Carnival Liberty Cruise

I just got back from a two week vacation. The first of this was spent on the Carnival Cruise ship Liberty. The cruise left out of Miami and went to ports in the Eastern Caribbean including Half Moon Cay in the Bahamas, St. Thomas in the US Virgin Islands, San Juan, Puerto Rico and Grand Turk in Turks and Caicos. Here’s some of my favorite pictures. Click any photo for the hi-res version.

We left Miami on February 15 to a beautiful sunset.

My second week of vacation was to be spent at the Winter Star Party doing various astronomy-related things, so I had brought some of my gear on the ship, hoping to get some pictures as we were venturing much further south than I’ve ever been before. This turned out to be quite difficult for several reasons. First, the ship rocks. Second, the deck is lit up like a city. As such, I wasn’t able to get very long exposures, so I had to take a bunch of really short (ie 1 second) exposures at high ISO.

We arrived at the first port on Sunday, February 16. Half Moon Cay is a private island in the Bahamas. There’s not much to the island but the things for cruise ship passengers. Only 50 people live on there year-round. The rest of the people we saw commute every day from nearby islands.

I did two excursions here. The first was a bike ride and small hike to the highest point of the island. A whole 60 feet in elevation! But I did get some good views.

The also took us by stingrays.

The second excursion was a kayaking adventure. I bought a waterproof bag so I could take my nice camera with me. Taking a selfie with a DSLR in a kayak is not easy.

The next day was a day at sea so I didn’t take many pictures during the day. I did get a nice sunset shot and also the Southern Cross was quite high at night. I would get a much better pic at the Winter Star Party.

The second port was St Thomas which we arrived at on Tuesday, February 17. I awoke to see this island outside our cabin.

This island is absolutely gorgeous.

I did two excursions here. The first was a quick ride to the top of a mountain providing an excellent view of the port.

The second was Tree Limin’ Zip Lining (I’m not quite sure what “Limin'” is). I was quite disappointed when it started raining as we got to the course, but the rain went through really quick and started clearing up. We got gorgeous views of Magen’s Bay, where people such as Oprah and Bill Clinton own houses.