Plans are proceeding!

We had nearly my entire family over for Easter dinner this weekend (my brother was in Japan on business, eating live baby squid, poor guy), so we took advantage of the fact to try to coordinate our shore excursions. The idea was that no one under the age of 18 should go off on an excursion alone.

But it's pretty obvious - my family tends to like the same things. So a large group of us (including me) are going parasailing in Grand Cayman, and another large group is leaning toward horseback riding on the beach in Jamaica, and a third group are interested in something the cruise line refers to as "Sea Trek".

Sea Trek is a sort of modern version of old-style deep-sea diving. They give you a helmet connected to a hose, and you walk around, wearing this contraption, on the bottom of the ocean looking at fish. You emerge with your hair dry and your jaw unclenched, and no headache (at least, in theory) from wearing a too-tight mask so that it wouldn't leak. Could be cool. Although the picture of it on the shore excursions site shows a bunch of people in helmets standing around with nary a fish in sight.

Jamaica has been a bit problematic for all of us. I was reading reviews of our proposed cruise on Cruise Critic (www.cruisecritic.com), and saw references to armed gunmen and scary-crazy drivers, and we've really been struggling to decide if we should do anything there or just take advantage of in-port-day spa sales. I'm still leaning toward the latter, but the horseback riding has to happen there (the age limit is lower there than in Cozumel, which means everyone could go), and my husband and brother-in-law are already booked to play golf there.

My sister was more daring than I - she signed up on the Cruise Reviews forums and asked everyone there about it. Here's her question and all the answers, in case you're similarly concerned: http://cruise-chat.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/4361096441/m/1651006663.

On the wardrobe front, I'm making only marginal progress. At the moment, I'm thinking that I'll just take existing formal-night dresses, rather than buy new ones (especially after I realized that the TravelSmith reversible tank and skirt that I like only has the tank available in size S), but I think I might have found some shoes - Zappos is a wonderful site. They list 983 (I think) different pairs of sandals in the mythical size 10-1/2 (which is my mythical size), and there are a couple there that could do double duty for casual and formal nights.

I think we're well under 80 days - I haven't had an e-mail from Carnival in at least a week, telling me what the countdown is.

And the weather around here is starting to act more like spring, finally (yes, I know it's only been officially spring since Friday).