Ship Life

                        Teague loved the window seat on the tender boat.

We booked our cruise with Costa well before the tragedy in Italy. I was obviously concerned about going on our cruise after that, but figured that it was probably the safest time to cruise, and likely the best time to cruise with Costa because they would be more cautious than ever (and because, let's face it, they couldn't afford another disaster).

With all of the bad press surrounding Costa, I was pleasantly surprised that the company  contacted us and offered us a full refund if we chose not to cruise with them after the Italy incident. We ended up having a great experience and would definitely recommend the Brazilian cruises with Costa. 

 The cool thing about the Italian cruise line? They serve Brazilians exclusively from December through March. They actually hire an all-Brazillian staff for those months as well, and the main language spoken is Portuguese. So here we were, 3 of only 7 English speakers on the entire cruise, eating Italian fare and conversing with Brazilians in Spanish! Sounds like the start of a bad joke, but it was a really really good time! Brazilians are so fun-loving and couldn't have been nicer to us. Teague was a really good sport when everyone wanted pictures with the blonde/blue eyed gringo.

I'll bet you can't guess where Teague spent all of his time on the ship. Lucky for us, the water slide did have hours of operation, otherwise, I think he would have slept on it.

        Our lifeboat drills. They meant business.