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Wednesday, March 13, 2019 ~ Roatan, Honduras

April 23, 2019 deladane Leave a comment

As soon as I booked this cruise, I knew that I wanted to find a tour for one of our ports where I could hold a sloth. I have been obsessed with sloths for years, and holding one would be a bucket list experience for me. There are several monkey and sloth habitats on Roatan, so this seemed like a good day to do that. Another priority for today’s tour was to spend some time snorkeling from the shore at West Bay beach. My research told me that they have an incredible reef which is easily accessed from the shore, and photos of the beach itself looked beautiful so I knew I wanted to see it for myself. The next step was picking a tour company, and Roatan has lots of options for small group tours where they will fill a van with 15ish people and take you to play with the monkeys and sloths, to go shopping somewhere on the island, and to end the day at the beach. I considered doing that, but since holding a sloth was such a huge priority for me, I didn’t want to risk taking a group tour and possibly missing that stop. Some of the places those tours take you to have specific hours when you can hold the sloths, and I did not want to risk something delaying my tour so that we arrived at the wrong time and could not hold a sloth.

That’s when I came across Rony’s Tours. They offer lots of varieties of tours, but the one I liked the best was the private tour option. For a little bit of extra money above the cost of a group tour, DH and I could have our own driver and guide for the day in our own air conditioned car. We could pick and choose where we went, how much time we spent at each place, and in what order we made the stops. The website has a list of all the different places you can go and how much each place will cost, so it was very easy to pick out our schedule for the day. They were quick to reply to my emails and answering all of my questions, and they did not require any payment in advance (always a plus because then you don’t need to deal with getting a refund if the ship misses the port for some reason!).

Today’s Fun Times

These papers were included with our Fun Times today:

My alarm clock went off bright an early at 7am. I jumped out of bed, eager to get this exciting day started! Peeking out the window at 7:30, it looked like we were already tied up to the dock.

Once we were both dressed and with our beach bags packed, we went upstairs to Lido for breakfast. We had good timing because there were only two or three people on line at Blue Iguana, so it didn’t take long to get our breakfast burritos.

Breakfast with a view!

Like a kid in a candy store, when I finished my burrito, I left DH sitting at the table and sipping his coffee so I could go take photos of the port from the outside decks upstairs. It was shaping up to be another sunny, beautiful day in the Caribbean!

The Carnival Freedom was in port with us today

At 8am, Gary announced that the ship was cleared so I went back to get DH so we could head out. The morning sun would have put our faces in shadow, so I told DH we should skip this photo op and wait until later this afternoon, when hopefully the sun would be at a better spot in the sky for a souvenir photo.

Mahogany Bay is another highly commercialized cruise port, which means lots of walking to get from the gangway out to where the private tours can pick you up. Luckily, it was a little less confusing today compared to Costa Maya yesterday, and soon enough, we found our way up the hill, across a big parking lot, up and down another hill, and out to the sea of tour providers waiting to pick up their passengers. Someone approached me to ask which company I was looking for, and when I said Rony’s Tours, he pointed me three people down from him. When I got there, they greeted me by name and said they were my driver and guide. How did they know it was me without me saying anything?? I wonder if that meant no one else from either ship booked with Rony’s Tours today? Or maybe the group tour had a different meeting time/location? Either way, it was nice to find our guides and not need to negotiate that mess of vendors any longer!

Our guide for our day in Roatan was named Windell, and our driver was Darson. Windell explained that he would come inside all the stops with us while Darson stayed with the car all day. It was now 8:30am, and we drove off towards our first stop as Windell explained some of the history and culture of Roatan. He is a high school English teacher but in their schools, students don’t take every subject every day, so he doesn’t have to teach on Wednesdays and is free to guide cruise ship tours. In addition to those two jobs, he also attends college for a degree in English, so he’s a busy guy! With all of that English background, it was no surprise that his speech was easy for us to understand and he was completely fluent. He joked that his English was better than his Spanish!

After about 20 minutes, we arrived at our first stop at a scenic overlook. There were a few vendors selling crafts and souvenirs, and behind that was a view of Coxen Hole. I found it a little strange that Windell took us here since our ship was docked at the other cruise port in Mahogany Bay. It was a pretty view, but it would have been more fun to see our ship instead of the RCCL ship which happened to be docked over here today. Maybe there is no equivalent view over Mahogany Bay? I’m not sure, but this place seemed pretty popular with tour buses and there were probably 50 other tourists up here at the same time as us.

We didn’t have any interest in the souvenirs for sale here so we enjoyed the view for a few minutes, then got back in the car to drive to our next stop: Manawakie Eco Park. Rony’s Tours offers two places to play with the sloths and monkeys. Daniel Johnson’s costs $10 per person and is a very popular choice among cruise ship passengers, whereas Manawakie costs $15 per person and has only been opened for a few months so it is not as well known just yet, and it is located closer to West Bay (Daniel Johnson’s was actually in the opposite direction and would have involved a much longer drive). There were only a handful of reviews on Trip Advisor for Manawakie, and even fewer on Cruise Critic, but all of those reviews were excellent and said it was not crowded and they had lots of time to play with the sloths and monkeys. I thought Manawakie sounded like a better option for our needs, and it was worth the extra $5 per person cost.

We arrived at Manawakie at 9:15am and we were the only ones there! They have their own guides there so Windell did not go in with us, but he showed us where to pay our entrance fee and made sure we were set up with our guide, Hector. Although we were eager to play with the sloth, Hector had a route planned out for us. First, he walked us through their garden and explained how the locals use the various plants and herbs for home remedies and medicinal purposes.

We could tell that he really knew his information well, but honestly, his accent was so thick that we could barely understand him. He spoke very fast and his speech sounded like he memorized a script so it didn’t hold our attention as much as it should have. They have a display set up with around 10 different jars and containers, and he opened each one to tell us what was inside and how it was used. Maybe we would have enjoyed it more had he taken us there at the end of the tour, instead of at the beginning when all we really wanted to do was play with the animals?

After about 20 minutes, we reached the area where they keep the capuchin monkeys. Hector explained that the monkeys are not shy and will jump all over us, climb inside our clothing, and try to take anything hiding in our pockets. We purposely left everything in the car aside from our sunglasses and my camera, and DH made sure to empty his pockets except for the one with a zipper closure where he kept his wallet. Within seconds of us entering the cage, this happened…

This monkey was named Poncho and he was 3 years old. He really loved climbing all over DH and he kept going up onto his shoulders, then down his shirt! It was crazy but so funny at the same time! Poncho was really a handful, but I was more drawn to the other 2 monkeys. One was a tiny 6 month old baby, but he spent the whole time up in the rafters, too afraid of humans to come down and say hello.

The third monkey was 1 year old and he was just perfect for me… too shy to jump all over me, but friendly enough to let me feed him and pet him.

Hector gave us sunflower seeds to feed the monkeys, and they would take it from our hands, split it open, and eat the seeds.

I think Poncho saw me feeding the 1 year old (I wish I could remember his name!), so he came over to get some food too.

It didn’t take long before this happened…

He was a fast-moving critter! We had a lot of fun playing with the monkeys, and it felt like we were in there a long time, but I just looked at the time stamp on my photos and we were only in there for about 10 minutes. I guess it was such a frantic experience that it felt way longer than it actually was! When we were ready to leave, Hector put Poncho up in his tire swing with some sunflower seeds to keep him distracted so we could open the gate and quickly jump out without Poncho escaping.

The next two cages housed a rabbit and a few parrots, but we weren’t allowed to play with those animals for whatever reason.

We knew all that was left was to play with the sloth, but Hector wanted to share more of the history of Roatan first. He took us into this little hut with murals painted on all the walls. Luckily it was air conditioned in there so at least it was comfortable, but the acoustics were not the best, and between the echoing, the noise of the air conditioner, and Hector’s thick accent, we only understood about 30% of what he was saying. He gets credit for trying, at least!

This is Hector

A nice map of the island

At first we thought this said Prophet Joe Biden and we started to laugh. We tried explaining what we thought was so funny, but Hector had never heard of Joe Biden. He did know who Barak Obama was, so we were able to explain Biden’s role to him. It’s always interesting to me to learn what people from other countries do and do not know about America and our politics.

And with that, it was finally time for the grand finale… the sloths! The problem was, there was another group already in there! How did that happen?? We were the only ones here when we arrived, so how did they get ahead of us? As we were waiting off to the side, this deer came up behind us on the other side of the fence.

They have 4 sloths at Manawakie Eco Park… one male, one female who just had a baby, and one other female who is pregnant. So maybe I should say they have 4.5 sloths? Hehe The male sloth is the father of both babies, so they named him Real Deal, and he was the sloth we were allowed to play with. No one will be allowed to hold the baby sloth until it is 1 year old, and the two female sloths were up in the trees while we were here so we couldn’t hold them.

If you look really closely, you can see one of the females with her baby up in this tree…

Fernando is the sloth keeper and he introduced all the sloths and taught us how to safely hold Real Deal so we wouldn’t hurt him and so he wouldn’t hurt us. His nails are very sharp, and if he doesn’t feel like we are holding him securely, then he will dig into us with his nails for a better grip. To avoid that, we had to cup one hand under his bottom so he could sit on that hand and then he would just drape over our shoulders.

OMG! I am holding a sloth!!!

Sloths can turn their heads around 180 degrees, perhaps because that requires less energy than turning their whole body?

He was so cute and cuddly!

DH’s turn to hold Real Deal. BTW, only the males have that marking stripe on their backs (I had always wondered about that!)

My bucket list officially has one more check mark! In the end, we spent 45 minutes here and I think that was the perfect amount of time. Had we come with a bigger group, we may have needed more time so everyone had a turn with each of the animals, but 45 minutes was perfect for just the two of us. Windell and Darson were waiting for us at the front entrance, and as we drove away at 10am, a big 15 person van pulled up so I was glad we arrived so early.

We drove for about 20 minutes to our next stop at the Mayak Chocolate Factory. I saw it listed as one of the free stops on the Rony Tours website and mentioned it Windell that we were interested in making a brief stop there if it was on our way. Conveniently, it was about midway between Manawakie and West Bay so it made for a good place to stop.

The store was quite small, so luckily we were the only people inside at that time. Had we come with a bigger tour group, I imagine it would feel pretty crowded! One of the employees came over to explain how to harvest the beans and make chocolate.

The lady gave us samples of a few kinds of chocolate, including white chocolate, milk chocolate, 60% and 80% dark chocolate, and chili chocolate. Luckily DH tried the chili chocolate first because he said it really had a strong kick to it, and there is no way I would have liked it so I skipped that one. It was an interesting stop and the chocolate was tasty so I’m glad we took the time to visit their factory. We stayed there for less than 10 minutes, then piled back in the car to go to the beach. There was a lot of traffic backed up on the one lane road because there was construction going on to pave the road. This is the main road that leads to West Bay and Darson said it used to be very bumpy before they repaved it, so luckily the construction was nearly done and the road was smooth for us. The problem was that only one direction of traffic can pass at a time so we were backed up from letting traffic pass in the other direction. Once it was our side’s turn to go, it only took a few more minutes to arrive at West Bay beach. Rony’s lists all the options for the different beach clubs along West Bay, and we picked Bananarama.

Bananarama charges $10 per person for a day pass, which includes a lounge chair and bathroom access. There was no need for an umbrella because the beach is lined with trees for natural shade, and we could rent a locker for $5 (plus a $5 refundable deposit).

