We left the pier at 5 pm.  We watched the sailing from our balcony . 

This gives you some idea of our mini-suite.  This is the first time we have had a suite, it is quite a bit bigger than the balcony rooms and the balcony is a little larger.  The shower is much bigger and I loved that!!  When we went to supper I met Rey again, he came up to the dinning room with the next day’s menu and I picked out breakfast and dinner for the next day.  I didn’t pick out a lunch as I had such a big breakfast I decided to skip lunch or at least just get a very small one up in the Garden Cafe.  Then we spent the evening in the Casino playing the slots.  Norman as usual did very good.  We each had $10 a day budgeted for the slots and at the end of that day I had lost all mine and Norman had $28 on his ticket.  The next day we both did better.  I had $17 on my ticket and Norman had $54.  Sunday and Monday were at sea days, so we explored the ship and checked out all the places to go and see where everything was.  We knew we wanted to get a good picture for Christmas presents this year so we stopped to pose and then checked out the Photo shop to see how much that would cost.

Most things on the ship cost more than I wanted to pay.  I had wanted a watch but they were all around $200 and since I am not sure I can wear a watch I was not going to pay that much.  At the Photo Shop we made out better.  We were going to get 5 pictures, one for each of the kids and one to take to Walmart to get Christmas cards made up.  At Walmart they are $19.95 for 20 cards.  When I mentioned that to the girl who worked there she said we could have them made up right there.  She showed us the samples and then said they were 25 for $19.95.  We left and talked it over in our room that night.  The next day we went to the photo shop to see the pictures, there was no charge for the 5 poses and we picked out the one we like the best.  The prints were $25 each but you could get 10 for $149 so we decided to do that, then we picked out frames.  The ones I wanted were for 4 by 6 and the pictures were 6 by 8.  Those were too big for the kids, none of them have room for big pictures like that and those had two pictures, the one of us and one of the ship.  They told me they could do the smaller 4 by 6 but they would cost the same.  Alright by me, I just wanted the smaller ones and I had expected to pay $100 for the 5 poses.  When I ordered those they asked if I was happy with those poses and that I could have more with different back grounds if I wanted.  NO Thanks – we were happy.  Then we got the frames and found they were on sale, buy one get one free so we got 6 frames for $23  and ordered the Christmas cards.  We figured that would come to somewhere under $200 which was what we had expected but when they gave me the bill it was for $135.  I nearly dropped dead.  They gave us the Christmas cards free and took $14 off the cost of the pictures.  The next day when we went in to pick up the pictures they gave me another frame and said something about a flash drive.  I knew I had not ordered that so really didn’t pay any attention until 10:30 PM on our last night when they woke us up to say we had not picked up the flash drive and needed to come down and get it.  Norman went down and sure enough there it was for us free.  That would have held all the picture they took around the ship of us but we had not let them take any as we knew we were not going to buy any of those. So all in all we got a great deal on those.

Time to go over to see Becca and the kids and bring them the thing we got for them on the cruise.  I’ll tell you all about those tomorrow. Have a great day.