Island Hopping

Cruises aren’t just for couples and spring breakers. Ozark resident Debbie Ophoven took her daughter, husband and parents on a family-friendly adventure at sea.

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The bar below the Westerdam's main dining room has a soaring atrium design.

We sailed out of Fort Lauderdale on a 10-day Holland American cruise on the Westerdam. It was me, my husband, Mark, my daughter, Ashley, and my parents, Joyce and Herb Mason. Fort Lauderdale is absolutely gorgeous to sale out of. You kind of cruise down the Intracoastal Waterway, so there are people on both sides screaming out of the windows of their high-rise apartments and stuff. It’s really fun. So we hung out on the deck and waved to people.

Getting Settled

On the first day, you check in, and they have a little welcome reception, and they have lunch. You can eat right through your cruise. You can eat constantly. You can choose your dinner arrangements to either choose the early seating or the later seating. We chose the later seating. It worked out great because Ashley didn’t like the whole formal sit-down eating. She was 8 when we went on the ship. So, she would eat earlier, and then head to the kids’ program at night. Ashley loved loved loved the kids’ program. They just had so much fun. They would have games in the kids’ room for them to play with. They had computer games and all sorts of other games. But they would also do scavenger hunts on the ship. They did a pirate night where they dressed up like pirates. They would put on little plays and stuff. So it was very interactive, and she just had a ball. Every night they would put on your pillow the agenda of what was going to go on the next day, for both the grown-ups and the kids. You could kind of go through and highlight what you wanted to do. They’d say they were going to be making space mud at 9 and doing arts and crafts at 10 and playing soccer from 11 to 12. So she could kind of plan what time she had to be at the kids’ program.

First Stop: Nassau

First stop was Nassau, and that’s in the Bahamas. It took us about a day and a half to get there. We had been to Nassau the year before. We had liked it. But this time, nobody wanted to ashore except for me, and I just wanted to go shopping at the Straw Market. It was like a flea market. They had all sorts of good stuff cheap. So I went there all by myself. There are just so many people that get off the ship at the same time, that I didn’t feel uncomfortable just going off on my own. But, you know, it is a foreign country, so you have to be careful what you’re doing. That particular stop was only for a few hours. You have to be back on ship at a certain time, and then off you go to the next location.

Second Stop: Tortola

When we stopped at Tortola, Mark and Ashley and I bought an excursion to go over to The Baths at Virgin Gorda. The Baths are a beach, and you park way up top, and you have to walk way down to get to the beach. It’s these rock formations, and things that you climb through. Big giant boulders that you climb through and walk through. And then water comes shooting up through them. It’s pretty cool. And there’s usually good snorkeling around here because there’s these big rocks and so forth. This particular day, it was kind of rough, so there wasn’t really good snorkeling at all. But it was just really great to kind of walk through these rocks and so forth. And the water was just beautiful. The beaches are just gorgeous out there. It’s really turquoise, and the sand is very white.

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