Today’s menu

Pizzarama, where we intended to order a pizza for lunch but then ended up not getting hungry so we skipped it

Pizza menu

Lots of picnic tables in the shade and a large bar area

Some live music, but you could only hear it in the bar area

We walked down to the beach to pick out our lounge chairs. There were plenty available even though we didn’t arrive until 11am

This beach was really beautiful

We told Windell that we were going to go snorkeling, so he offered to walk us down to the far end of the beach to show us where there was a break in the reef that we could use as an entrance area. I read a few posts online before the trip which explained where to go for the best snorkeling, but it’s so hard to find the right spot when you are standing on the beach. We were glad that Windell knew where to go, and he walked us all the way down to the far left side of the beach to the Grand Roatan Resort to point out these rocks in the water, which is where he said we should enter for snorkeling.

We didn’t realize he was taking us so far down the beach or we would have brought our snorkel gear with us! Now we had to walk all the way back to Bananarama to get our snorkels, and then walk all the way back down here again to get in the water. It would have made more sense if he told us to gear up first before we walked over there. Oh well, it was a beautiful day for a long walk along the beach.

Once we got back to Bananarama, DH decided he wanted a beer before snorkeling. We had asked Windell earlier this morning what the beach bars charged for a bottle of beer and he said $2. We thought that was fair and opted not to stop at a market to pick up beers prior to arriving at the beach. DH went up to the bar and was surprised that they charged $3.50 per bottle, nearly double what Windell told us. We found Windell and told him about it, and he was really surprised but said he knew where we could find cheaper beer. He led us out towards the parking lot for the beach where there were a few stores and restaurants. One of the stores sold us a 6 pack of local beer for $9, so $1.50 per bottle. Now that’s more like it!

While DH enjoyed his first bottle, I rented a locker so we could store our valuables when we were snorkeling, and since the lockers were in the shade, we stashed our beer in there too haha

Finally, it was time to go snorkeling! We walked back down to the end of the beach and started to see coral just a few feet from the shore.

Brain Coral

There were lots of Parrot Fish

All of a sudden, this huge school of Blue Tangs surrounded us. It was one of the coolest things I’ve ever experienced when snorkeling. There were hundreds of them!

Sharptail Eel

The reef here lived up to all the hype and it was definitely some of the best snorkeling we’ve done in the Caribbean, but I’m honestly not sure that we entered the reef at the right spot. There were a lot of places where the coral was very close to the surface and it was hard to swim without touching it. I am actually shocked that neither of got scraped up from the coral! Now that I’m at home and have a better understanding of the beach, I just pulled up West Bay on Google Maps. Looking at the satellite view, I can see a channel in front of the Infinity Bay Resort which may have been a better place to enter the water. I just assumed Windell knew where to send us, but now I’m not so sure that was the best place. The snorkeling was great, but I know we didn’t make it out as far as I wanted to (where the boat tours were anchored) because we just couldn’t find a safe path to get there with all the coral. We both started panicking out there and didn’t want to get injured, so we stopped after 30 minutes. I wish I had asked around while I was at the beach and found another recommendation of a good safe place to swim, but oh well, you live, you learn!

After we walked back along the beach to Bananarama, I put the fisheye attachment lens onto my camera and got back in the water to try to get some cool over/under water shots. The conditions need to be perfect for these shots to come out, with very calm clear water, and ideally, lots of fish too. The area of beach in front of Bananarama has fine, soft, white sand, which makes for a beautiful beach but usually there’s nothing exciting to see under the water in those conditions. At least there was a small boat anchored near the shore so I could try to use that as my focus point.

This was the best one with the boat… too bad there’s no fish or coral or anything worth seeing under the water!

Looking back towards the beach

I took a lot of photos, aiming the lens in different angles, but those were the best of the bunch for today! By the time I got back to our chairs, DH had retrieved the beers from our locker.

Salva Vida is the local beer in Honduras

Looking straight up from my chair, I saw that the sun was creeping beyond where the palm trees could provide shade. The beach faces west, so I knew that as the day went on, we would gradually lose our shade, but I was hoping that picking chairs in the back row, up against the wall of the restaurant, that we would keep our shade as long as possible.

Notice how the front row of chairs is partially in the sun? They were completely in the shade when we first arrived 2 hours ago!

We spent the next hour and a half relaxing on our chairs, enjoying some cold beer, and doing lots of people-watching. We had originally asked Windell and Darson to pick us up at 3:30pm to have plenty of time to drive back to the port, but by 2:30, we had lost all of our shade and finished all of our beers, so we decided to pack it up an hour early. Bananarama has a seating area off to the side which is designated for tour guides to have a place to wait while their guests are enjoying the beach, so we knew exactly where to find Windell. We needed a few minutes to dry off and put all of our stuff away, so he went to find Darson and told us to meet him out in the parking lot when we were ready. We left the beach around 2:40pm. This proved to be another advantage of taking a private tour in that we could adjust the schedule however we wanted and we didn’t need to coordinate with anyone else.

As expected, there was a bit of traffic on the drive back, but the time passed quickly as we chatted with Windell, learning more about his life on the island. We actually got to talk with him about some topics that tour guides usually stay away from (politics and sexual orientation), and he was very open and honest with us. Windell was a great tour guide and we really enjoyed our day with him. The drive back to Mahogany Bay took around 45 minutes, and Darson was able to drive into the port area to drop us off a little closer than where we had to meet him this morning. We thanked them both for a wonderful day in Roatan, and then made our way passed the shops and back towards the ship.

Of course, we needed to stop for a quick photo on the way, now that the sun was at a better angle!

We boarded this ship and went up one quick flight of stairs to our cabin to drop off our bags. This little guy was waiting to greet us…

We also had a letter in our mailbox with instructions for priority tendering tomorrow in Belize.

We started to regret our decision not to get some pizza at the beach because it was now 4pm and we were starving! We had yet to try Guy’s Burger Joint, and even though we knew it was dangerously close to our 6pm dinner time, we knew we couldn’t wait 2 more hours to eat. Luckily, the line was really short at the grill and at the toppings bar, so we were seated at a table and ready to eat in no time.

I love that you can add your own toppings, with as much or as little of each as you like… let’s face it, the toppings are the best part! In an effort to not completely ruin my appetite for dinner, I left the bun off and only ate the burger and toppings, and I shared my fries with DH.

After our not-so-light snack, we went back to the cabin to get ready for dinner. By 5pm, I felt exhausted and needed to lie down for a while to regain some energy. I guess all that fun in the sun got to me because I was really tired. We turned on the TV to catch up on the news, and finally gathered up enough energy to go upstairs for dinner right around 6pm. When we arrived, Prudence’s section was nearly deserted. All aboard time was at 5:30pm today, so maybe people didn’t have enough time to get ready for the early dining time? Or maybe they all just wanted to eat at Lido instead?

Tonight’s menu

Roatan Port of Call Menu

None of the entrees appealed to me, and as expected, I wasn’t really hungry anyway, so I just ordered 2 appetizers and that was it.

Cannelloni (this was really good, and had I been more hungry, I may have ordered another one and considered it an entrée sized portion)

Braised Ox Tongue (This was not as good. I thought I would like it because I love cow’s tongue at the delis back in New York, but this was tough and rubbery and I did not care for the flavor. For me, this was a rare miss in the Carnival MDR)

I don’t remember what DH ordered, but I think he was also full from his burger and didn’t eat much, and I know for sure that neither of us ordered dessert.

Poor Prudence was very confused as to why we left dinner so early, but we explained that we were exhausted from our day in port and had a very late lunch, so we just weren’t in the mood for a big dinner tonight. We left the dining room around 6:50pm and realized that it was so early that we could catch the early show for 80’s Pop to the Max in the Encore! Theater. I was doubtful that I would still be awake for the 9:30pm show, so this worked out really well. I love 80’s music and I was looking forward to seeing this show, and the thought that I might fall asleep and miss it made me sad, so it’s a good thing that things worked out as they did.

The doors opened at 7pm and we were able to sit in our favorite seats in the front of the balcony, to the left of the control boards.

A few minutes before showtime, the dancers came out to warm up the crowd. Since it is necessary to arrive somewhat early for shows on cruise ships if you want a good seat, I like that Carnival did these pre-shows to give us something to do while we’re waiting. I mean, I could just scroll through my Thumbs Up feed, but what fun would that be?

I know I was a bit harsh when I shared my thoughts about Motor City, but I was really hopeful that tonight’s show would be better. Like I said, I love 80’s music. It’s fun and upbeat, and lends itself to great costumes and dance routines. The song selection for this show was pretty good, including a mash up of a bunch of one hit wonders which I really enjoyed, but unfortunately, the singing was just not good. The set for this show uses several giant electronic boards as the back drop, which added lots of opportunities for creativity in the show. My favorite part was that they had 3 or 4 treadmill bases which they kept moving into different configurations and incorporating into lots of the songs. That was actually really cool and original! Unfortunately, if you strip that away, the singing was mediocre at best. The reason I emphasize this so much is that we heard on Thursday that there were technical difficulties in the late show. They made it through two songs and then the electronic backdrop boards died. They tried to fix them but couldn’t figure it out, so the cast brought out some stools and sat on the stage to sing through the rest of the show. I honestly cannot imagine how miserable that would have been, and I heard some pretty bad reviews from people who witnessed it. We were extremely grateful that we finished dinner early enough to catch the early show because at least we got to see all the dancing and special effects!

My apologies for the blurry photos… it was the best I could do sitting that far away and without using a flash.

This was for Whitney Houston’s song “I want to dance with somebody”… the dancers were supposed to look like they were dancing with the silhouettes on the screens. I liked the concept, but not sure that it translated well on such a large scale.

The photos I took of the dancers using the treadmills did not come out well because there was too much movement and the people looked very blurry, but you can see them on the ground at the back of the stage in the next two photos.

The finale song was Michael Jackson’s “Man in the Mirror”… kind of an odd choice for a finale considering it’s more of a ballad than an upbeat pop song, but I appreciated that they were trying to share the message of change and bettering yourself.

When the show ended, we grabbed our favorite seats on deck 4 overlooking the lobby to watch Gary host the Decades Music Trivia Party. This was a lot of fun (perhaps more fun than the show was!). They played a quick one second clip of a 3 popular songs from each decade (60’s, 70’s, 80’s and 90’s), and we had to yell out if we knew the name of the song. Then they played a verse or two of each song to see if we were correct. Several times throughout the game, Gary pulled up people from the audience to do a little something extra like an air guitar contest, or a dance off, or something like that, and he gave out prizes to those winners. It went on for about 45 minutes and was well attended judging from the people watching from all 3 decks in the atrium.

They shot off streamers at one point… and then had to rush to collect them before they got tangled up in the glass elevator pulleys! Haha

When they played “I Had the Time of my Life” from Dirty Dancing, Gary and one of the guys from the entertainment team reenacted the famous lift. That was pretty impressive!

After the trivia ended, I realized I was getting hungry. Of course, that shouldn’t surprise anyone since I barely ate dinner and it was close to 9pm, so 5 hours after our late lunch at Guy’s Burgers. We went up to the Lido Buffet to see what options were available tonight. The deli was serving a special grilled cheese sandwich today which sounded really good, with grilled onions, spinach, and muenster and cheddar cheese, so I ordered it. They did a great job of toasting it this time and I had high hopes… until I took a bite and realized it was covered with mayo! This really annoyed me because they listed out all of the ingredients on the sign advertising the special sandwich (sorry, I forgot to take a photo) but made no mention of mayo! Had I known, I would have asked for no mayo since I really dislike mayo. There was so much of it, and with the gooey cheese, it was impossible to scrape it off. DH said he would eat some of it, so at least it didn’t totally go to waste.

At least I got lucky because there was no one in like at the pizza place and I had no wait at all for a few slices of the Funghi pizza!

That was the perfect snack to fill me up enough that I wasn’t hungry anymore, but not so filling that it prevented me from sleeping well. And with that, we got ready for bed and fell asleep early to recharge for another exciting day tomorrow in Belize!

