After spending the majority of yesterday curled up in bed in our state room, thanks to a major, pounding headache (I’m pretty sure it was thanks to this):

… thankfully, I felt well enough to venture ashore when we docked in Cozumel, Mexico early Monday morning (Sept. 6).

Our obligatory photo in front of the cruise ship.

After getting off the ship, we took a $7 taxi ride on over to the pier where we met up with our scuba crew from Scuba Tony, at their boat the Chiquilla Bonita. We booked this scuba trip on our own, not through the cruise ship. We preferred it this way… for one thing, it’s cheaper. Plus, it’s a more intimate experience and you really get to know the people that you’re hanging with.

Our dives were our Open Water dives 1 & 2 to get our PADI Open Water certification. This certification process has been a long one for us, we were supposed to get certified last year in Hawai’i during our honeymoon, but one of us ended up being sick on our scuba days. Nonetheless, we’re finally getting around to it.

When we first got out to the water and went in to the shallows to go over some basic skills, I was having a real rough time descending into the water. I had these wonderul, vivid images from Shark Week on auto-play in my mind. It didn’t help that before we went down, our dive master Mario, mentioned that we might get to see some sharks.

Finally after a good few minutes, I finally was able to descend into the water, and let me tell you.. it’s a lot less scary once you’re actually down in the water than it is when you’re on the surface.

Our first dive was amazing. We’ve been snorkeling before, but scuba diving is SO much better. If you haven’t tried it, you must. Just allowing yourself to drift in the water while observing the amazing marine life happening around you is pure pleasure, pure happiness.

And boy did we see some marine life. Along with the tons of beautiful tropical fish, we encountered two barracudas, one Caribbean spiny lobster, one sleeping nurse shark and my personal favorite, one giant, gorgeous sea turtle. I named him Crush. It took all of my willpower to not swim over and play with him. That, and the underwater current sort of kep me away from his resting spot. So, good thing – I think.

Unfortunately, all dives must come to an end so we surfaced after about 40 minutes to take our break.

During this break I found out that I do get seasick.  So, I will apologize for the lack of photos with this post because I was too busy throwing up over the side of the boat.

On our second dive, we swam and drifted amongst the most beautiful coral reef that I’ve even seen, Palancar Reef – In my imagination, only second to the Great Barrier Reef. A really cool brief history of Cozumel, Jacques Cousteau was the person who first “discovered” the beauty of Cozumel and put it on the map as an incredible place for diving.

I will have to agree, the water was crystal clear and visibility was pretty amazing.

Here we are after our dives with our dive master, Super Mario! Absolutely adored him!  The little boat in the background is the one we went out in.  And you can see Carlos, the boat captain, in his visor cleaning up the scuba equipment.

We will be making a return trip to Cozumel just to go diving. You can count on that.  And we will be calling up Scuba Tony!

On Saturday morning (Sept 4) we woke up bright and early to drive down to Port Canaveral, just outside Orlando to board our cruise ship, the Carnival Dream.

When we boarded the ship, we immediately went to the Lido deck to grab some lunch – because one of the highlights of being on a cruise is stuffing yourself silly with cruise-line food, right?

Lunch is buffet style with many selections from a good number of food stations around the deck. There was your expected pizza, burgers, sandwiches, pasta… but my favorite station was located towards the back of the boat, the Indian Tandoor. It was either because I was having a mad craving for Indian food or just because the food was so good. But, the food was so good. Even Paul cleaned his plate of cumin pilaf and buttered chicken.

The thing with cruises is that there is always food available to eat. No wonder you’re almost expected to gain five pounds or so during a trip. Check out some of the pastries that are available at the European cafe.  Ridiculously mouth-watering.

There’s also a sushi bar: Wasabi. The sushi was, okay. Paul loved it and ended up eating most of mine.

My favorite part of food on the ship was our nightly seated dinners in the Crimson Restaurant.  I loved that the food was already included, and that you could order as many appetizers, entrees and desserts as you wanted.  Paul definitely took advantage of it, I didn’t.  My tummy couldn’t handle that much food – and on that note, I’ll leave you with some food porn:

Yummy gazpacho

More “sushi”

Delicious fish

More delicious fish

Orange cake

And… we’re back from our semi-impromptu week long Western Caribbean cruise!  Seven whole days without internet, and I didn’t even miss it.

Me! If all people, the person whose day job depends on the internet… didn’t even long for it once.

I came home yesterday to 167 emails in my inbox, and it didn’t even phase me.  That little monster called Stress didn’t claw its way back up my back, and I was proud of myself. This is probably a sign that I was finally able to kick back and relax on this trip.

I love traveling. But I may be one of the worst travelers, well, maybe not the worst… but I’m definitely not a good one.

I spent the better half of the first four days of the trip passed out and sleeping in our state room. Eat, sleep, eat, sleep, repeat.  It was a strange feeling, letting go and letting myself sleep whenever I got tired.  The last few months have been long and difficult for me, filled with depression and panic attacks from being overworked and overstressed.

After I woke up from my work-induced-stress-coma, we had a great time on our trip.  I loved chatting with the locals during our port stops. Paul and I seem to have a knack for being able to instantly become friends with the locals on our trips, it’s fantastic because we learn a lot about the area and the culture, not to mention the free perks and secrets to getting the best deal on food and shopping *grin*

There is just so much to share about our week-long trip so I’m going to be posting daily about it for the next few days, as well as share some recipes of a few dishes that we tried along the way. Love that Caribbean food!

Here are some fun pics of the Crane family from our Gatlinburg trip.  Fun times, it’s always nice to get away from the city once in a while.  What would’ve made it perfect is if our doggy babies could have joined us (some peeps have dog allergies – boo!)

Me and Paul! We haven’t taken one of these pics in a while – it used to be our signature photo on our road trips – before we started getting creative with the timer on the camera.

Papa Crane with his two grandsons!

Adorable nephew Tyler and niece Ana – she was modeling her new ring for me!

Saturday night was dinner at Cherokee Grill in Gatlinburg.  Nice steak restaurant, the food was quite good.  They’re famous for their steaks, but I choose to get their charbroiled shrimp and spicy macaroni and cheese.  I must say, that mac and cheese – delish!