For our 2025 winter vacation, I wanted to keep things simple. Even back in March, I could tell it was going to be a hard year, and while I knew I would want a getaway at Christmastime, I also knew I would not have the energy to plan much.

My daughter C and I had cruised before: once with Royal Caribbean to the Norwegian Fjords in the summer of 2023, and again with Celebrity Cruises to the Southern Caribbean in December 2024. And though cruising never really fit my younger self’s travel style, these days I have found that while it isn’t how I want every vacation to go, it can be a welcome break from my more heavily planned, detail-oriented holiday.

By the time December rolled around, I was incredibly grateful to have a simple, straightforward trip set up—one that let us escape the Virginia winter, spend time with friends and family, and have ample mother-daughter time, with enough activities on the ship for both of us to allow for valuable time apart, and very little additional thought on my part.

To further uncomplicate our trip, I decided that we would drive to and from Port Canaveral, our port of embarkation. For last year’s cruise out of Puerto Rico, our flights were changed repeatedly between purchase and departure, each time becoming less convenient. I did not want to go through that again.

Traveling by car gave me back a small amount of agency, which felt good in a year where so much felt out of my control. Later, I realized that the decision also felt very on brand for 2025. We ended up with more road trips than I would have predicted, including drives to Lancaster, Philadelphia, and New Bern, our summer southern European driving vacation, and a road trip to Ohio for a friend’s wedding.

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On the Wednesday afternoon before the cruise, we packed up the car, stocked up on road trip snacks, and hit the road. We were excited to get out of town, and I was thrilled that traffic on I-95, notorious for traffic jams, was light. We made good time and stopped for the evening halfway through North Carolina.

The following day, we were up and on the road early. It would be a long slog to our condo in Jacksonville, Florida, our next stop. Driving I-95 can be mind-numbingly boring. We broke up the morning with a stop at South of the Border, just over the South Carolina border. On many a trip along this corridor, we have passed this mega attraction, but never stopped. It’s the quintessential kitschy 1950s roadside stop blown up to 2000s excess with a motel, camping, restaurants, oversized fiberglass statues, mini golf, and the largest indoor reptile exhibit in the U.S. Though, at 9 AM on a random Thursday morning in winter, it was nearly deserted. So, we just filled up on gas, stretched out our legs for a bit, and got back on the road.

It was many more hours and miles before we arrived at our condo in Jacksonville, where we would spend the next two nights relaxing and catching up with my aunt. It was wonderful to have the temperatures warming between North Carolina and Florida, to gradually shed our coats and sweaters. We had nothing in particular planned. Just spending time with family, which was another benefit to driving over flying. Then on Saturday, C and I once again loaded up the car and drove the last 2.5 hours to Port Canaveral to board our cruise ship.

There was the usual madness at the port—parking, walking to the cruise terminal, shuffling through the line—but overall it went pretty quickly, and we soon found ourselves on board in our cabin. Putting down our bags was like setting down the baggage of the past year. It would be temporary, but for a little while, I could feel lighter. Then C and I headed to the café on the promenade to meet up with my long-time friend CZ, her son Little CZ, and Little CZ’s dad to catch up and explore the ship for the rest of the afternoon and evening. That night, as we steamed off into the Caribbean, I slept the best I had in months.

The following day, we arrived at our first port of call: Nassau. When I booked the cruise, Nassau was not part of the itinerary. It was instead Labadee, Haiti, a 260-acre private and secure beach area exclusive for Royal Caribbean. However, after the State Department reissued the Level 4-Do Not Travel warning in July, due to an increase in violent crime and civil unrest, the cruise line suspended visits to the island. Though Labadee is really just a private playground with little cultural interaction with Haitians and it wasn’t clear to me how much money actually reached the locale population, I was still curious about the stop, though not heartbroken it was cancelled. We waited many months to find out the alternative destination, which online sources indicated could be Nassau, Grand Cayman, Grand Turk in the Turks and Caicos, or Puerta Plata in the Dominican Republic. I had my fingers crossed for the latter two as they sounded more interesting, but in the end Nassau it was.

Having been to Nassau many times, CZ opted to stay on the ship. Little CZ and his dad headed out on a food tour, while C and I disembarked for our own self-guided walking tour. The heat hit us immediately. The port was crowded and loud, full of Caribbean brass drum music and the buzz of excited passengers spilling off their ships. Little wooden shops, painted in bright Caribbean shades of fuchsia, coral, azure, lime, and yellow, lined the way. The energy was contagious. We were here! In the Caribbean.

And all my teen wanted to see in Nassau was Starbucks! Fine. That was our second stop after the Straw Market, which, unfortunately, was not quite open when we arrived. Some shopkeepers were just setting up, but most stalls still had tarps over their goods. Frankly, the goods looked like the same old beach wear, t-shirts, rattan bags and hats, and kitschy goods we had seen in so many Caribbean stores. Then we walked over to Government House, a beautiful, flamingo-pink Georgian colonial-style building in the center of the old town. Though that too was hard to see as metal bleachers, likely set up for a Christmas parade, blocked the view.

I then dragged C to the Queen’s Staircase, a 66-step limestone staircase carved out of the rock between 1793 and 1794 to link Fort Fincastle to the waterfront area. To reach the stairs, one walks through a shaded corridor between the limestone walls, covered in vegetation. It was really lovely. But it was also crowded. I waited quite a long while to capture my daughter’s photo on the stairs with few other people around. At the top of the stairs, my plan had been to explore Fort Fincastle, but it was closed for renovations. We decided to return to the ship for lunch, planning to disembark again later to see the Pirate museum and perhaps another museum, but we did not get back off.

Day three was a cruising day (the cruise line counted boarding day as Day one), and we had a few activities planned. C and I had an early morning pickleball lesson on the sports deck, but it was very windy—the net wouldn’t stay in place, and the balls were quickly blown astray. We later tried mini golf, where the wind sent our golf balls skittering just as easily. Though we weren’t going to win any tournaments anyway. CZ and I took a short walk around the pool deck, our hair whipping into our faces; it was warm, but the wind made being on deck feel like an endurance sport. Thus, CZ and I retreated to the adult-only solarium to relax and talk. After lunch, C, CZ, and I headed to a lounge for a geography quiz and ended up taking first place. Later, all five of us joined up to watch family karaoke, where even C and Little CZ’s dad went up on stage to sing Men at Work’s “Down Under.” We followed that up with dinner together in the main dining room. All in all, a nice day at sea, and a great start to the cruise.