Step Tracker Daily Total: 8,965 steps; 3.62 miles; 14 flights of stairs

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Tuesday, March 12, 2019 ~ Costa Maya, Mexico

April 15, 2019 deladane Leave a comment

Today was the first of four consecutive port days, but we weren’t scheduled to arrive at Costa Maya until 12 noon. In general, I prefer when my port days start first thing in the morning so I can make the most of my time there. By arriving at noon, it gave us a mini-sea day in the morning, and then we scheduled a tour for the afternoon. There are lots of cruises that do our last 3 ports but do not go to Costa Maya, so this was kind of a bonus port day (and was one of the reasons I picked this specific cruise!). After I booked the cruise, I started researching a bit more details about each port. What I noticed about Costa Maya was that the pier was only big enough for 3 cruise ships to dock there. Some people reported that they were doing construction on the pier, but that it was a slow process and unlikely to be finished by the time of our cruise. The problem was, there were 4 ships scheduled to dock in Costa Maya on this day, and we were the last to arrive. I called Carnival to inquire about it and they said that we should be fine and that we never use tenders in Costa Maya so there will definitely be dock space for us. Honestly, I was still skeptical because everyone kept saying that they’d never seen more than 3 ships dock at one time at this port, but I just crossed my fingers and hoped for the best.

With us being in port from noon until 8pm, I did not know what to do here. Many people like to use of the free pool in the port area, but I really prefer to get out and explore the ports, especially when I have never been there before. There are several beaches and all inclusive places that get good reviews, but with sunset at around 6pm, and considering that we probably wouldn’t get to the beach until around 1pm, it felt like we would only make use of half our time in port. Plus, we had 3 beach/water sport days for our other 3 ports, so this was a good day to do something different. Neither of us had ever been to any Mayan ruins before, and there are 2 or 3 places to see that within an hour drive from the Costa Maya port, so that seemed like a good idea for today. I looked into all of my options and decided that Chacchoben was our best bet. While none of the options are as big as Tulum or Chichen Itza near Cozumel, Chacchoben was said to be well excavated, they allowed you to climb up on the ruins, and it was only a 45 minute drive away (as opposed to 2+ hours to reach ruins in some other ports). I found a tour through Island Marketing which included around 2 hours at the ruins, plus a stop at a butterfly farm for $1 less than a tour of just the ruins with another popular tour company (Native Choice). The butterfly farm seemed like a good way to break up the drive in 1 direction, so why not, especially since it was basically free! Haha Best of all, while Island Marketing required a small deposit to hold our space on the tour, the deposit was fully refundable if our ship did not dock for any reason (so that eased my concerns about overcrowding at the dock making us miss this port altogether!). Here is the description of our tour from the Island Marketing website…

Join us on an exploration of the Costa Maya Mayan Ruins site of Chacchoben, one of the more recently discovered Mayan sites in Costa Maya. Learn about the advanced culture of the Mayans and see the Temples built hundreds of years ago including a delightful visit to the Costa Maya Butterfly Farm! Chacchoben offers manicured paths and an easy walk suitable for all ages and group needs. This is the most accessible Mayan Ruin site in the area due to its proximity to the port and layout of the site. Located a short 40 minute drive from the port, the Chacchoben Temples are a beautiful example of the intricate Maya construction during the Maya Classic period. The excavation of Chacchoben began in 1994 and a great deal has been discovered about the importance of this site and its people. There are still many secrets waiting to be unearthed! Chacchoben, which means place of the red corn, is believed to have been inhabited around 200bc. However, the structures now visible at the site have been constructed around 300-500ad. Journey into the Mystical realm of the Maya, walk through the ceremonial grounds and temples that have been traversed by Mayans over 1000 years ago! Keep your eyes open for the other residents of the jungle surrounding Chacchoben. Spider Monkeys, Peccary, deer, and armadillos inhabit this area so keep a look out! On the way to the Chacchoben Mayan Ruins you will visit the butterfly farm. The butterfly farm breeds the most exotic species of butterflies, like the astounding “blue morph” and the mysterious “owl butterfly”. Discover NATIVE butterflies and their amazing pupae hanging on the plants like precious jewelry crafted by nature. The butterfly farm also breeds the endangered Maya “Pygmy” Deer which was once plentiful in the Land of the Maya. Make sure to have your camera ready to capture these amazing moments with nature. Learn from our expert butterfly farmers about the life cycles of butterflies and the role they played in the ancient mayan vision of the universe.

I filled out the booking form on the Island Marketing website, and they replied with details on where to meet the guide on the day of the tour. Now all that was left to do was to wait until March 12 rolled around, and hope for the best with the docking issues!

Today’s Fun Times

Since I am incapable of sleeping late, even on vacation, I was awake around 7am today. I didn’t want to wake DH (especially since I did promise him that he could sleep late today given our late arrival into port), so I got dressed as quietly as possible and left the cabin in search of a light breakfast to hold me over until DH could join me for a full breakfast. I ended up trying a chocolate muffin and I was not disappointed. It was warm and had just the right amount of sweetness for a breakfast pastry.

It was shaping up to be a beautiful day in the Caribbean today!

It was only 8:20am at this point, so the decks were still pretty empty, but I imagine the aft pool became much more crowded as the morning went on. I just noticed the guy in the pool seems to have spotted me taking this photo haha

A rare site… tons of open deck chairs and not a towel in sight!

Even Serenity Deck was empty at this early hour!!

I couldn’t resist so I snagged an empty clamshell and spent some time scrolling through the Thumbs Up site and using iMessage to text my close friend because today is her birthday. That social media package was definitely fun to have, as much as I knew I should be enjoying my vacation and not reading up on what everyone was doing back at home haha

I stayed out there until around 9:15am, and then headed back to the cabin to see if DH was awake yet. On the way, I passed by the Cherry on Top candy store. It was still closed, but here are some photos in case anyone is curious.

The map showing the ship info looks like we are mighty close to Costa Maya!

When I got back to the cabin, DH was already awake and ready to go, so we went back upstairs to the Blue Iguana Cantina to try some breakfast burritos. I ate these nearly every day for breakfast when I cruised on the Carnival Sunshine in 2013, but they didn’t have a Blue Iguana when we were on the Valor in 2015 so DH has never tried it. Spoiler alert: all it took was one bite and DH was hooked! He ate here at least once a day for the rest of the cruise! Haha

The menu has not changed since I last ate here 5.5 years ago…

I ordered a burrito with a wheat tortilla, regular scrambled eggs, ham, hash browns, Monterey jack cheese, and grilled onions.

Back in 2013, I did not know about the arepas, so I have been looking forward to trying one for a very long time! I’m actually not surprised that I missed it on the Sunshine because I never saw anyone else eating arepas on the Dream this week. They do list it on one of the menu boards (I think with the taco options?), but it’s not obvious and I have a feeling new cruisers just don’t know about them. Unfortunately, that means there is not much turnover and the arepas were sitting out under the heat lamps for quite a while before we got them. I ordered one for each of us and the server had to kind of man-handle them to get them to un-stick from the pan.

They were a little greasy, but I enjoyed the slightly sweet corn and gooey cheese, and I ordered one each day to supplement my breakfast burrito. As for the burrito itself, it was just as delicious as I remembered from the Sunshine, with the crunchy hash browns and grilled onions being the true highlight!

I liked how they wrapped the burritos up like this. If we had a balcony, I could definitely see getting it to-go and eating it on the balcony as we pulled into port each morning.

DH also tried one of the tacos and he loved it so much that he got two of them as part of his breakfast every day, and he tried to get them as a snack in the afternoons too.

The timing for our meals was totally thrown off today because we docked at noon and that is when all of the lunch venues opened, so if we wanted lunch before getting off the ship, our only options were the deli or pizza. Not that we couldn’t find a good option at those two places, but everyone else on the ship would need to eat there too and I didn’t want to deal with the huge line that was likely to form. Instead, we ate a big breakfast and planned to skip lunch. If we got hungry on the tour, we always pack Clif Bars in our bags so we could snack on that. Gary made some announcements about not being allowed to bring food off the ship in Mexico, but I have always found pre-packaged food to be the exception to the rule as there is no risk of bringing in bugs or contaminants to their country.

After breakfast, we went back to the cabin to wait for the ship to arrive in Costa Maya, and we were greeted by this little guy…

We turned on the TV to see what options they had for TV stations and found CBS News. The lead story on the news was about the Boeing 737 Max plane crash in Ethiopia. We continued to follow this story all week because our flight home is on Southwest and they are one of the 3 airlines in America to use that model of aircraft. A day or two later, President Trump grounded all 737 Max planes, so we kept trying to figure out if that would affect us and if that was the model of our plane. Ultimately, we just had to wait until we got back to New Orleans on Sunday because there was no way to know which specific plane would be used for our flight several days in advance. I’m sure all of those people waiting in line to park their cars at the cruise terminal parking garage were happy that they drove and did not need to worry about their flight home! We kept flipping back and forth between CBS News and the forward deck camera station to monitor our progress with docking. We could see there were several ships already docked, so I kept my fingers crossed that there was space left for us!

Looking out the window, we started to see land and knew we were getting closer to the port.

At some point while we were in the cabin watching TV, our cabin phone rang. It was a manager calling from Guest Services to tell us that he was sorry we did not receive all of the services we paid for with FTTF on embarkation day. He said he refunded the money we paid for FTTF in the form of onboard credit to our account, but that we could keep all of the perks for the remainder of the cruise. We were very impressed by this resolution as it was far more generous than we expected. If we counted up all of the various perks included with FTTF, the 2 things we missed out on account for maybe 25% of the value, so the fact that he refunded 100% of the cost was very kind and very much appreciated. For what it’s worth, we had no further issues or complaints about FTTF for the remainder of the cruise and had that snafu not occurred on embarkation day, we would have found the program to be well worth the $90 fee.

Right at 12 noon, Gary came on the intercom to announce that we were docking! We ran upstairs to the outside decks to see it for ourselves, and sure enough, they found space for all 4 ships to tie up to the dock! This photo really shows how crowded it was as I was able to get parts of all 4 ships into one shot, with the Celebrity Equinox on the left, the Oceania Riviera in the middle, RCCL’s behemoth ship Symphony of the Seas on the right, and part of the Carnival Dream’s railing and deck long the front.

Another funny photo showing all 4 ships…

It looked like lots of people from the other cruises were coming back for lunch on their respective ships…

The water was so many beautiful shades of blue!

As I mentioned earlier, we got a letter yesterday explaining that people with FTTF could meet in the MDR on deck 3 to have priority exiting the ship. We were thankful for this as we anticipated a big rush of people trying to get ashore ASAP due to the late docking time. It was a little confusing figuring out where they wanted us to meet because the letter said to go to the forward side of the MDR but it turned out that they were using the mid-ship elevators and really needed us to meet back there. Once we figured it out, there was a crew member in the mid-ship elevator bank to operate one of the elevators and bring us directly down to deck 0. While we were waiting for the elevator to arrive, we noticed a long line of people walking down the stairs in that elevator bank, so it was nice to see that FTTF did actually get to ‘cut the line’, although there was no way to know how much time we saved.

We were off the ship by 12:15pm. It was really windy as we walked down the long pier towards the cruise ship village.

Looking back towards the Dream…

Hi from Costa Maya!

We saw this tall pole thing when we were in Puerto Vallarta on the Pacific coast for New Years, so it was funny to see it again 3 months later on the Caribbean side of Mexico. We didn’t wait around for the men to perform their ritual of climbing up to the top of the pole, spinning around in circles, then falling straight down hanging from the ropes, but I assume they did perform at some point as they were standing around in the background when we walked passed them.

There were lots of shops in the port area selling clothing, jewelry, and souvenirs.

Lots of lounge chairs near the swimming pool

Not surprising that it was very crowded at the pool at this time, with 3 other cruise ships who have been docked here for a few hours already.

