{"id":1121,"date":"2011-03-04T09:03:43","date_gmt":"2011-03-04T15:03:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tom.hise.org\/blog\/?p=1121"},"modified":"2011-03-04T09:03:43","modified_gmt":"2011-03-04T15:03:43","slug":"winter-vacation-2011-part-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tom.hise.org\/blog\/?p=1121","title":{"rendered":"Winter Vacation 2011 &#8211; Part 1"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Last year we had to cancel out &#8216;<em>Big Trip<\/em>&#8216; to Australia for medical reasons.\u00a0 So we decided that this winter we would go on a simpler vacation to someplace warm as a sort of a test run to see how well I can manage traveling now.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/tom.hise.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/03\/Wind-Spirit.jpg\" target=\"_blank\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1123\" style=\"margin: 4px;\" title=\"Click to Enlarge\" src=\"https:\/\/tom.hise.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/03\/Wind-Spirit-300x199.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"169\" height=\"111\" \/><\/a>We chose another <a href=\"http:\/\/www.windstarcruises.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">WindStar <\/a>cruise as we had enjoyed them in the past and knew they would do things right.\u00a0 We chose the cruise on the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.windstarcruises.com\/windspirit-yacht.aspx\" target=\"_blank\">Wind Spirit<\/a> from St. Martin which visited\u00a0 Tortola, Virgin Gorda, Jost van Dyke, St. Kitts, and St. Barths.<\/p>\n<p>Of course it was winter in the mid-west and the weather did its best to spoil our plans.\u00a0 We were scheduled to fly out on February 4 and a huge storm hit on Wednesday, the 2nd!\u00a0 Our route was through Chicago O&#8217;Hare which was shut down by 2 feet of snow and high winds.\u00a0 We looked for alternatives and kept hoping that things would be back to normal by Friday.\u00a0 The short version&#8211;our plane left Cedar Rapids two hours late on Friday and we <em>just <\/em>made our connection in Chicago.\u00a0 In Miami we had another tight connection but managed to get on the plane to St. Martin with some time to spare.\u00a0 After we were in the air we both sighed with relief and had a couple glasses of wine.<\/p>\n<p>It was late when we arrived on St. Martin so we did not see much of the <a href=\"https:\/\/tom.hise.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/03\/Hotel-Beach-Plaza.jpg\" target=\"_blank\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-thumbnail wp-image-1130\" style=\"margin: 4px;\" title=\"Click to Enlarge\" src=\"https:\/\/tom.hise.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/03\/Hotel-Beach-Plaza-150x112.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"150\" height=\"112\" \/><\/a>island that night.\u00a0 We were not scheduled to board the ship until after noon on the next day so we had time that morning to explore the area around our hotel &#8211; <em><strong>The Hotel Beach Plaza<\/strong><\/em>.\u00a0 It was a beautiful area and the hotel appeared very nice.\u00a0 Unfortunately it was, in our opinion, rather poorly run with poor service and no information about the services available.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/tom.hise.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/03\/Wind-Spirit-Buffet.jpg\" target=\"_blank\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-thumbnail wp-image-1136 alignleft\" style=\"margin: 6px;\" title=\"Click to Enlarge\" src=\"https:\/\/tom.hise.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/03\/Wind-Spirit-Buffet-150x112.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"150\" height=\"112\" \/><\/a>Around 1:00 pm we were picked up from the hotel and taken to the ship.\u00a0 Check in on board went smoothly and we soon settled in by the pool for the buffet while waiting for other passengers to arrive.<\/p>\n<p><em>More to follow.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Last year we had to cancel out &#8216;Big Trip&#8216; to Australia for medical reasons.\u00a0 So we decided that this winter we would go on a simpler vacation to someplace warm as a sort of a test run to see how well I can manage traveling now. We chose another WindStar cruise as we had enjoyed [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1121","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cruise","category-travel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tom.hise.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1121","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tom.hise.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tom.hise.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tom.hise.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tom.hise.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1121"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tom.hise.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1121\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tom.hise.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1121"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tom.hise.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1121"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tom.hise.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1121"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}