Wonderful vacation!

We had a great vacation! It was a lot of fun. Very relaxing! We missed the kids, but of course, it was good for us as well as for them.
The ship was huge. It was very pretty. We really loved our room. It was spacious and we had a balcony, so that was really nice. The staff was great. Everyone was friendly and helpful. The food was wonderful as well.
We arrived in St. Maarten after 3 days on the ship. It was a really nice island. We were surprised at how aarid it was. We really loved our tour there. It was an ATV tour. We took 4 wheelers around the island, which is half french and half dutch. It was interesting to see the different sides of the island. At the end of the tour, we spent about an hour at Orient beach. It was beautiful. The ocean was so pretty. The sand was so soft, white, and powdery. We loved it. When the tour was over, we re-boarded the ship to get cleaned up to go shopping in Philipsburg. It was a lot of fun. It was interesting to see all the vendors there. And then there were also really nice stores also - Tiffany's, Coach, etc.
The next island was St. Thomas. We went on a snorkeling tour here. It was really great. We took The Dancing Dolphin catamaran out to Turtle Cove. There were lots of pretty fish and several green sea turtles, which was really neat. That was something that I really wanted to see, so I was excited to see them. They were so used to people that they would just swim right up to the surface less than a foot away. It was really neat.
We didn't get to do the shopping we hoped to do on St. Thomas because they had a Mardi Gra type of fesitval downtown. We were told that all the stores would be closed for this event from Thursday-Sunday. We arrived on Thursday. It turns out that some of the stores were open afterall, but by the time we found out, it was too late to get a taxi. We ended up just visiting some of the local vendors at the pier and purchasing some stuffed turtles for the kids and a few magnets.
Our last island was Princess Cays. It was really pretty. The beach was very nice. This is actually a part of the bahamas that Princess Cruises owns. They had an island bbq for us. It was really good. This island was really pretty, with nice beaches, lots of shells, and reefs to snorkel in.
It was nice because the only people there were people from the ship, Princess staff, and vendors that princess invited to the island. The vendors were very friendly and made a lot of the items. The good thing is that because they were invited by Princess there wasn't anyone there asking if they could braid our hair or anything like that.

We had a very nice trip!!! If you want to see pictures, you can go to http://travel.webshots.com/slideshow/563343719JyKTwk;jsessionid=abcymZCF72Kw5eI1X6_Nr