It was very confusing to find our way out of the cruise port village because, of course, there were no signs that said “exit.” It was like being in a department store at the mall… they never tell you how to get back to the mall and do everything they can to keep you trapped inside the store! So frustrating! I just kept asked the vendors where to go for a taxi in hopes that it would also lead me to the exit, and eventually we made it to the parking lot. Our directions from Island Marketing said to exit the port gates, continue past the shopping centers, and their office would then be half a block away on the left side. Ok, sounds simple enough. We walked through the parking lot for the taxis and spotted the port gate. When we walked through the gate, we could see a second set of gates up ahead, so we walked through that, and then saw a T intersection further up the road. I had yet to see any shopping centers so I figured we needed to go up to that intersection and their office would be on the left. By now, it was 12:30pm and we needed to meet at their office by 12:45pm. It was extremely hot and humid, and there was no shade during this whole walk. We finally got to the end of the road but we still didn’t see any stores so I asked a lady where the Mayan Trips office was located (that’s the name of the office per our instructions). She said it was back the way we came from and we already passed it on the other side of the gate. What?! Our instructions said we had to leave the port through the gate! As it turns out, the office was between the two sets of gates. Wouldn’t that have been helpful information to share with us?! The two gates are about 200 feet apart so it would be a very obvious landmark to tell us to look for their office between the two gates. Anyway, we doubled back and sure enough, there was the office, tucked away on the side.

We checked in at the desk and our guide, Brian, told us to wait out front for everyone else to arrive. There was a slight breeze outside, so it was definitely more comfortable to wait out there than inside the office with no air conditioning. This next photo was taken with me sitting on the bench outside of their office. That is the second gate… it would have been wonderful for the instructions to say their office was located a few steps before the second gate, don’t ya think??

Once everyone checked in a few minutes after 1pm, a 15-person van pulled up and we all got in. Rocky was our van driver for the tour so that Brian could turn around and talk to us during the ride. He explained some of the history of the Mayan Ruins and of Chacchoben, specifically. One thing that I found interesting was the way they originally discovered these ruins. Brian explained that the Mayans wanted to hide their temples to protect them from invaders so they covered them with dirt and leaves, basically creating what looked like a mountain. The problem was that there are no mountains in this part of Mexico! In fact, the land is extremely flat (as shown in the photos I posted from the ship when we first docked), so a random mountain in the middle of all that flat terrain really stood out, and it wasn’t hard to realize there was something hiding under there! Oops!!

We drove for about 30 minutes, nearly all on one or two roads, with very mundane scenery…

At 1:50pm, we pulled up to the Butterfly Farm. Brian explained that we only had 20 minutes to spend here, so we could either go to the lab where they house the caterpillars or to the tent where they keep the butterflies. Of course, we all agreed that we would prefer to see the butterflies. After all, isn’t that why we were here?!

A lady came out to greet us and said she would give us a tour of the facility. She led us inside the lab with the caterpillars. Ummm, didn’t Brian just say we wouldn’t have time to see the caterpillars AND the butterflies? Why are we in here? I figured I’d give it a few minutes and see what happened. I knew there was no way I was getting back in the van without seeing the butterflies! Haha The room was very small, so with our whole group squeezed inside and trying to see the plants and caterpillars, it was hard to follow what the lady was saying. I think she tried to explain how they grow caterpillars or something like that, but I honestly did not hear her at all. I just looked around and made note that there were many different species of caterpillars hiding on the leaves of the plants.

At one point, the lady asked if we had any questions. It was now 14 minutes after we first arrived, so I spoke up and asked if we could go see the butterflies now. Luckily, Brian didn’t object and the lady led us over to the tent.

The lady did not really provide any information about the butterflies besides warning us not to let them fly out of the tent. She just told us to walk around and keep our eyes open, and we were sure to see some butterflies. Brian said we needed to leave soon so we could spend no more than 10 minutes in here. There were trees and plants everywhere so it took some effort to find the butterflies at first, but soon enough we got the hang of it. There were hundreds of butterflies in there! It was really challenging to take a good photo because they kept flying around, but I think I took a few good photos.

This is the Giant Owl Butterfly that was mentioned in the description of the tour

I caught one of them mid-flight! This was a Malachite Butterfly

One last Giant Owl Butterfly before we had to leave…

Brian rounded us all up and said it was time to go back to the van. In the end, we spent 24 minutes here, so we pretty much stayed on schedule. Sure, it would have been nice to spend more time searching for butterflies (especially because I only got to see 2 varieties and I think there were probably other kinds flying around in there if I had more time to look), but we had places to go, and Mayan ruins to see!

This was our van for the day, parked at the butterfly farm. I think they had deer inside the fences behind the van but I never had a chance to look…

Once we were all settled back in the van, we drove for about 10 more minutes to the Chacchoben Mayan Ruins. Brian said the tour would take about an hour, so he gave us a few minutes to use the restrooms, then he gathered us up and we walked along a flat dirt trail towards the ruins. A few minutes later, we came to an opening and saw this:

It was so cool! Just sitting there in the middle of a field of grass, there was a huge Mayan temple! For perspective, look at the two people walking along the left side of the temple… they are several inches shorter than the first plateau, and then there are 4 or 5 levels above that. This temple was huge!

As we were walking along the trail, we passed several larger groups who were gathered around their guide and listening to some information, so I was a little worried that it would feel crowded at the ruins. To my surprise, it did not feel crowded at all. Brian walked us past them so we got to the first temple before them, took our photos, then gathered around to listen to him talk as those other groups had their turn to take photos. Our group had 10 of us, if I remember correctly, and those other groups had closer to 50 people each, so we were in good shape!

Brian pointed out the different color of stones to see what had been restored and what stones were original.

I thought these round palm leaves were neat

This was the tree of life, which had great significance in Mayan culture. Notice the large tour group huddled around the tree… glad we had a much smaller group than that!

This was a hill a few feet away from the first temple. Brian said there is probably another temple, or structure of some sort, hiding under all that dirt. This was what the first temple would have looked like when the first people discovered it.

Walking along the trails between the temples. The grounds were well maintained and flat, so it was very easy to walk around the property. The instructions from Island Marketing said we needed to wear closed toed shoes on this tour, and I can understand why. It was definitely easier to have on sneakers and not flip flops, especially when climbing up on the rocks.

A map of Chacchoben

Lots of big trees for shade

When we got to this spot, Brian told us we could climb up these steps the easy way or the hard way. Of course, DH and I picked the hard way, which meant a steeper section of stairs and nothing to hold on to. The easier way had shallower steps and was along a wall that you could hold for balance.

It’s hard to see how steep these steps were, but trust me, they were steep!

Looking back towards the ground

We made it to the top!

When we turned around, we saw this:

OMG! This temple was huge!! There were actually two temples up on this higher level… the one I just showed was the Temple of the Sun, and the one below is the Temple of the Moon.

Brian gathered us all in the shade to explain more about the Tree of Life and these two temples.

As he was talking, he heard some noise from above… there was a spider monkey climbing up in the trees! Needless to say, he lost our attention as we were all excited to see the monkey!

We went back over to the bigger temple for some more photo ops. Notice that there was no one else up here besides the people on our tour. At some point, there was a fork in the path and all of the larger groups went right while Brian led us left so we were the only ones up here at that time.

After that, Brian led us back down the steps via the easier route, and as we got to the bottom, we saw the bigger tour groups approaching. What great timing! We made our way back towards the entrance, briefly stopping to see the houses where the Mayans lived. We were back at the visitor center around 4pm, so we spent just over an hour walking around the ruins. I’d say that was the perfect amount of time. Sure, there are other Mayan Ruins sites across Mexico and Central America that are bigger and more developed than Chacchoben, but I don’t think I would have needed to spend any longer than an hour walking around the ruins. We saw plenty, got to climb around and explore, and learned a bit about Mayan history and culture. Overall, it was time well spent and I’m glad we booked this tour.

After another break to use the restrooms, we piled back in the van for the drive back to the cruise port. Or at least, that’s what we thought! Brian had one little surprise planned for us… a stop at a pineapple stand for a little snack.

The van stopped on the side of the road and Brian told us to stay seated and he would pick up a treat for us.

He gave one of these bags to each pair of two people. This was by far the sweetest pineapple I have ever tasted, even better than in French Polynesia! The only issue was that this was way too much for us to eat, especially with less than 2 hours to go until our dinner time back on the ship. We each had a few slices, but we had to throw the rest away because they won’t let you bring fresh fruit back on the ship.

We arrived back at the Mayan Trips office, promptly at 5pm as scheduled. We thanked Brian and Rocky for a great tour, then walked back towards the cruise port. On the way to the ship, I noticed some flamingos that I had not seen earlier…

There were lots of lounge chairs available at this late hour, which did not surprise me considering the Equinox and Symphony OTS were past all aboard time.

Then we made the long walk down the pier and back to the Carnival Dream

It was still very windy out there, as shown by my hair blowing everywhere in this photo!

The Dream looked so pretty in the late afternoon light

By the time we got back on the ship, it was nearly 5:30pm, so this was one of those moments when we were really happy to have two showers in our cabin. We also took advantage of being on Deck 1 and climbed up the one flight of stairs to get back to our cabin as fast as possible, avoiding the long wait at the elevators. We got showered and ready for dinner in record time, and made our way upstairs to the MDR just 5 minutes late. The dining room was only 25% full, if that, so I guess a lot of people were taking advantage of the later sail away time and either eating dinner on shore or would eat at the Lido buffet later tonight. Of all the tables in Prudence’s section, only one pair of women at the long table next to us were seated when we arrived. I think one other couple showed up a few minutes later, but that was it.

Tonight’s appetizers

Dinner menu

Port of call menu for Costa Maya

Fried Shrimp appetizer

Romaine Caesar Salad

While we were eating, we noticed this ambulance coming down the pier. When it got to the intersection between our pier and the one leading over to the Oceania ship, it started to turn around, squeezing next to the orange cone in the middle of the road. The ambulance took several minutes of going back and forth, trying to maneuver on the narrow pier, and we just kept saying that we hoped whoever needed this ambulance didn’t need it too urgently because this was taking forever! Why they didn’t move that orange cone to create more space for the turn was baffling to us (especially since we saw the port workers move the cone for their vehicles later in the meal). The ambulance eventually succeeded in its turns and backed up all the way down the other pier to help a passenger from the Oceania ship. About 30 minutes later, we saw the ambulance drive away, but it did not have any flashing lights. We’ll never know if that was because the person no longer needed assistance, or what happened, but hopefully they received the care they needed.

Anyway, back to dinner. I had Penne Mariscos for my entrée.

DH ordered the short ribs (he said they were just okay, but a bit dry)…

…and the beef lasagna (he said this was one of the best entrees he had all week)

Dessert Menu

I think DH ordered a cheese plate for dessert but I forgot to take a photo. I ordered the cheesecake with strawberry sauce. It was pretty good, but not nearly as good as the cheesecake from the steakhouse (no surprise there!)

We finished dinner by 7:15pm, and had a bit of time before the 8pm comedy show, so we went outside on deck 5 to catch the end of a beautiful sunset.

DH was hoping to see some pier runners, but I wasn’t surprised that the only people out there were dock workers. I had a feeling that no one would miss the ship tonight as the sun setting is usually a good reminder to get back to the ship haha

The 8pm family-friendly comedy show tonight was with the other comedian on board, Just June, and the show was called “Moms Mabley”. Since this was the first time we saw her show, we didn’t know what she looked like, and were quite surprised when this lady took the stage.

