This year’s vacation I think will be blog worthy. It might be the last one all four of us take together since the kids are basically all grown up. Of course, if Mom and Dad foots the bill, who knows?

This year’s trip is taking us to the eastern Caribbean. We are leaving from Fort Lauderdale on the Carnival Magic and will be gone for six days. We will stop in Half Moon Cay in the Bahamas, in Amber Cove in the Dominican Republic, and on Grand Turk in Turks and Caicos before heading back to the States.

We started our journey on our 23rd wedding anniversary, Saturday July 13th. We arrived at the airport early and ate at the Barrio Cafe. We are big fans of the original restaurant on 16th Street in Phoenix and the food was just as good. After our satisfying “linner” which included churros and ice cream for dessert, we caught a direct flight from Phoenix to Ft Lauderdale. Phil was hoping we’d fly into Tropical Storm Barry which was pummeling NOLA, but our pilot was a bit smarter than that and we diverted it to the north. We arrived in Ft Lauderdale at 11:30 PM local time. Baggage claim took nearly forever and we finally made it to the hotel just before 1:00 AM. Unfortunately, the room we were issued was trashed and we eventually were given a new room. Everyone finally settled down around 2:00 AM and we got a few hours sleep.

Not the best start to our trip, but it definitely could be worse. At least we don’t have to worry about our four-legged babies, Bandit and Shadow. While we were flying east, my sister Jane and her husband Chris were flying west to spend the week house and dog sitting. I want to apologize to them in advance for the extremely hot conditions forecasted for the week. Of course, she does have full use of the swimming pool so it is not all bad.