Yep, It's been nine years of wedding bliss with Christina as my beautiful bride. Nine years since I watched her walk down the aisle that I've photographed so many other brides walking down. It's amazing.
Click to see the pictures so long as I haven't removed them from our server.
For the first time since we've been married we celebrated our anniversary with a big trip without the children and chose a simple 7-day cruise to the Western Caribbean leaving from Galveston. It was the most relaxing trip I have been on in years. If you're looking for 24-hour parties and non-stop talking and entertainment like my wife this may not be the best thing for you. The music and the shows were kind of enemic and seemed to have the soul sucked out of them and were never loud enough (of course this comes from a bass player who played one too many years next to the crash cymbals and snare drum). It didn't really matter to me because I wanted to spend most of my trip sleeping in and enjoying the silence. But my wife dragged me out to acouple of 'fun' day trips in Costa Maya, Belize and Cozumel. The Costa Mayan stop was a 6 hour tour of Mayan ruins, which I named the Mayan Death Camp Tour because I barely made it back to the ship with a fever and every muscle in my body aching. In Belize we spied on the Prime Minister's family photographer until he invited us in than we talked for a while about what and how we shoot. In Cozumel we walked around Cruise Ship Row where everyone spoke English and wanted to sell us something for American cash. They weren't all that keen on the almighty credit card, but we did find a couple of people who would take the cards and came back with a couple of gifts for family. The day we were there there were five cruise ships docked right next to us. So my guess was there were between 10k-15k people dropping in on the little island at that dock. They had cell phone reception there too.
My favorite part of the cruise was sleeping and swimming after midnight and then more sleeping. Then of course there was eating. And eating and eating. It took up half our day most days. I was kind of getting a little bored with chewing after a while and just wished they'd make it all into a milkshake: Lobster milkshake, salmon milkshake, feticcini alfredo milkshake. Chewing just took too bloody long. Most of the time it was time for another meal as soon as we were done with what we were eating. We did a lot of walking around the deck day and night trying to keep from dying from the incredible intake of butter that was piled up in front of us morning, noon, night, midnight, and everywhere inbetween. Oh!
We hope to go on another next year and take the kids. I think they would like it a lot. At least the eating and swimming part.