She doesn’t look like the usual cruise ship comedian, but she was entertaining and spent most of her act playing off the people sitting in the first few rows of the lounge. When the cocktail waiter came around, I ordered an Angry Orchard cider. He asked if I wanted to get a bucket of 4 to save $2. Since it was only Tuesday and I knew I’d get through 3 more ciders in the next 5 days, I asked him to leave them closed and ordered the bucket. I wasn’t expecting cans, but that did make it easier to open them in our cabin haha

She stayed true to her schtick through nearly the entire routine, but towards the end, Moms Mabry transformed back into Just June. I definitely was not expecting that all of that hair was hiding under her wig!

After the comedy show ended, we found “our couch” on Deck 4 overlooking the atrium, and listened to Chris Ayden playing the guitar.

From “our couch”, we could see when the theater doors opened so there was no need to wait in line, and when the time came, we went over to the Encore! Theater to get seats for the Love and Marriage Show. This show is only as entertaining as the 3 couples picked to participate, but these couples and Gary did a great job keeping us all laughing.

When the show ended, we were both a little hungry so we went upstairs to Lido to find something to eat. At that late hour, our only options were pizza or the deli. The line for pizza was crazy long so we went to the deli instead. I ordered the classic grilled cheese, but wished they left it in the oven a bit longer to make the bread more crispy.

DH ordered a hot dog with sauerkraut and a reuben sandwich, and he said both were good (he actually ordered these a few times throughout the week, so he must have liked them!)

By the time we finished, it was nearly 11pm so we went back to the cabin to pack up our beach bags and get ready for sleep, as we had a very early wake up call for tomorrow in Roatan!

Step Tracker Daily Total: 16,054 steps; 6.48 miles; 12 flights of stairs

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Monday, March 11, 2019 ~ Fun Day at Sea

April 7, 2019 deladane Leave a comment

Today’s Fun Times

After the first three days of our vacation required setting our alarms for annoyingly early hours, preceded by hectic work weeks for both of us, today’s schedule for a day at sea was a welcome treat. You would think I would take advantage of having no where to be and no need to set an alarm clock by getting to sleep in, right? Well of course that didn’t happen and I was wide awake by 7am. I tried falling back asleep, but by 7:20, I realized that was unlikely to happen and I gave up. I peaked outside and it looked like a beautiful sunny day, so I may as well get dressed and get this day started.

I took this opportunity to walk around and take photos of the public spaces on the ship. Most people were still in their cabins, so this was a good chance to get some photos without anyone in them.

Deck 1 hallway

I liked the art they used to decorate the walls on the passenger decks. It had a mid-century vibe and subdued color scheme which is rare to see on Carnival’s older ships.

The photo above is in the mid-ship elevator bank on deck 1. All the other decks have the glass elevators in that spot, but those elevators don’t go all the way down to deck 1.

Mid-ship elevators

Ship map located at all of the elevator banks

The only time I tolerated walking through the casino was in the early morning hours. Maybe they need to upgrade the ventilation system or something, but once the day got started, it was way too smokey in there and I tried to avoid it if possible. Luckily, you can cut across the ship right below the casino by using deck 4, and then use the mid-ship elevator stairs to get back up to deck 5 again.

Fun Ships in the atrium

Decks 3, 4, and 5 in the Atrium, looking down from deck 5

The next few photos are all in the Encore! Main Lounge where they did all of the production shows

Standing at the top of Deck 5. You can access the balcony level from deck 4 and deck 5.

The seats in the front row of the center of the balcony level were almost always left empty because their view is blocked by the control booth. We sat in the front row, but one section over to the left of here for an unobstructed view of the stage

Standing in front of the stage on Deck 3

Funky art work on the stairs

Atrium Bar and lobby, looking up from deck 3

Information about the internet packages… They charge $8 per day for the social media plan if you wait until you are on the ship to purchase it. That is double what I paid!

Information about the Carnival Hub app

They had several of these kiosks around the ship so you could access your onboard account without waiting on line at guest services

The photo gallery before they set up all the photos, and a trash bin for rejected photos

Heading all the way aft on Deck 5, we get to the Burgundy Lounge which is used for the comedy shows. Not pictured is the bar towards the left side, and an additional large seating area on the right side

The Song lounge for smaller live music acts and karaoke

The Piano Bar. We could almost always find a seat up at the bar, and if not, then there was seating available at the tables.

Bonsai Sushi… this was located in the hallway between the entertainment venues aft on deck 5 and Ocean’s Plaza in the midship area. There was no barrier to keep the people eating separated from the walkway, so I imagine that would make for a hectic dining experience

Crimson Restaurant, midship MDR. It was really nice that they kept the doors open to this dining room all day long so you could get from the midship elevators up to the atrium, theater, guest services, and the forward elevators. The galley is just aft of here so you could not go in that direction without going up to Deck 5 or down to Deck 2, but at least you could go forward at any time of day.

Riding in the glass elevators, looking up through the sky roof to see the water slides

Looking down on the glass elevators from deck 11

There are still a few lounge chairs available at 8:30am at the Lido pool on Sea Day #1

Nothing but sun, sky, and ocean

Beautiful views of the wake from the aft pool

Lots of seats available on Serenity Deck at 8:50am

My tour of the ship ended at the Lido Buffet as I was getting hungry and needed a little snack before our real breakfast at the dining room.

Banana bread, mini cinnamon rolls (these were what I picked as my snack and they were really good!), and apple danishes

Croissants and apple panettone

Sliced cheeses and deli meats

Bagels, waffles, bread, and biscuits

Breakfast meats and potatoes

Last night before falling asleep, DH and I made a deal. I knew it was highly likely that I would wake up long before he was ready to get out of bed. He is not the biggest fan of early wake up calls while on vacation, but he’s a good sport and goes along with it on port days. I promised him before going on the cruise that I would let him sleep in on the morning of the 2 sea days as well as Costa Maya day since we didn’t arrive there until noon. Last night, DH said I should go explore the ship if I woke up early, and I could come back to wake him at 9:15am so we could go for brunch. As expected, DH was still in bed when I returned at 9:20am, but he was awake and ready to start his day. While he got ready, I read over this letter that was left in our mailbox.

I knew that FTTF would get us priority access to the tenders in Belize, but I was very surprised that we would also have priority debarkation in Costa Maya tomorrow. There was likely to be a big rush of people all trying to get off the ship ASAP when we docked at noon, and we needed to get to our private tour by 12:45pm, so this priority access was much appreciated to take off some of the stress.

Sea Day Brunch was held in the aft dining room from 8:30am until 1pm. Carnival started rolling out a new brunch menu on some of the ships, but the Dream still had the old menus on our sailing.

I was tempted to get the French toast, but instead opted for a bagel with cream cheese and smoked salmon, and 2 fried eggs.

DH ordered the huevos rancheros (and the flamin’ tomatoes soup, but I forgot to take a photo of that… it looked like a bowl of marinara sauce, and that’s basically what it tasted like too!)

After brunch, we went back to the cabin to get a DH’s book and my trip journal, and we were greeted by this cute little towel animal. It took me a few days to get used to seeing the towel animal in the morning instead of with evening turn down service like they used to do, but I still always appreciate the friendly reminder that I’m cruising with Carnival! (Celebrity and Paul Gauguin don’t do towel animals and I missed them on those cruises! To me, towel animals are one of the best cruising traditions.)

I asked Jennifer if we could keep our towel animals through the whole week of the cruise so I could make a little collection on our window sill. Today, our little guy looks a little lonely, but he will soon be joined by lots of towel animal friends!

We made our way back upstairs to the Lido Waves Pool and it was way more crowded now than when I was here 3 hours ago! They were doing the ice carving demonstration in the middle of the deck space, so lots of people were crowded around to get a good view.

As much as I love beautiful sunny days, I try to stay in the shade as much as possible to avoid getting a sunburn. On port days, the sun can be unavoidable depending on what excursions we have planned, so I try to stay in the shade on sea days as I can usually find a place to sit that is close by the “action” but also out of the sun. One of the things I really liked about the set up of the Lido pool area on the Dream was that it was 3 decks high from deck 10 to 12, leaving lots of spots in the shade under the deck above if we stayed on decks 10 or 11. Deck 10 was usually very busy between the pool, the bars, and the many food venues, so we spent a lot of time on deck 11. That gave us a great view over the action below us, but we could still hide out in the shade from deck 12 above us.

I just loved the different shades of blue we saw throughout the cruise

Looking straight down, we could see lots of people using the lounger chairs on deck 5.

I just noticed the reflection of the lifeboats on the windows below us… that’s a fun effect!

We spent about an hour out there, with DH reading his book and me jotting down notes in my trip journal. At 12:30pm, we decided to go to Pasta Bella for lunch. Pasta Bella is located upstairs in the Lido Buffet on deck 11. You need to check in with the hostess and she will give you a paper with the menu to check off what you want in your dish, and a stand with a number on it so you can pick your own table and the waiter will know where you are sitting when your food is ready. I hoped that eating here on the first sea day would mean that it was less crowded because people hadn’t found it yet, but I was definitely wrong! It was very busy and the hostess told us it would take about 30 minutes for our food to be ready. We each filled out a sheet, put it in the box at the back of the room, and took a seat to wait for our lunch.

While we were waiting, a waiter dropped off some garlic bread. It was a nice flaky consistency, almost like a focaccia, and had the perfect ratio of garlic and butter. It was tempting to ask for a second serving but we held out to wait for our pasta.

The waiter delivered our food almost exactly 30 minutes after we ordered, so it was impressive how accurate the hostess’s prediction was! The pasta was hot and tasty, but I wish they put in more of the toppings (I only had 3 shrimp and 2 pieces of chicken). No worries though, that just meant I would be ready for my next feeding a little sooner!

Our roll call on Cruise Critic was not very active for this cruise. I think there were only 4 pages in the thread by the time we sailed. This was my first cruise when there was a group on that other social media site (pretty sure it is against the rules here for me to mention the site by name… I’ll just call it “Thumbs Up”). The Thumbs Up group had over 400 members and it was very active, especially in the last few weeks leading up to the cruise, with people posting daily countdowns and asking questions about excursions. Someone organized an informal meet and greet in the Atrium Bar for 1pm today, so DH and I went down there to check it out after lunch. We sat at the bar until 1:10pm and couldn’t figure out if anyone else was there for the meet and greet. It’s hard to meet in a public space for something like this when you don’t know what everyone else looks like, and there can be people there who are not part of your group. On my previous cruises, we have always worn plastic beaded necklaces to these kinds of events so we can all find each other, but no one suggested that for today. Maybe this just wasn’t meant to be, so we left because we wanted to get seats in Ocean Plaza for the One Hit Wonders Name That Tune event at 1:30pm.

Somewhere during our walk through the ship, I saw this piece of art… Not sure if you can really call this art? It kind of reminded me of the painting with dogs playing poker haha It made me smile, so I guess that’s all that matters!

Right near Ocean Plaza, they have a screen with this map of our location. I think they also had it on one of the stations for the TVs in the cabin. We’re about halfway to Costa Maya!

We arrived at the Ocean Plaza around 1:25pm for the 1:30 trivia game, and it was already really crowded. We found two open seats off to the side, but had we arrived a few minutes later, we would have needed to stand through the game.

The theme for this trivia was 80’s and 90’s one hit wonders, and we had to name the song title and artist for each of the 20 songs they played. It was worth one point each for a total of 40 points, and we did respectably well, earning 31 points. We knew the titles for all but one of the songs, but it was tricky trying to remember the artists (after all, they are one hit wonders!). Even though we didn’t win the coveted gold plastic ship on a stick, we had a lot of fun playing as name that tune is our favorite type of trivia. We played it nearly every day on our 14-night Celebrity cruise last year, but on the Dream, the timing often conflicted with our plans in port. Our only other chance to play was on the last sea day, but the theme that day was Country music so we had zero chance of knowing any of those songs and opted to skip it.

