Background Info:

Since you last heard from me, I’ve had a few changes in my life.  Around 2 years ago, my husband Jason and I moved from San Jose, CA to Phoenix, AZ.  Jason’s parents have lived here for 20 years and we wanted to move closer to them, partly because of the other major change.  I would like to formally introduce to you the newest member of our family, our 2 and a half year old son, Ian.

Needless to say, we have had our hands full for the last couple of years!  Another reason I have stayed away from cruising was that I didn’t think it would be much fun to take a baby on a cruise.  When Ian turned 2 this summer, I started to get the urge to consider a cruise again.  His daycare schedule came out for the next school year and they would be closed for 2 full weeks at the end of the year.  It’s been getting pretty hard to keep him entertained during the weeks of school vacation, so going on a cruise with endless options of fun things to keep him happy and entertained sounded very tempting.  

To cruise, or not to cruise…:

I was daunted at the idea of flying to a cruise port with all of Ian’s “stuff”… his car seat, stroller, pack n play, 3 different kinds of diapers (for daytime, nighttime, and swimming!), all of his favorite snacks (because of course, a cruise ship full of wonderful food options isn’t good enough for my toddler… he prefers to live on a diet of Goldfish and pretzels *eyeroll*), a puddle jumper, the list goes on and on.  If flying to a cruise port were our only option, we would need to wait a few more years before I’d even consider cruising.  Luckily, there are several cruise ports about a 6-hour drive from Phoenix, plus a little more time to make a few stops along the way for gas and food and whatnot.  This seemed a lot more doable with a toddler, so I started researching our options.

There are a handful of cruise lines that sail from Los Angeles, Long Beach, and San Diego.  Our options were severely limited when I learned that nearly every cruise line requires children to be at least 3 years old AND potty trained to use their camp programs.  Luckily, Carnival allows 2 year olds in diapers to participate in the camp program (and thankfully they are willing to change diapers as needed!).  The only glitch was that since he still uses swim diapers, he is not allowed to use the pool, splash pad, or any of the public water features on the ship.  That wasn’t a deal-breaker for me… we would be cruising in the winter on a route that tends to be cold for the sea days, so I doubted any of us would want to use the pools those days.  Plus, we live in Phoenix and have year-round access to a splash pad and heated resort-style pool at our community center.  If Ian wanted to go swimming, he could do it while we were off the ship in port, or he could wait until we got home.

Picking the perfect itinerary:

So now that I knew we were cruising with Carnival, it was time to pick a ship and itinerary.  There aren’t many options from Southern California, so it was a pretty easy decision.  The Radiance and the Miracle have some 3 and 4 day itineraries to Ensenada and Catalina Island, but there was no way I was going to pack up all the stuff entailed with traveling with a toddler, and drive 6+ hours each way, to take a cruise that short.  The Miracle also has a few 5 and 6 day itineraries to Cabo, but that was also too short for my liking.  That left the Panorama.  I loved the idea of sailing on a newer ship, although I was a little nervous about sailing on such a big ship.  Panorama’s capacity is just over 4000 passengers with 2 people per cabin, and I would be cruising during school vacation when many cabins would have 3 or 4 passengers.  I am more used to having around 3000 passengers on the ship, so I kept my fingers crossed that it wasn’t too crowded to enjoy the ship, and I just hoped the benefits of a new ship with lots of amenities would outweigh the possible negatives of a big ship.

Most of the time, Panorama sails 7-day itineraries, leaving Long Beach every Saturday, and visiting Puerto Vallarta, Mazatlan, and Cabo.  I considered the cruise leaving December 23, but then I noticed the following week would be an 8-day cruise, including New Year’s Eve, with an extra port stop in La Paz.  Once I found this itinerary, there was no turning back!  I’ve always wanted to cruise over New Years, and I liked the idea of having 4 port days at places I’ve never been (aside from Puerto Vallarta… we spent a week there in December 2018).  

