Just before record snowfall started on Friday, February 5, Tom and I flew to Florida. Being a meteorologist, if I didn't foresee the potential for this storm I would've never heard the end of it from friends, so on Monday we changed our flight to leave on Friday instead of Saturday. While on the runway in Baltimore, we watched the first snowflakes fly as we waited to take off.
We arrived in Fort Lauderdale, FL the day before our cruise to the Eastern Caribbean was to begin. We stayed at the Red Carpet Inn, west of the city off State Road 84. There's nothing around it. We wound up walking on an overpass (that goes over Interstate 95!), to get to a small shopping center. Being afraid of heights it was scary...although the pay off was to find a Dunkin' Donuts about a mile down the road!!
The Red Carpet Inn had a great restaurant, "Diane's Restaurant" but at night you could hear lots of noise. We took the motel shuttle to the port and waited from 11:30am until 12:30pm when we boarded the Holland America "Eurodam" ship. It's a beautiful ship, and only TWO years old. We were off to a good start.
This wasn't a gay cruise. This was a regular cruise with a certain small number of cabins rented out to gay people. I loved it. The average age was between 50-80 of the passengers. People went to bed by 10pm like we do!! They were happy, conversational, friendly, and smiled at each other. WOW, what a difference from the last cruise!
It was 74F that day, and we sat on the deck getting sun for an hour (until Rob was sunburned). We took the lifeboat drill, we ate dinner in the open cafeteria and ended the evening watching a song and dance performance on one of the stages. It was a great first day!
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