In our quest to avoid the sun, we went out to the lounge chairs on the port side of deck 5, since the ship was sailing south and it was now into the afternoon so the port side faced east and would be completely in the shade. I think this is one of the reasons we do better not having a balcony on cruises. It gives us the flexibility to seek out the side of the ship that has shade at that moment, instead of feeling obligated to make use of our balcony even if it happens to be in direct sunlight at that moment. Don’t get me wrong, we love having a balcony, but this one factor did help ease the pain of not having it on this cruise.

After a little while, I started to get hungry. I didn’t want to eat too much and spoil my appetite for dinner… after all, tonight was lobster night in the MDR! The pizzas on Carnival are thin crust, so they aren’t that filling, and I thought a slice or two of pizza would make the perfect snack. I left DH to hold our lounge chairs and I made my way up to deck 10 Aft. I must have had really good timing because not only was there no line at all, but there were 3 slices of the Quattro Formaggi pizza sitting behind the counter. I really only wanted one or two slices, but when I asked for it, the guy working there just handed me the whole plate with all 3 slices! I was planning to sit in the buffet area to eat it, but now that I had more food than I wanted to eat on my own, I took the pizza back downstairs to deck 5 and forced DH to help me eat some of it. He’s a trooper like that! I forgot to take a photo of the pizza at that moment, but I ended up getting the Quattro Formaggi again later in the cruise, so here is a photo from then.

Another perk of the hub app listing all the menus is that I could take a screen shot of the menu to post on this review. I did that for the dining room menus each night too because it comes out much better than when I try to take a photo of the menu with my camera and have to fight the glare from the lights above. I know that people who sail on Carnival regularly can probably recite these menus by heart because they have not changed in a few years, but I wanted to post them for people reading along who have never cruised with Carnival.

We stayed outside relaxing on the lounge chairs until around 4:30pm, and then went back to our cabin to get ready for formal night. I am a firm believer that my fellow passengers can take just as good a photo (if not even better!) than the cruise ship photographers, especially on a formal night (oops, I mean a cruise elegant night). Last year on our Celebrity cruise, it was fun to find a new piece of beautiful art work each night from one of the public spaces around the ship and use that as our backdrop for a photo. Unfortunately, the décor on the Dream is a bit flashier and does not make for as good of a back drop. A lot of the art is very busy and loud, and would take away from seeing us in the photo. Tonight, we opted to keep it simple and stood by the stairs in the elevator bank (luckily the person taking our photo was patient as a bunch of people came running down the stairs right as we were about to take the photo, so we had to wait for them to pass first).

With that chore out of the way, we found a seat on one of the couches on deck 4 that overlooks the atrium so we could listen to some live music. This became our favorite spot and we sat up here nearly every night. We had a great view of whichever performer was in that stage area, we could people watch down to all the people at the bar and on the dance floor, and it was never crowded so it was a comfortable little hideaway on a ship with nearly 4000 other passengers. Tonight’s pre-dinner performer was Chris Ayden playing acoustic jams.

I was pleasantly surprised at how many options of live entertainment were available on the Dream. I have grown to expect that on Celebrity ships, but I honestly did not think we’d have so many live performers on Carnival. The Fun Times has a section that lists what acts are performing at what times in each venue, and every night there were 6 musical acts performing, plus Zack in the piano bar, whatever kind of show was happening in the Encore! Theater, and the DJ playing in the nightclub. Of those 6 musical acts, they had Chris Ayden (an acoustic guitar soloist), Charles and Phoebe (a variety music duet), Machine Company and Horn Troupers (a Motown band with like 6 or 7 members with a full brass section… very unexpected!), Kudos Strings (a strings trio who played incredible arrangements of pop songs… I don’t usually care for strings but these guys were fantastic), Black Jack Duo (a country music duo), and Cavair (Steel Drums at the Lido pool). There was really something for everyone’s taste, and often two or three acts performed at the same time in different venues so it was hard to pick where we wanted to go! No complaints though… that’s a good problem to have! Haha

Anyway, back to tonight… We listened to Chris Ayden for a few minutes, then made our way to the Scarlet Dining Room, all the way aft on deck 3. Since we ate at the steakhouse last night, this was our first time eating in the MDR and we needed someone to show us to our table. On the Monday prior to our cruise, I emailed the maitre’d to request a private table for two, hopefully near a window. I remember from our last Carnival cruise that many of the tables for two get lined up in a row, with just inches between each table, and it’s hard to get in and out of your seat and it kind of feels like you are sitting at one big table with those around you. While we do enjoy eating dinner with others, that tends to make the meal take way too long, and we did not want to have 2+ hour long dinners every night. As I mentioned last night, we prefer to keep our dinners to about one hour long, so I thought that if I could request a private table for two, hopefully our wait staff would allow us to eat at our pace and not necessarily the pace of those sitting around us. I did not get a reply from the maitre’d, but I just assumed the email went through and he was too busy to reply but would hopefully grant my request. I totally forgot that the MDR is opened in the afternoon on embarkation day, and we could have stopped by to find out our table assignment, so we just left it as a surprise for when we arrived at dinner tonight.

We checked in at the hostess stand and they escorted us up to deck 4, and then all the way to the back of the room. Wow, did the maitre’d deliver a fabulous table for us! It was table 637, located along the windows all the way at the back of the room. All of the tables around us were long tables for 10-12 people, but ours was just a small table for 2, separated from the rest, and it felt like we had special treatment!

I even used the little ledge near the window as a place to stash my camera and purse while we ate. We could not have asked for a better table for the rest of our cruise dinners. Our head waitress was Prudence from Zimbabwe, and she was supported by I Ketut and Kadek (not sure where they are from). They worked together really well, and always kept the meal moving so we were finished by 7:15pm at the latest (and that was on the days when we arrived at 6:05 or 6:10pm so it was still just about a one hour meal).

Here is the menu for tonight’s dinner…

The bottom 2 sections of the menu are available every night, but we never ordered from those items…

Dessert Menu…

Drinks menus…

Kadek brought over a basket of bread and I picked the cranberry whole grain bread. One thing I never followed was that on some nights he served us each one piece of bread, and on other nights, he left the whole basket on the table for us to serve ourselves. Maybe it was elegant vs. casual night? I am not sure. Personally, I don’t like to fill up on bread so I never take more than one piece and didn’t care if he left the basket or took it away.

We enjoyed beautiful views of the sunset throughout the whole cruise. Unfortunately, these photos really show how badly the windows need to be washed! Haha

Caesar Salad… I really enjoyed this and ordered it on several nights when I didn’t see a second appetizer that interested me. For the most part, I ordered two appetizers and one entrée each night. Tonight was the one exception because I wanted two orders of my entrée.

DH ordered two soups… first, he had the Sicilian Meatball Soup

Then, the Roasted Wild Mushroom Bisque

Looking through my photos, I just realized I missed taking a photo of DH’s entrees. Oops! When I ordered my entrée, I asked Prudence if I could have two lobster tails but only one portion of the side dishes. I’m not sure if it was lost in translation or if it was just that they pre-plate the dishes in the galley so Prudence can’t honor a special request, but she ended up bringing me two of these plates. It’s a good thing I only had the caesar salad as my appetizer because I was actually able to finish nearly all of the two entrée portions!

Such a beautiful sunset! Try to ignore the filthy windows hehe

Just as we finished our dinner, it was time for sssshhhhhowtime! Being all the way back on the upper level of the dining room meant we had no view of the action on the stairs and on the lower level. The waiters in our corner of the MDR did a good job of trying to get us excited, and of course we all had to wave our napkins in the air. Cruising has such bizarre traditions, doesn’t it?!

For dessert, I ordered the malted chocolate hazelnut cake. It was really rich and right up my alley for a sweet chocolatey dessert, although it was more of a fudgey mouse than a cake.

DH ordered the Vanilla Crème Brulee. He finished every bite of it, so I think that’s a good sign that he liked it!

I don’t think I mentioned this yet… one of the fun features of the Carnival Hub App is that you can mark off the events in the daily schedule which you want to attend, and then if you click on the favorites button, it will just show you those events and you don’t need to scan through the entire calendar. I think you can also set it up to give you a notification on your phone at the time of the events but I didn’t use that feature. This is what the favorites screen looks like…

After dinner, we wanted to catch the 8pm comedy show, so we just walked up one flight of stairs when leaving the MDR and we were there! How convenient!! This photo was taken at 7:43pm and you can see that the Burgundy Lounge was already quite crowded. Our options were limited, but we were able to find two seats together.

I liked that the cocktail waiters were always walking around and eager to take drink orders. Sure, one of us could have walked up to the bar to get the drinks, but we’re on vacation and it’s okay to be lazy. DH ordered a martini and I ordered The Punchliner drink.

It took about 10 minutes for the waiter to return with our drinks. Mine was fruity and sweet, just how I like it!

This show was the family friendly show with the same comedian we saw last night, Geoff Keith. Sometimes I actually prefer these shows because the material content tends to be funnier instead of just relying on cursing and dirty humor to get a laugh. I didn’t take any specific notes on the theme of this routine but I did like how he had a pre-written script rather than just improving and making fun of the audience.

The comedy show ended at 8:30pm, so we made our way all the way forward to get seats for the big production show in the Encore! Theatre. When we arrived, the doors were still closed.

No worries! They have a display case right outside of the entrance so we checked out some of the awards that the Dream has won over the years. This record seems like it was made to be broken…

We still had a few minutes before they were going to open the doors, so I left DH waiting there and went downstairs to talk to someone at Guest Services about our experience with FTTF on embarkation day. Our assistant stewardess indicated that she would speak to her manager about her mistake in not realizing we had purchased FTTF and therefore not having our cabin ready by the time we boarded at 11:45 yesterday morning. I expected a phone call or letter in our mailbox with an apology, but I gave it the remainder of the day yesterday and all day today to no avail. With nothing better to do in the few minutes before getting seats for tonight’s show, this seemed like a good time to voice my concerns at Guest Services.

As I expected, it wasn’t very busy at this time since the late seating for dinner had just started and most people were enjoying their evening on the ship right now. There were one or two people at the general line, but I was able to walk right up to the desk and be helped immediately in the FTTF/Diamond/Platinum line. I explained that we were disappointed to not receive two of the benefits we paid for when we boarded the ship yesterday… having immediate access to our clean cabin, and having priority delivery of our one checked suitcase. At this point, it was water under the bridge for us, so to speak, but I did want to make sure that someone higher up the chain knew what happened so they could work to make sure it does not happen to other passengers on future cruises. The representative took notes on what I told him and said he would pass the information along to a Guest Services manager. The whole thing was very quick and DH was surprised to see me back upstairs within 10 minutes of leaving.

Shortly after that, they opened the doors so we could get seats in the theater. I prefer sitting up in the balcony level so I can have an unobstructed view of the whole stage and not need to worry about someone tall sitting in front of me and blocking my view. Unfortunately, that does make it hard to take clear photos of the performers, especially without using a flash. Every night, they opened the doors 30 minutes prior to the start of the show and there was a big rush of people all arriving at that time. This photo was taken at 9:05pm and already, most of the seats in the middle sections of the lower level were taken.

While the theater never filled up completely for the late shows, most of the good seats were taken pretty early leaving just the back of the balcony available for people who arrived later. Perhaps this was a sign of sailing on a ship filled to capacity during spring break with lots of 3^rd and 4^th passengers in the cabins, or maybe it’s just how things always go on the Dream because it was the biggest ship we’d ever sailed on, but either way, we made sure to arrive early for all the shows to get a decent seat.

Tonight’s Playlist Productions show was Motor City, featuring Motown and R&B hits from the 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s. I had seen this show already on the Carnival Sunshine in 2013, but I enjoyed it then and that was over 5 years ago so I didn’t mind seeing it a second time. At around 9:20pm, they started the pre-show and pulled up a few daring members of the audience to dance on stage. Sitting up in the balcony meant we were saved from that embarrassment!

