Welcome Guest Bloggers:
Tom & Mary Milano
I’d like to introduce you to our friends, Tom & Mary Milano, before you hear from them. As soon as we returned from our first cruise in 1999, we called our travel agent to 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 and fun reviews of every cruise they took.
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. Here’s just a taste to get you started, the first blog of a 5-blog series:
A 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 Oscars; Broadway has the Tonys, and the TV industry has the Emmys. If there were a best ship award, the Royal Caribbean design team would sweep the field, in my opinion. 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 to the ceilings, as is given to the walls and floors. Then they further enhance these beautiful settings with a variety 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 that 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 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. (Stayed tuned tomorrow for more from Tom & Mary about their cruise on the Oasis of the Seas!)
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You can read the rest of Tom & Mary’s Cruise Review, including the latest Wimpy appearance, right here.
You can find “Tom & Mary’s Teaspoon of Spiritual Nourishment” online at their website or on Facebook. Following Henry David Thoreau’s sage advice, “ Whatever you allow to enter your mind the first hours you are awake, will set the tone of your entire day,” they started sending an inspiring, uplifting thought to our loved ones and friends every day to start their day. These daily emails are not quotes, but instead are excerpts of the great writings of yesterday and today about the importance of a positive words and attitude. Currently more than 600 people in seven countries receive “Tom & Mary’s Thought for Your Day” every Monday through Friday. If you would like us to be added to their mailing list, send your e-mail address to tomandmarymilano@yahoo.com.