Today, we’re visiting St. Lucia…

Since Emerson’s birth, we’ve been on a Thanksgiving cruise every year. At this point, I guess you could call it a quasi-tradition. Upon reflection, I can’t say that it seems especially Thanksgiving-like. It’s certainly not the Thanksgiving of our childhoods; although, I suppose it might be the Thanksgiving of Emerson’s.

In any case, this year feels especially foreign as the rest of the family is at home. That’s mostly a quirk of the calendar as we have two other cruises happening with my mother and grandfather and then with my mother and Libby’s parents in the next few months. Still, it’s odd not to have any of them here with us.

Back to St. Lucia…

We made today another “beach day” and took a taxi out to Reduit Beach in Rodney Bay ($14/pp roundtrip). This really wouldn’t have been my first choice for a beach, but it’s kind of where the taxis we’re going… so we went along with the flow. Reduit Beach is rather narrow and popular with the tourists (as it’s lined with resorts). As a result, we overpaid for our beach chairs and umbrellas ($20 for the day) and found ourselves pestered by all sorts of hawkers until they finally figured out we didn’t want to buy any of their worthless crap. Sadly, the waves were also up today, and the red flags were out. No swimming for us.

Emerson made friends with a nice family plopped next to us on the beach. They had a 19 month old daughter, who enjoyed destroying sand castles as Emerson happily built them up. All in all, they were nice people. Too bad we generally don’t like making friends.

We returned to the ship and strolled around the shopping arcade. Emerson bought some toys. I bought some St. Lucian rum (which the ship didn’t bother to confiscate… just passed it right through the x-ray machine and picked it up without a comment).

We had a later lunch aboard the ship and them played a couple of rousing rounds of miniature golf. Afterwards, we hung out on our balcony and them put Emerson down for her nap.

Tonight we returned to Chops Grille for our Thanksgiving dinner. We did this in part because we like Chops. I also couldn’t face eating our main Thanksgiving meal in the Windjammer. That just seemed wrong somehow…

After dinner, we went to the headliner show.

Today’s box score: +1 country (St. Lucia)

View of St. Lucia: