Working on a CRUISE SHIP + Last Stop in Costa Rica

It is already day 12, which means it is our last day on board this world cruise, and we are so Sad. And after 10 days of enjoying ourselves on this ship, yesterday we had a day at sea. First we got a haircut, but then.

They put us to work as waiters.

I've never waited tables in my whole life, and I'm super nervous. But I'm really excited about our name tags. They say dining service for one day.

They specified one day. So we can't jump back in here and try to serve people tomorrow with your bake here.

I'm really nervous serving the bread. This is going very easy. Serving the bread.

Going in the kitchen.

Wow.

This is where the magic happens.

You want to carry it?

No, you have to carry it.

Here we go. Carl's nervous.

My favorite part so far is that Kara took so long to bring the wine and the water that they had already ordered from another waiter. So when we got them to the table, they already had their drinks. It was actually a lot of fun, and it gave us such a better appreciation for what the people on the ship do day in and day out to make this experience possible for us and all of the other guests on the ship.

This morning, we pulled into the port of Puntarenas, Costa Rica, and thankfully, they're not kicking us out until tonight. So we have one more day of exploring. And it is so beautiful here. I'm so excited.

So we've just driven two hours into the middle of the country where the mountains are in Costa Rica, and it is the most beautiful place I've ever seen. Everything is so green. There's just life everywhere. Farms, birds, flowers, trees. We're in an area called San Ramon, and it is a cloud forest, which we're going to be exploring in a little bit. But first we're having some lunch. We're eating a very local meal of rice and beans with chicken and salsa on top. The rice and beans they refer to as casado, which in Spanish means marriage, because the rice and beans are always together. I'm so excited about this. So excited. Almost heard my song out.

So simple and so delicious. I love this.

We're getting to spend the afternoon hiking through the cloud forest and looking for all the wildlife that Costa Rica is famous for. But, like, the forest, like, whether we see anything or not is just absolutely beautiful. It's so green. Like, take this leaf that I just picked up off the ground, for example. There's green things growing on top of green things, on top of more green things.

We just walked through a hummingbird area, which sounds, I don't know, like, I don't know if I'd be too excited about seeing hummingbirds, but they were awesome. Hummingbirds are so fascinating.

We learned a fun fact that hummingbirds are the only birds in the world that can fly backwards. You're welcome. Next time that comes up on Trivia Night.

I feel like normally there's like a weight or person limit on these things, but say we have 50 right now.

It's moving so much. No one's going anywhere fast.

We just finished our hike and I'm so glad that we finally got to explore the beautiful, luscious, mountainous part of Costa Rica that I've always heard about. We actually came to Costa Rica once before.

Believe it or not, we traveled before. We were full time travel vloggers. We had just gotten married, we had no money. One of our very first trips together was to the beach in Costa Rica.

At that point, like, I owned my own little printing business and Kara was the nanny. So the way we used to travel back before the channel was like, whenever Kara had time off work, we'd just use some of the points that we had saved up and we'd go take a trip. So we ended up kind of taking just like a random spur of the moment, four day trip here to Costa Rica.

I think there was some kind of flight sale.

Yeah, we probably got a good deal.

Like, that's why we chose Costa Rica.

And I think the most memorable thing from that trip is it was actually the very first time we ever stayed in a hostel.

I had no idea what a hostel was.

Karis thought I was pronouncing hotel wrong when I told her we were gonna stay at a hostel. But that was the way we could travel cheap and stay within our budget. So first night, check into the hostel, head out, come back. And as soon as we come back to the hostel, this critter just comes sprinting out of the door at us.

Like, we open the door and it violently ran past us to a point where I screamed. We went in the room and my bed had poop on it.

Just like a big poop right in the middle of the bed.

I was like, what is this hostile thing?

So we go to the front desk and we tell the lady, like, hey, I think there was a cat in our room and it pooped in the middle of the bed. Expecting her to be like, really apologetic and like, rush off to get us clean sheets. But she was like, oh, I've been looking for the cat. I think we did get clean sheets. Eventually. But like, that's the one thing I remember from that trip. Like failing to surf and the cat pooping on our bed was like my memory from four days in Costa Rica.

And now we're heading back to the ship one last time.

We snuck back on the ship for one last gelato.

Before they picked us off. I'm so sad.

So bad.

Well, this is officially the end and I am genuinely sad to say goodbye to the ship that's behind us. I mean, obviously we're sad that the cruise is over, but the one thing I didn't expect to be sad about was that I'm sad to leave the people that were on the ship.

We really feel like we're friends with those people. I mean, two weeks with these same people in a small space is a long time.

We got to know some of them really well and hopefully our paths will cross again somewhere in the world.

We have a lot of new Facebook friends now.

We have a long, depressing walk down the pier where we will get in a taxi that will take us on a dark two hour drive to San Jose where we will sleep for a couple hours before heading to the airport tomorrow morning.