Now, it was time to pick our cabin.  In the past, we have cruised in inside, oceanview, and balcony cabins, and there was usually a specific reason I chose that cabin for that cruise (inside cabin on a port-heavy cruise, a great promo where the balcony was the same price as the oceanview, etc.).  Now that we are cruising with a child, I wanted a balcony so Jason and I would have somewhere to hang out while Ian was sleeping.  There were still plenty of cabins available, so I opted for a balcony just aft of the forward elevators on deck 9.  Checking the deck plans, it lined up to be under one of the cabins on deck 10 (I definitely did not want to be further aft where the lido pool would be above us and we would hear lounge chairs scraping on the ceiling, and noise from the DJ by the pool while Ian was trying to sleep!), and this would put us just 2 decks below Camp Ocean, and one deck below the Lido buffet.  I also liked that deck 9 had passenger cabins for the whole length of the ship so we could easily access any of the 3 sets of elevators (forward, mid-ship, or aft), and we could leave our cabin and go across on deck 9 to the elevator nearest our destination, then go up or down.  

With the perfect cabin selected, I officially booked the cruise on Carnival’s website.  We were officially going on a cruise as a family of 3!!  I booked with a rate that included price protection, so of course that meant I spent nearly every day until the cruise checking the prices of our cabin to see if I could get some money back.  As it turned out, the price remained surprisingly consistent, going up or down by only a few dollars here and there, but there was never a drop big enough to be worth submitting the price drop form.

I debated whether or not I should purchase Faster to the Fun.  We had it on our 2019 cruise and it definitely had its benefits, but they have since raised the price drastically and I wasn’t sure it was worth it.  Then I started thinking… We would be traveling with our toddler for the first time, and that comes with its own set of challenges.  Wouldn’t it be nice to go straight to the cabin upon boarding and drop off all our carry-on bags?  I don’t know how we would manage chasing after a toddler who wants to explore every square foot of this huge cruise ship, while also schlepping our carry-on bags, backpacks, bottles of wine, and cases of soda for the cabin.  It would also be nice to have early access to the cabin and have our checked bags arrive early so we could quietly unpack while Ian took his afternoon nap.  Another benefit would be that we would have priority tendering in Cabo.  We don’t arrive until 10am that day, so it was already going to be a late start and it would be nice not to stress about what time we’d actually make it off the ship in a non-priority tender.  That seemed like enough good reasons to me, so I went ahead and purchased FTTF for $130 for the cabin.

So many ports, so many options of things to do!:

So now that we know our ship and our cabin, it’s time to figure out what to do in each port.  Pre-child, I prioritized itinerary over ship amenities when choosing a cruise.  I loved waking up in a new port every day and having something different and exciting to experience.  I really hoped that I could continue that same philosophy when cruising with a toddler, but I knew I’d have to adjust my expectations on what exactly we could do each day.  Jason and I used to love going on full day excursions in a small boat to go snorkeling, and we even went scuba diving for the first time on our last cruise in 2019!  Unfortunately, that just doesn’t work when cruising with a toddler.  

Also, my philosophy has always been to avoid booking excursions through the cruise ship.  In my experience and based on the comments of other cruisers, they tend to cost more money to see fewer attractions with more people on the tour, and in a shorter time frame than private excursions. With one exception (see the Panama section of my Celebrity Equinox review!), I have had nothing but wonderful experiences working with private tour companies and/or planning a DIY excursion on all of my cruises.  Would that still be possible when cruising with a toddler?  Toddlers are unpredictable by nature, so I needed to take that into account when planning what we would do each day.  At home, Ian is a trooper when we take him along for whatever we have planned on the weekends, so I kept my fingers crossed that he would be so excited in interesting and unfamiliar settings that he would be happy and entertained through whatever we were doing.

Here is Ian having a wonderful time at his first professional sporting event, a Phoenix Mercury WNBA game last summer…

And here is Ian LOVING a rugged Pink Jeep Tour in Sedona, Arizona:

Expectations adjusted, I started looking into our options.  I will go into more details on what we did each day as I get to that day of the cruise, but here is a summary of our plans:

Cabo: Aquabulle Underwater View Boat to the Arch

La Paz: Explore downtown DIY

Mazatlan: All-Inclusive Day Pass at Playa Mazatlan Hotel

Puerto Vallarta: Vallarta Zoo, then walk along the Malecon

Seeing as how I am an obsessive planner, I created a calendar listing our activity for each day of the cruise. We hung this in our cruise cabin, which made it easier to remember what was on the agenda each day.

I have made countdown candy jars for all of our previous cruises.  The idea is that we eat one piece of candy each night and gradually watch the jar become empty as we get closer to the start of the cruise.  Ian is still a little young for this tradition, so I only made it for Jason and myself.  It’s fun to have a daily reminder of such an exciting vacation coming up!

