bobmacliberty

The National Museum of the US Air Force at the Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, OH is one of the best museums that I've ever seen. It's the largest military aviation museum in the world with aircraft from the early days of flying, every war era, and even space vehicles. They also have a few retired Air Force Ones that you can walk through, including the Boeing VC-137C used by Kennedy through Clinton. They do a great job of telling the stories of people who were involved with these planes with lots of other artifacts. Well worth a visit if you're ever near Dayton.

We've also visited the Chacchoben Mayan ruins while at Costa Maya. We used The Native Choice for the excursion and I'd recommend them. It's about an hour drive each way. We had plenty of time when we got back to wander around the port area a bit, but that will depend on how long you're there.

Is Tortola a tender or docking port? Either way, you'll probably have a nice sightseeing cruise to White Bay and back plus 3-4 hours of beach and Painkillers, with plenty of time before all aboard. Sounds like a great day! We almost always book 3rd party excursions and have never had a problem getting back to the ship with time to spare. While that's not guaranteed and things can go wrong, the reputation of these companies is dependent on getting passengers back to their ship on time. If they strand people a few times, word gets around quickly and their business dries up. They therefore do everything possible, including working with other excursion companies if needed, to get you back on time.

That sounds like a good alternative. Spread across several couples, it's not much more than the Royal excursion and ideally, will give you more time at JVD since you won't need to wait on others in the excursion. I hope it works out for you! If my memory is correct, I think Andrew @A&L_Ont did a private excursion not too long ago. Hopefully he'll jump in with the name of the company that he used.

I don't know if he's old enough to be into girls yet, but wearing a cast is a good way to get attention from girls. 😉

There's not much that I can add to this. 😒 Good Luck to both teams.

Looking forward to this Crystal! Istanbul is definitely on my list.

The York Minster is a great place to visit. If you're able to handle a lot of stairs, I recommend going up to the roof. There's also a fantastic set of roman ruins under the Minster.

Try the Khan Academy. It's free, online learning that is broken up into small chunks that are easy to "digest". It's a mix of text based info and videos, with the videos typically only being 5-10 minutes long. You can start with any topic that you want, or even go back and review elementary school grade math topics. Sal Khan created this and his story is an interesting one. He has both bachelors and masters degrees from MIT and had a very successful career as a financial analyst. In 2004, he created some videos to help tutor his cousin in India. He posted his videos on YouTube and the concept took off. He built a huge library of videos and quit his job in 2009 to do this full time. That eventually caught the attention of people like Bill Gates as a way to improve how we teach people and he received a lot of investment. The idea was to let students learn at their own pace and have the teacher focus where help is needed rather than teach everyone at the same pace with more gifted students being held back at a pace too slow for them and students needing help being left behind at a pace too fast for them. Khan Academy | Free Online Courses, Lessons & Practice

One of my daughter's favorite expressions when she was young... Girls go to college to get more knowledge. Boys go to Jupiter to get more stupider.

I see what you did there. 😉

Nope. Not touching that one.

RCI math is easy. It doesn't matter what the equation is. The answer is always the same.

We met with our (now 28 year old) daughter's first grade teacher for a parent teacher conference way back when and were worried about her handwriting. It was terrible. Her teacher told us not to worry. She'd survive just fine and handwriting wasn't going to be needed in the future!

Atlanta is surprisingly good at moving luggage between gates quickly. I've had several Delta experiences where I end up with 30 minutes or less between flights in Atlanta and am able to get myself to the next gate in time, expecting that my luggage won't make it. I've never lost luggage through Atlanta from a short layover, although I have for other reasons.

I hated O Chem. Nothing but pure memorization. It's a weed-out course in Engineering also.

I still have a hard time wrapping my mind around it. I just doesn't seem possible. So many people's lives are now destroyed. I think of the art stores on Front street that are just filled with the life's work of so many artists. That art is now likely gone. So sad.

I think she's Pinnacle for life. I'm pretty sure that you keep your existing status when you reach that age (18?, 21?) but you also separately have the actual number of points that you've earned from sailings that you were on. If you want to get to the next level, you need to earn all of those points on your own. As an example, our daughters are both Diamond through us, but have fewer than Diamond level points. They'd need to earn enough points on their own now just to get to Diamond, and then more to get to D+. Since there's nothing above Pinnacle, that little girl is already maxed out, no matter how many points she actually earned from sailing.

Garlic, basil, pine nuts, parmesan, olive oil. We do it in a mortar and pestle, which is supposed to result in a better taste than using a food processor or blender. I don't know if that's true, but it's definitely more work.

From what I've read about the new menu, that would be the carne asada. 😜

If you're tired of the craziness of social media and just want something fun, try following Buitengebeiden on Twitter. It's just posts of animals doing cute/funny stuff. I saw this post today, which many of you cat owners may appreciate: https://twitter.com/buitengebieden/status/1688096129253081088 Hopefully you don't need a Twitter account to see the post. Here is his main Twitter page if you want to see more: Edit: Sorry...thought this was just going to be a link to a web page. Oops.

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Definitely more crowded later in the day. Hopefully that means that you got on the Gringotts ride quickly. That was out favorite ride of Universal Studios. How was the Hogwarts Express ride? We didn't have tickets that allowed us to go between parks, so we weren't able to ride it.