They also had everyone in the audience stand up and learn a little dance routine as a fun way to get us excited for the show.

The show itself started around 9:30pm and ran for just over 30 minutes. Before I share my views about this show, I need to put in a little disclaimer… As with everything else in this review, these are my personal views and you may or may not agree with them. Any negative opinions are not meant to upset or offend anyone, but merely to educate you about my experiences. With that said, we were not impressed with most of the production shows on this ship. Maybe it was because this was a relatively new cast and it was only their third cruise performing these shows, but the singing was pitchy (and sometimes downright cringe-worthy), and the dancing was often sloppy and out of sync. We enjoy going to theater and have held season tickets to the Broadway traveling shows in San Jose for 6 seasons and counting, so maybe we were being overly critical? We did not expect Broadway-caliber performances on a cruise ship, but we expected more than this. I actually think the song selection for all the shows was great, and Carnival knows how to pick crowd-pleasers that appeal to a mass audience, so maybe we would have enjoyed the shows more had we seen the prior cast last month, or even if we saw this cast after a few more weeks of practice? We really did want to love the shows as that’s usually one of our favorite parts of cruising, and we went into each of the 4 shows on this cruise optimistic and with an open mind, but sadly this cast fell short for us. There are 8 performers in the cast… 4 men and 4 women. Within the cast, there are singers who dance, and there are dancers who sing, but perhaps none that excelled at both. To give credit where it is due, I will say that there was one male and one female dancer who we could tell had good training and technique, but we almost never heard them sing! With all of that said, we did attend all 4 shows and stayed through the whole production each time, so they did have some redeeming qualities. We had fun and enjoyed it for what it was.

When the show ended, the cast danced out into the lobby for an after-party. As you can see from the people lining the railing on decks 4 and 5, and from the packed dance floor down on deck 3, everyone was having a good time as the DJ played more Motown hits and Gary had us all up and dancing.

We sat in “our spot” on deck 4 to observe all the excitement, then went back to Ocean Plaza to listen to Machine Company and Horn Troupers play more Motown classics. This band was fantastic, and it was refreshing to see a big horn section in a cruise ship musical act as we don’t see that very often. We stayed until around 11:30pm, then headed back to the cabin to rest up for tomorrow in Costa Maya!

Step Tracker Daily Total: 11,042 steps; 4 miles; 22 flights of stairs

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Sunday, March 10, 2019 ~ Embarkation Day!

April 4, 2019 deladane Leave a comment

I had a lot of trouble sleeping for both nights in New Orleans, and I was awake nearly all night last night. We sprung the clocks ahead one hour today for daylight savings time, and at first, I thought that would be annoying to lose one hour of sleep on embarkation day. As it turned out, I was awake anyway and gave up on sleep by 6:30am. I always check my sleep stats from my Fitbit every morning, and I was not surprised at all to see all these red lines signifying the time I was awake last night!

I mentioned yesterday that the weather forecast called for extremely high and damaging winds all weekend. The forecast also called for flooding along the banks of the Mississippi River. Not being from this part of the country, I didn’t understand exactly what that meant, so I did a bit of research about it before leaving for the trip. There was actually a thread posted this week last year with the exact same concerns, so thank you to that person for posting that thread and for those who replied. It turns out that this issue of flooding happens every year when the heavy snows from the winter months in the Midwest start to melt and send more water into the Mississippi River. The river is considered at flood stage when it reaches 17 feet deep, and this was expected to happen on March 9. The levees are designed to hold up to 20 feet, so we still had 3 feet of wiggle room, but the concerns were that boats would need to travel slower along the river to avoid splashing water on shore with their wakes, and the river could also have stronger currents making it hard for boats to move along the river safely. This is not such a big deal for a cruise ship, which is designed to maneuver safely in much more extreme conditions, but I was a little concerned that there would be increased traffic from other boats in the river, and that may impact the Dream. It also crossed my mind that with losing one hour last night due to changing the clocks, the Dream would lose one hour from it’s time to reach the port this morning, and the port workers would lose one hour from the time they needed to offload last week’s cruise and load up the ship with new supplies for our cruise.

With all of that said, I checked the webcam for the Port of New Orleans and was thrilled to see this:

It looked very foggy, so we were lucky that the Dream did not appear to have any delays and was already tied up at the terminal. We were officially going on a cruise today!!

Even though we purchased FTTF and could board the ship really early, we still had one more tour we wanted to cramp into our brief 48 hour stay in NOLA… a tour of the St. Louis #1 Cemetery! This is the oldest cemetery in New Orleans, and I have always been fascinated by the mausoleum style of graves used here, so I was really excited to squeeze this tour into our schedule. This was another tour offered by the company we used yesterday afternoon, Free Tours by Foot, but it was not technically free. The city of New Orleans started charging $2 per person to enter the cemetery because they were having such a high volume of traffic that it was causing damage to the graves and they needed to raise money for maintenance and repairs. Free Tours by Foot charges $2 per person for this tour to cover the cost of entering the cemetery, but I was fine with that considering it is directly benefiting the cemetery itself. Of course, they still appreciate us tipping our tour guides as well. They offer this tour two or three times a day, including some tours at night with a ghost story theme. It worked out perfectly for us to do this tour early on Sunday morning before boarding the ship for our cruise.

We got ready for the day and finished packing up our luggage so we could just quickly grab our bags when we got back after the tour and didn’t need to delay boarding the ship any more than necessary. It didn’t take much thought for us to decide to return to District Donuts for breakfast. That was so good yesterday that we wanted another chance to try it today. In case you were curious, I did check to see if any place near our AirBNB sold beignets, but I didn’t find anything and just planned for us to visit the Riverwalk location of Café Du Monde the day we returned from the cruise. I loved the Samoa donut that I had yesterday, but I also wanted to try something different, so DH and I decided to get one Samoa and one brownie batter donut (brownie batter glaze, brownie, and chocolate chips), and we shared both. The brownie one was good, but I still liked the samoa better.

After breakfast, we hopped on the #11 bus to get down to the French Quarter. The bus only runs every 30 minutes this early on a Sunday morning but we were awake so early that we caught an earlier bus than I had planned, which gave us some time to wonder the streets of the French Quarter before meeting the guide for our tour. It was so beautiful to walk along the quiet streets in the morning fog with nearly no one else around.

I loved how eerie the gates to Jackson Square looked in the morning light.

A little Mardi Gras humor

Funky light fixtures at the entrance to one of the hotels:

When we reached Bourbon Street, OMG! It was such a mess!! There are no words to describe the odor that filled the air (so I’ll just let you use your imagination about that), and I couldn’t believe how much trash was all over the street. Notice all of the bright green cups from the Hand Grenades??

We needed to meet up for our tour at 9:15am, and when we arrived, we were greeted by 2 tour guides. Over 40 people signed up for this tour, so they planned to split us into 2 smaller groups. I asked one of the guides around what time the tour was scheduled to end (as even though I wanted to enjoy this tour and learn about the cemeteries, I was also anxious to get down to the cruise port!). He said that his tour is usually a little shorter than an hour and 15 minutes, and the other guide talks a bit more so she tends to run a little longer. Luckily, it worked out that when they divided the group, we were in Kyle’s group for the slightly shorter tour length. He led us all around the cemetery, and pointed out famous graves and interesting tombs. Although it was obviously morbid, I found it all to be so fascinating to learn about.

In the photo below, you can see that the doors on the front of the tombs are divided in half. I always thought this was so they could bury two people, one on top of the other. I also always thought that they use this above-ground style of grave in New Orleans to prevent bodies from rising up from underground and floating away. Kyle explained the true history behind these graves, and it has nothing to do with possible flooding washing away the graves. The entire city of New Orleans used to be within the few blocks of the French Quarter, and they feared that they would run out of space using traditional cemeteries. They dug up all of the old graves and started using mausoleums instead. They put the bodies in thin wood boxes inside the clay tomb in the top of the 2 levels, and leave it there for a year and a day. In that time, the tomb acts like an oven and the body is naturally incinerated. Waiting a year and a day means the body will be there over the summer when it gets very hot in Louisiana, and it also allows families a chance to visit their loved ones on the one year anniversary of their burial. When they open the tomb back up, they sweep the remains into a bag which is labeled and stored in the bottom compartment. They originally just brushed the remains to the back of the top shelf where there is an opening for the remains to fall to the bottom section, but then multiple family members’ remains got mixed together. Today, they bag each person separately and label the bags in case the remains are ever needed for DNA testing. The family can keep reusing the tomb over and over again, which is why you will see many names listed on the face plate of each tomb.

So what happens when more than one person from a family dies in the same year? The cemetery has these tombs available to rent as needed, and then the bagged remains are placed inside the family tomb when they are ready.

This was the tomb of Homer Plessy, as in the famous court case Plessy v. Ferguson which upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation laws for public facilities (“separate but equal”).

This tomb was featured in the movie Night Rider. Kyle said that the Church who oversees the cemetery was so upset about how the film disrespected the cemetery that they never let anyone film any kind of movie here again. When we first started our tour, Kyle said we could take as many still photos as we wanted, but we were not allowed to record a video of any kind.

This pyramid-shaped tomb is the future resting place of actor Nicholas Cage

Perhaps the most famous person buried in this cemetery is Marie Laveau, the originator of Voodoo practice in New Orleans. Honestly, neither DH or I had ever heard of her before this tour, but Kyle said she is a really big deal in New Orleans.

The tour ended at 10:45am and we both thought this was time well-spent instead of rushing off to board the ship first thing in the morning. But now that it was over, it was time to get over to the Dream! Double checking the port webcam, it looked like the fog on the river had lifted and the ship was waiting for us to get down there!

We requested an Uber with 2 stops… first, back to the AirBNB to grab our bags and return the keys, and second, to the cruise port. I love that Uber has this feature now to go to two stops in the same car because it saved us a lot of time (and probably some money too!) versus using two separate Ubers for those two trips. The one downside is that they only give you 3 minutes for the car to wait at that first stop because it is meant for dropping someone off or picking someone up enroute to your destination. This was why we needed to make sure our bags were fully packed, zippered, and ready to go before leaving the house this morning… because we only had 3 minutes to bring all our bags down 2 flights of stairs and get loaded in the trunk before Uber starts charging a fee. Everything worked out perfectly and we were both sitting back in the car, ready to go, in 2 minutes 40 seconds.

Luck was on our side yet again because our driver had been to the cruise port before and knew exactly where to go and how the process worked. We have had Uber drivers on prior cruises who had never driven passengers to the cruise port before and it was very confusing for all of us, so this driver was wonderful. When we drove into the port entrance, there were a ton of cars lined up in one lane, but we just drove passed them and the port workers directed us to a free lane that went straight to the passenger drop off location. All of the cars we passed were waiting to park their cars in the port parking lot, and we heard complaints from our fellow passengers throughout the cruise about how miserable the traffic was getting to the parking lots and how many hours they were waiting to get in. It seemed like there was a higher number of people driving to port for this cruise as compared to cruises out of Florida, so it’s not surprising that there were very long lines of cars backed up to access the parking lots. In addition to all the people going on our cruise, the Norwegian Breakaway was docked right beside the Carnival Dream doing their own turn around day, so more than 7,500 people were all trying to access this one port at the same time. That’s a lot of people trying to access one small port area!

