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Port Canaveral, Florida Recommendations

Radisson Resort at the Port Pool Area

Port Canaveral is one of our favorite places to cruise from for several reasons.  The port area and the cruise terminal are easy to navigate.  That’s good news especially for the folks who are driving to the port and parking their car there during the cruise.

Radisson Resort at the Port is our favorite place to stay when cruising from Port Canaveral.  (We prefer a beachfront hotel when we are actually visiting Cocoa Beach.)  We love the pool area, a fabulous Tiki bar, and easy transportation to the ship.  We can’t wait to hang out with cruising friends at the Tiki Bar in the pool area the night before the cruise

Here are some interesting restaurants we’ve enjoyed in the Port Canaveral area:

Rusty’s Seafood & Oyster Bar:  Roger especially enjoyed this place, because he loves oysters on the half shell.   We enjoyed a fabulous group meal on the open-air deck of this restaurant, with fun live entertainment that had us all swaying our hips, even in our chairs!

Roberto’s Little Havana:  This restaurant is just a little more than a diner, but I love trying new kinds of food, and this was my first taste of Cuban entrees, which I love.  Good food, good service, so this might be a place you want to try!

Durango’s Steakhouse:  Some friends picked this place to meet up with us, against our objection that you don’t eat steak on a coast.  To our surprise, this was among the best steaks we’ve ever eaten, and we ate their twice during our week-long visit.  Highly recommend this place for steaks!

Florida’s Seafood Bar & Grill:  This restaurant is the furthest away from our hotel, but I wanted to throw it into the list, because we enjoyed a fabulous seafood meal here.

Rusty's Seafood Menuhere one evening.

While you’re out on the road headed to or from your restaurant, I highly recommend a stop in Ron Jon’s Surf Shop.  We aren’t big shoppers, but we really enjoy visiting these stores, and we never leave empty-handed.  The most comfortable beach sandals I’ve ever worn came from here!

We visited Cocoa Beach the first time after taking our kids on a whirlwind visit to the four Disney Parks, Universal Studio and Sea World in Orlando.  We had scheduled three days in Cocoa Beach for beach time before flying home.  As we pulled into our hotel, two long limos pulled out of the parking lot, and we commented that someone “important” must be staying there.

Later that night, our son, who was only 17 at the time, slipped out of our room for a little time to himself downstairs, and returned saying that we could get a free drink in the bar if we said we’d seen Tommy Lee Jones or Clint Eastwood at the hotel.  Apparently that’s who the limos were for!

The next morning, Roger and Rachel headed down to the beach early, while Eric and I were relaxing a little longer in the room.  As they rounded the corner from the elevator, they ran into Clint Eastwood who was just coming in from an early swim.  (Yes, their bodies collided.)  Roger was shocked, Rachel didn’t know who he was, so they just moved on, but Roger said Clint was in great shape for an older guy.  We later found out they were filming Space Cowboys at that time, a movie that still makes us smile.

If you have time, you may want to add on some extra days before and/or after our cruise in the Port Canaveral, Cocoa Beach, Orlando area, because there’s so much to see and do there.

Good Friday 2010

Good Friday Thanks

So many fabulous friends have written guest blogs for us, and I want to say thank you.  Tom & Mary Milano most recently wrote several Wimpy Friday reviews, and I certainly want to give them a big thank you, because I know many of you were already fans of theirs, while others were just getting to know them.  Tom’s taking a break from these reviews, but I wanted them to know the joy they brought to our lives. 

As a review, here’s all the recent guest blogs: 

I’ve invited these wonderful people to share their stories with you, because their stories may enrich your travel experience and will definitely enrich your souls.  If you’ve enjoyed any of these guest bloggers, please leave a comment on one of their posts here, or visit their blogs and websites to let them know.  It’s good to let folks know they’re appreciated. 

To that end, thank you for sharing in my life by reading my blog.  I love my life! 

Judy J.

Ports of Call

St. Thomas

U.S. Virgin Islands

We love St. Thomas.  The folks on this island are friendly and welcoming, and St. Thomas has some of the most beautiful views and beaches I’ve ever seen.  We consider St. Thomas a paradise, and Roger claims he’s working his way south to live in St. Thomas at least six months out of every year.  more »

Dreaming of Beaches

Boatyard Beach, Barbados

I woke up this morning thinking about beaches.  Some of my favorite memories from our cruises are the relaxing days we’ve spent together on fabulous Caribbean beaches.  Roger is a sun lover, but I’m not, so he gets us two beach chairs and an umbrella at the beach, then he settles my chair in the shade of the umbrella, while he stretches out on his chair in the full sun.  We each take a few dips in the water, just to cool off, but other than that, we don’t spend any time in the water unless we’ve also booked some snorkeling, jet skis, or parasailing.  I love digging my toes into the cool wet sand.  I love hearing the waves lapping against the shore, the birds calling as they fly overhead, and the laughter of people nearby enjoying their vacations.  I’m happy with a lovely fruity beverage and a good book, relaxing in the shade, near my fabulous husband.  more »

