Joy,

Yes, it was a great trip all right. And you sure smoothed out the transition/transportation issues I ran into when I tried to put it together on my own. The extension of our usual visit to Florida to include going from Orlando to Panama City via Miami with a 10-day stopover to visit our missionary friends as well as see the tourist sites followed by going from Panama City to San Juan via Miami with another 10-day stopover to embark on a 7-day cruise as well as a few extra days in Puerto Rico and then returning to Orlando via Miami, somehow all on a single itinerary with American Airlines was way easier than what I was trying to do with a series of round trip tickets. Not only did your way wind up being less expensive, but it meant that our luggage was checked for each destination rather than having to be reclaimed after each leg. Not only that, but there were no checked luggage charges anywhere along the way, even from San Juan back to Orlando, because "international legs" were a part of the ticketing. How about that!

The cruise was fun, although we're going to have to stop trying to do a major "shore excursion" at every port when we go on one of these things. We get home from a "vacation" greatly in need of a rest. But I guess we're going for the adventure more than a vacation, seeing as how we're supposedly retired. I''m not sure what sort of pictures you might want, but I'm going to try to attach two, one of us sitting at dinner on one of the dress-up evenings, and the other of us in the smaller glass-bottom boat we went out on at Tobago to try snorkeling. Funny thing about that. Well, maybe not so funny. We'd signed up for a beginner''s snorkeling session in a four-foot-deep pool at our first stop, to see if we could do it and how it's done. We also signed up for the glass-bottom and snorkeling adventure three days later. Well, they canceled the first session, so we went on a bus tour instead. Then, when we got to Tobago, we figured we'd just go along for the ride. But the guys who were running the operation insisted that everyone give it a try. So there are the two of us, me not even being a swimmer really, jumping into 10 or 20 feet of water a mile or so from shore, just having had these contraptions attached to our heads and about 30 seconds worth of "instruction" as to how to breath. I kind of recalled my attitude during "survival" training as an Air Force cadet 50 some years ago. It was an adventure. And now we''ve got bragging rights!