In 1995, my sister offered to pay for one of our fares if we'd go with her on a cruise she'd been planning to take our mother on for her 70th birthday (which was the previous December)- of course we accepted! This time, we cruised on the very upscale but still very fun Celebrity Cruise Lines ship, MS Horizon. The itinerary was out of San Juan and we visited St. Thomas, Antigua, Martinique, Barbados, and Mayreau (in the Grenadines). It was especially cool to get the stop in Mayreau as it's not on the typical cruise itinerary.
We came down to San Juan the day before the cruise and we all stayed at a quaint little hotel in the city. While it wasn't much to look at, it was comfortable. Still, downtown San Juan is very noisy at night... it seems like people really love to just blast their car horns 24/7 there. I remember the hotel (can't remember it's name) serving us a nice breakfast before we went to the pier in Old San Juan.
At Martinique, we did a sea tour around the island, and then a land tour to an area devasted by a Mt. Pelee, a volcano, back in 1902. The area was still recovering! I want to get back to this island again sometime as it is truly gorgeous!
The food on the Horizon was a definite step up in quality but I thought the desserts were a step down from what we had on Holiday. The overall cruise experience was far more formal then Diane and I liked back then, but in the intervening years, Celebrity has relaxed to the industry standards for the most part as far as dress codes are concerned.
We had a spectacular time on this ship- no other cruise line had stewards in white gloves escort us to our cabin on embarkation (this isn't done on the modern Celebrity anymore either)! The ship was conservatively elegant and at 46,000 tons, was slightly larger then the Holiday but is considered small by today's mega-cruiser standards.
The MS Horizon was transferred out of the Celebrity fleet in 2005 and now sails for Island Cruises as the Island Star.
All photography on this page done by Paul and Diane McCullough