Tom & Mary’s Cruise Review (All-In-One)

Guest Bloggers, Tom & Mary Milano
Royal Caribbean’s Oasis of the Seas, January 30, 2010

I’d like to introduce you to our friends, Tom & Mary Milano.  When we returned from our first cruise in 1999, we called our travel agent 016to book another cruise.  (We started our travel agency in  2005, because we loved cruising so much!)  We were still pretty much cruise novices, so I enjoyed browsing the Internet to find more information about our ship, our itinerary, and cruising in general.  Among the many people I met online was Tom and Mary Milano.  Tom and Mary were contributing editors of a cruise website at that time, writing amazing reviews of every cruise they took, including fun stories of romance aboard a cruise ship. 

Roger and I credit Tom and Mary’s writings with saving us from divorce.  Well, sort of!  After our first cruise, we thought it would be fun to take some dance lessons, so we could really enjoy dancing on our next cruise.  Turns out, I dance divinely with the male dance instructor, and Roger can really cut a rug with his dance partner/instructor, but when they put us together, he was a hesitant lead, and I was a bossy overbearing partner.  We decided to quit dance lessons rather than divorce, and, about that same time, Tom and Mary posted another cruise review about their own frustrations with dance lessons.  In their review, they described their decision to revert to their World War 2 “slide and glide” dancesteps on the cruise dancefloor. 

I suspect Tom and Mary are actually very good dancers, but as Roger and I read that review together, we said, we can do that, and we hit the dance floor together every cruise.  Roger will tell you, there’s nothing I love more than for him to ask me to dance.  I know he really doesn’t love dancing, so he shows me how much he loves me every time he offers his hand, asking me to dance.  And, we probably lean and sway more than slide and glide, but we feel like we are dating again as we dance, and that’s one of the reasons we love Tom and Mary Milano!  Tom and Mary also send daily emails and Facebook messages of encouragement, devotion, and blessing, that start my day off right. 

When Tom and Mary recently sailed Royal Caribbean’s Oasis of the Seas and returned saying they did not plan to write a review, I begged them to write their review as a guest blogger here, and they agreed.  So, over the next few days, I know you’re going to enjoy reading the delightfully unique review from Tom and Mary’s perspective. 

The Oasis of the Seas

TomMaryA Little Something About Us: From 2000-2006, we were contributing editors and had our own cruise review page on a major cruise review site. During that six year period, more than 200,000 cruise enthusiasts visited our site. As our regular readers know and you are about to know, Mary and I are romantics.  We live our lives one day at a time and we take a great deal of pleasure in doing nice things for each other. We started cruising in 1996 and I found that the ambience of the ship and the serenity we felt while being at sea was the perfect atmosphere to practice some serious marriage maintenance. We enjoy cruising because we can’t think of a more romantic, intimate, exciting way to spend quality time with the one you love, than when cruising. That is why we look at each of our cruises as another ‘Honeymoon’, another chance to relive that time in our lives that was so special. We just returned from our 50th ‘Honeymoon’ and like every one of them, it was very special. We have seen a lot of sunsets and it may be hard to believe, but our life is getting better and more fruitful each and every day. We know it’s the thoughts we carry in our mind and the things we do that make us feel this way. Some people are turned off at the slightest mention of how one feels about life and relationships. If you are of that nature, you may not want to read this review.

Royal Caribbean Has The Most Beautiful Ships: Different industries have different awards. Motion pictures have the Oscar’s; Broadway has the Tony’s and the TV industry has the Emmy’s. If there was a best ship award, the Royal Caribbean design team would sweep the field. They are in a class by themselves. The designers of the public areas do a superb job of blending a combination of materials that have a beautiful visual affect. They do all the areas of a particular location with a thoroughness you don’t often see. As much thought is given the ceilings areas, as is given the walls and the floors. Then they further enhance these beautiful settings with a P1010001_0001variety of exquisite furnishings. Not only are their designs beautiful and innovative, they are extremely functional. On the new Oasis, as it is on the Eagle Class ships, it is very easy to get around the ship. The traffic patterns are so well laid out, that you get the feeling you’re on a ship half its size. There are many beautiful cruise ships, but in our humble opinion, they pale in comparison to the ships of the Royal Caribbean line. Regardless of how many cruises you may have made, if you haven’t cruised on an ‘Eagle Class’ ship and now, the new magnificent ‘Oasis of the Seas’, you will be dumbfounded by the brilliance of the design. The Royal Promenade, and now the new ‘Central Park’ and ‘Boardwalk’ neighborhoods as they are called, on the ‘Oasis of the Seas,’ are unlike anything you’ve seen on any other cruise ship. It is without a doubt the most innovative, unique design of public areas that the cruise industry has ever seen. It is hard to find the words to adequately describe it, but we’ll do the best we can. more »