Eight weeks before our cruise, the Carnival Panorama struggled with engine problems which required the ship be taken out of service and sent to dry dock for immediate repairs.  The cruise scheduled that week had a drastically modified itinerary (the ship was moving so slowly that they only had 1 port day in Cabo and the rest of the week was sea days!), and they canceled the next 4 weeks of cruises.  The plan was for the ship to go to Oregon for an emergency dry dock, and regular cruises would resume the week of December 9.  I felt so horribly for the people booked on those 4 weeks of cruises as they must have been so upset to have their cruises canceled at the last minute (especially those who planned to spend their Thanksgiving holiday on board!), but I was very thankful that our New Year’s Eve cruise would not be affected and we could still enjoy our vacation as planned… or would it??

A week later, John Heald announced that they needed to remove the whale tail from the ship in order to pass under several fixed bridges to reach the dry dock location in Portland, Oregon.  This meant they had to cancel 2 more weeks of cruises, and the first cruise back would be the week of December 23, one week before our cruise.  It actually turned out that the ship had to travel up to Victoria, Canada to have the whale tail removed, then back down to Oregon for the engine repairs, then return to Canada to have the whale tail re-installed, before coming back down the west coast to Long Beach to resume its normal cruise schedule.  This was pushing it too close for comfort, but there was really nothing we could do but keep our fingers crossed and wait it out to see what happened.  It was such a stressful few weeks with very limited information available about if the repairs were on schedule.  Luckily, we had a very active group on a certain web page (I don’t think I’m allowed to type the actual name here, so you’ll have to fill in the blanks), and people who lived in the Pacific Northwest posted a few photos of the progress visible from the outside.  I did not take these photos, and I honestly don’t even know who did take them so I am technically posting them here without permission, but hopefully they don’t mind since they took the photos as a source of information…

After the whale tail was removed:

When the ship made it safely to the dry dock in Portland, Oregon:

A view of the azipods being repaired while the ship was in dry dock:

Our best source was information came from one of the people on our cruise page who had a connection to a crew member who was on the ship.  He kept her identity private until the very end (after the repairs were finished), but she gave us frequent updates based on whatever information she could find out.  Interestingly, Carnival didn’t really update the crew with much information either, so we were all thankful for whatever she could find out for us.

The planner in me was going crazy since I did not want to start packing until I knew for sure that the cruise was happening.  I didn’t want to jinx anything by packing too soon, so I refused to pull out anything from my closets until the week before we were leaving.  Once the ship was sailing south down the west coast with her whale tail reattached, I breathed a huge sigh of relief and finally felt confident that we would be spending New Year’s week aboard the Carnival Panorama!

On the Wednesday before the cruise, I got a phone call from the 305 area code.  I usually ignore spam calls, but something told me I should answer that call.  It was Carnival!  They were calling to offer me an “upgrade” from our regular balcony cabin on deck 9 to an Ocean Suite on deck 7 for a $600 upgrade fee.  As he was rambling off all the benefits of a suite, I was quickly searching on the Carnival website for more information.  The suite was much further aft than our current cabin, almost at the aft elevators, so that wasn’t ideal.  I was really hoping this type of suite had a floor plan which would give Ian a separate space to sleep in, or even a walk-in closet or some place big enough to put his crib so he wouldn’t wake us up every night.  I wasn’t thrilled about the $600 fee, but if it meant Ian had his own “room” to sleep in, I might have gone for it.  Sadly, that is not how the Ocean Suite is layed out, so I couldn’t justify the extra $600 cost and I declined his offer.  That was the first time the upgrade fairy ever called me, so it was nice to know I had the possibility of a good deal.  Other people from the web page group got much better deals, like $300 to go from a regular interior to a Havana balcony!  Now THAT was a good upgrade deal!  

The rest of that week was a blur, filled with last minute errands and all the packing that I usually do over the course of several weeks.  I took Ian for a haircut, and I did my nails for the cruise.  Recently, I have been playing around with the nail polish stickers with fun patterns that I could never create for myself, so I thought these were a fun design for New Year’s and the week of the cruise:

Before we knew it, our countdown candy jars were empty and it was time to leave for the cruise!

Up next: California bound!