Got Back From Cruise

This past week, over Thanksgiving, my family and I went on a Disney cruise. We went to Tortola (British Virgin Islands), St Thomas (US Virgin Islands), and Castaway Cay (Disney's private island in the Bahamas). It was a great trip. It rained a little bit one of the days we were hanging out on deck. When we were coming in to Castaway Cay it was raining and we thought the day was going to be washed out, but the rain stopped and the weather was beautiful that day.

This is the overall map of the cruise. We started out in Port Canaveral (due east of Orlando on the Atlantic Ocean), then went to Tortola (just east of St Thomas - see the 2nd map), then to St Thomas, then to Castaway Cay (the flag to the east of Miami), and back to Port Canaveral.

Here is a map of Tortola and St Thomas to indicate how close these islands are to each other. On our excursion from Tortola, we went to the Baths on the island of Virgin Gorda.

The entire cruise was great. It's a pretty expensive vacation, but Disney certainly treats you well. The food was great, the service was great, and the excursions were a lot of fun. I don't know when we'll be on another cruise, though - it's a lot of money for a vacation.

We departed Port Canaveral on Saturday in the early afternoon. We were at sea Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. Tuesday morning we arrived in Tortola. The trip from Tortola to St Thomas looks like it wouldn't take long, but in a cruise ship there isn't a good route to follow. We had to go east for a while, clear the British Virgin Islands, turn south, go past the islands, then turn west and eventually turn north to get to the St Thomas docks. Wednesday was spent in St Thomas. Thursday (Thanksgiving Day) was spent on the boat. Friday was in Castaway Cay. We arrived back in Port Canaveral early on Saturday and had to get off the boat fairly early (by 9:00 AM or something) so they could get ready for the next cruise.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Tasker: Get Voice Command

The way I decided to set up Tasker is to use some reusable tasks that can be called from other places. The first one I'll talk about is the Get Voice Command. This task listens for some stock commands like "yes", "no", "cancel", or "repeat". It is a quicker listener than the "Get Voice Input" command which I'll talk about in another post. This is meant some some quick one or two word commands. It uses regular expressions to match commands (meaning, you can say "yep" or "yeah" or "yes sir" and it will return "yes"). Being generic like this means that I don't have to duplicate all these regular expressions everywhere. I can just call this task and if it returns "yes", then I know the user (me) said something like "yes" or "yeah" or whatever. There's an input parameter to the task of the message to speak before listening for the answer. The task will re...
Read more

Blackjack Streak House Advantage

One of the side bets you can play at several casinos in Black Hawk is called "streak". This is a bet where you get paid if you win that many hands in a row (2, 3, 4, or 5). How much is the casino advantage on this game? Well, it all depends on the payout. There are several factors in play, but as a general rule you can assume that the odds of winning one hand in blackjack streak is 47.51% (or .4751) - thanks to Wizard of Odds for that. So the odds of winning "x" hands in a row are .4751^x, which is .22572 for 2 hands, .1072396 for 3 hands, .0509495 for 4 hands, and .0242061 for 5 hands. If you take that number, multiply by the amount you get if you win a streak of that size, and then subtract from 1, you will get the casino advantage. A typical streak pay scale is 3, 8, 18, and 38. So, for a streak of 2, the casino advantage is 1-(.22572*4)=0.09712 (9.71%). For a streak of 3, it's 3.48%. For 4, it's 3.196%. For 5, it's 5.596%. So the best bets are strea...
Read more

Picking 87 NCAA Basketball Games

My friend Tim and I picked 87 NCAA basketball games against the spread on Saturday. We alternated picks - first I would pick one, then he would pick one. Once a pick was made, the other person was automatically the "house" for that pick (meaning, you automatically had to take the other side). The way the picks were made, you wanted to make the ones you were most confident about early (before the other person had a chance to pick it). We made the picks in 3 waves - morning games, afternoon games, and night games. There were 24 morning games, 35 afternoon games, and 28 night games based on our breakdowns. In the morning games, Tim was 4-7-1 and I was 8-4. Our "top half" (picks 1 through 6 for this set) were both 2-4, however. That means I was 6-0 in the games lower down the list (ones I was basically guessing). In the afternoon games, Tim was 8-10 and I was 6-11. Our "top half" (1-9) picks were both 2-7. Again, we did better on the ones where we were guessin...
Read more