The Uber dropped us off at 11:20am and a porter came over to help me staple my luggage tags to our one big checked bag. We rolled our smaller carry on bags into the terminal and just kept asking people where to go for FTTF. The whole process went so quickly that I didn’t have a chance to really look around, but I did not see any signs that specified “FTTF go this way” so I had to keep asking the employees to make sure we were in the right place. Our first stop was to go through security, where they scanned our bags through an airport style x-ray machine and we walked through a metal detector. They asked us to remove our bottles of wine from our bag, and told us we had to have them inspected at a separate table. Maybe they thought we emptied out the wine and replaced it with liquor? I’m not sure how that was possible, but our 2 bottles of wine were legit so no worries. Next, we went up the escalator and there was no wait for the check in line. I am used to seeing a big, long desk with lots of people behind the counter waiting to check you in. In New Orleans, they have these little portable rolling carts and the guy checking us in used a scanner on a cell phone to scan our passports. He spent less than 60 seconds helping us, scribbled something on our boarding passes, and told us to walk “that way”. We filled out the check in information online prior to the cruise, so maybe that’s why the process went so quickly? We continued walking into a room with a ton of chairs, but since boarding has already started, there wasn’t anyone sitting around waiting in this area. We were directed to walk straight over to the gangway and we stepped onto the ship at 11:38am. In total, it took us 18 minutes from when we got out of our Uber car until we were standing in the lobby of the Dream. I am not sure exactly what time boarding started earlier this morning, but I imagine that there was a big rush of people at that time. By now, things had calmed down so there were no people backed up from FTTF and we just kept on moving through each step of the process.

Once on the ship, our first stop was to go down to our cabin to drop off our bags, and DH wanted to take a quick nap because he didn’t sleep well last night. I’m not much of a napper, but I planned to start unpacking the carry on bags while he slept. Imagine our surprise when we got to our cabin door and it was propped open with a dirty white tube sock in the middle of the floor! There was still trash in the trash cans, the bar of soap was used in the soap dish, and the shampoo dispensers in the showers were empty, so we could tell that the stewardess didn’t finish cleaning our cabin yet. I would have expected that had we boarded right at 10 or 10:30am when FTTF first started boarding, but it was now 11:45am and there was no reason our cabin shouldn’t be ready yet. We tracked down our stewardess Jennifer (actually, it turned out that she was our assistant stewardess, but we really only interacted with her all week and I’m not sure if we ever met our head stewardess), and she told us she had misread her paper and did not realize we had FTTF. She said she was almost done and just needed to vacuum our cabin. Ummm, so you don’t plan to clean our bathrooms?? We pointed out the things in the bathroom that needed attention and she said to leave our bags on the bed and go to lunch, and she would finish up soon. I didn’t love the idea of leaving our carry on bags (which have all of our electronics and things too valuable to put in a checked bag) in a cabin with the door opened where anyone coming down the hallway can just hop inside and steal the bag, so I asked her to be sure to close the door when she finished cleaning. Thanks to our great breakfast at District Donuts, we really were not hungry yet for lunch, so we walked around a bit and checked out the ship before it got too crowded. Before we walked away, I took the envelope from the mailbox outside our cabin. Our sign and sail cards were sealed inside, and it was clearly printed on the front that we had purchased FTTF.

A few months before our cruise, there was an announcement that Carnival was raising the prices of their internet packages. I was already debating if I wanted to purchase the social media internet plan, so this price hike was enough to convince me to buy it. I paid $4 per day for the 7 day cruise, so it was $28 total. After the price hike, it would cost $6.80 per day, or $47.60 for the whole week. That is a really big increase in price and I probably would not have purchased it for close to $50 for the week, but $28 seemed reasonable, especially considering it gave me access to the Southwest app to check in for our flights home. I was considering buying the Early Bird Check In for one of our flights home, but that costs $25 for our flight and it seemed like a bad use of money when I could spend just $3 more and get to play on my social media sites all week too! Before leaving home, I downloaded the Carnival Hub app. Once on the ship, I opened up the app and this was what it looked like…

Since we would continue to have cell phone and data access through the evening, I didn’t need to connect to the ship internet just yet, but later in the evening, I put my phone on airplane mode and connected to the ship wifi. When I went back into the app, it now showed this screen:

It was very easy to set up and it worked great for me throughout the whole cruise. I also really liked using the Hub App to read the dinner menus and daily schedules each day. This was the first time when I had access to an app like this on a cruise, and now I can’t imagine cruising without it!

After wandering around the ship for a while, we ended our tour at the Lido buffet where DH ordered a reuben sandwich from the deli.

I decided to get some noodles from the Mongolian Wok. There were about 10 people on line ahead of me and it took about 20 minutes from when I got in line until my food was ready.

These are the 3 sauces listed as options for the stirfry. I do not like anything spicy, so I ordered the black bean sauce because it did not have any spicy pepper icons next to it. It turned out that there were chili flakes in that sauce and it was definitely spicy by my definition. To me, if there are no pepper icons, then the sauce should not be spicy at all, so I was kind of bummed that they put chili flakes in that sauce. I ended up examining each forkful of food and picking out the chili flakes as I ate. Later on in the cruise, I realized that they also have soy sauce as an option so I ordered that and I liked my dish much more. I’m not sure why soy sauce is not listed as an option on the menu?

If you look closely, you can see the chili flakes on the pieces of zucchini

One thing I will say is they were generous in the portion of shrimp they gave me, so that made me happy.

At 1:30pm, we went back down to our cabin, assuming Jennifer should be finished cleaning by now and our checked suitcase should have arrived so we could unpack before the Muster drill. Sure enough, our cabin was clean and ready for us, but our checked suitcase had not been delivered yet. It was now 2 hours after we handed our bag over to the porter, and with priority bag delivery, I thought it should be here by now. What made it even worse is we saw several carts in the hallway that were filled with bags for other cabins and none of them had priority labels. Why did we pay for this service when we were not receiving any of the included perks?!

Before DH was allowed to lay down for his nap, I took a few moments to take photos of our clean cabin.

There were 4 closets along the wall when you first enter the cabin. The hanging rod in the first closet goes front to back instead of side to side, and it looked like the people in this cabin on the last cruise didn’t use it because there were no hangars in here. We ended up using the floor of this cabinet to store our backpacks and beach bags.

The next two closets were identical, with a regular horizontal hanging bar for clothes. They gave us plenty of hangars, especially since there were only 2 of us in the cabin and the cruise was only 7 days long so we didn’t have very much clothing to store. I really liked having separate closets though because I am used to having to share one big closet on the Celebrity ships.

The last closet has a few shelves and a full length mirror.

These photos are from the last morning of the cruise but I wanted to share it here because it shows the counter space and all the drawers, closets, and cabinets. There is a very thin drawer along the middle where the stool goes, but I don’t think I took a photo of the inside of that drawer. The biggest door under the counter with the small key hole houses the mini-fridge. It kept our drinks cold all week, but make sure to leave the cabinet door ajar to allow for good ventilation and air flow or the fridge might not work as well.

The desk has 4 drawers. Even though they are not very deep, they do go pretty far back and I was able to store a lot of loose items in these drawers.

The top drawer holds the hair dryer, but there is still a good amount of space for make up or small items that you don’t want to leave rolling around on the counter.

The 2 doors on the side angle of the counter house the safe and an extra shelf that we used to store our snorkel gear.

There are also 2 open shelves next to this cabinet which worked well to store our sun screen and extra Clif Bars.

Overall, I thought there was more than enough storage in the cabin and we didn’t come close to filling all the nooks and crannies. This cabin is designed to have 3 or 4 people in it so I imagine a bigger family would appreciate all that extra space.

Perhaps the best feature of this oceanview cabin was that it has two bathrooms. The first bathroom is just like the bathrooms on the other Carnival ships, with a toilet, stall shower with a curtain, a sink, and lots of counter space and storage shelves.

The second bathroom has a sink and a bathtub, with 2 small shelves next to the mirror (sorry that I did not get a picture of that). The floor space in this bathroom is extremely cramped, making it tricky to get dressed after a shower, but it was really great to have 2 showers to get ready for dinner when we had limited time after a long day in port, and the 2 sinks made getting ready in the morning and getting ready for bed at night much more convenient. I still wish this second bathroom had a toilet, but I knew it didn’t have one when I booked the cabin so I can’t really complain.

I took a few minutes to unpack my carry on bag while DH took a short nap, then we went up to the casino bar for happy hour. There were signs posted in the elevator banks which advertised happy hour from 12-2pm on embarkation day, only in the casino bar, with half off 3 specific cocktails and 3 kinds of wine, and $1 off beers.

While we were trying to get the attention of one of the bartenders, we overheard multiple people around us complaining that they were charged full price for their drinks. It turns out that they ordered “rum punch” instead of “island rum punch” and those are two different drinks. Why would anyone order the full price drink?! It seemed like a scam or something, but the bartender did correct their bill.

DH ordered the Tropical Mule and I had the Island Rum Punch. I think DH said his had too much ginger beer, but I enjoyed my drink.

It was too smokey in the casino for us so we took our drinks to go. I try to take a photo with these wood storage benches on all of my Carnival cruises.

We made our way back to the Lido buffet because I wanted to try the fancy cakes for dessert. These were huge upgrade over the cakes they used to offer, but unfortunately, they are only available during lunch and they serve the old style of cakes during dinner hours. I ordered a piece of the Funfetti Cheesecake and it was really good (although who taught this woman how to cut a slice of cake?!)

We still had a few minutes to kill before the Muster drill so we went back to the cabin to look for our suitcase, but nope! It was still not there! We relaxed in the cabin until 3:15pm, checking out in the hall every few minutes but the bag never came. It was fun watching the boats move up and down the Mississippi River from the window in our cabin.

This is the current room service menu. We never ordered anything so I can’t speak to how things tasted, but I did notice the limited free options on half the left page, versus the list of paid options which took up the other half of the left page plus all of the right page.

Breakfast room service door tag

Jennifer left us a few goodies while we were gone. Here is today’s Fun Times:

Welcome letter explaining the benefits of FTTF

The 12 pack of water bottles that I preordered online

The entertainment schedule for the whole cruise. I kept this paper folded up in the little purse that I carried at night so I could easily reference it to know what was happening each night.

Other information…

I created a map of the public spaces on the ship to minimize the time we spent getting lost during the cruise. It turned out that the guest services desk had a copy of the map from the elevator banks that I could have used, but I liked this more visual version of the deck plans.

They started making announcements that sounded like the Muster drill was starting, so we went to the elevators to go upstairs to our station, and there was our bag! It was the only bag on one of the carts, so we showed the staff that our ID matched the name on the luggage tag, and then just took the bag to our room ourselves. I didn’t want it sitting out in the hall all afternoon so it was better to put it inside the cabin now. I’m not sure exactly what “priority” means, but I don’t think a 4 hour wait for our bag was what we paid for. So far, FTTF was 0/2.

Our muster station was on deck 3 of the mid-ship MDR. It was really nice to sit inside at one of the dining room tables with plenty of space to spread out, and not being crammed onto the outside decks. We sat down at one of the first tables near the door so we could make a quick escape when the drill ended. The drill was scheduled to start at 3pm, but it did not end up starting until 4pm. 4pm was supposed to be our sail away time, so I guess things were a bit delayed. I wonder if my suspicions were correct and setting the clocks ahead one hour gave the port workers one hour less to load supplies onto the ship so they ran a little late? Anyway, muster was fairly quick and painless, and when it ended, we went right up to the Lido mid-ship pool area for the sail away party. The entertainment team did a great job of getting the party started with the usual line dances, and our cruise director Gary was full of energy to get us all excited.

They pulled this lady into the center of the circle and she started twerking… and then she got stuck and needed the crew to help her stand back up! Oops!

Our tradition of taking a sail away photo with the life ring continues!

We’re growing quite the collection of these photos!

Looks like the Breakaway also has not started to sail away

Those aft lounge chairs will make for a pretty view back up the Mississippi River when we do start sailing away

Finally, around 5pm, we noticed our ship was moving so we went upstairs to the Serenity Deck for a forward facing view as we traveled down the River, but behind the Plexiglas windows for protection from the wind. I really don’t know exactly what we were seeing but it was very unique for us to be on a cruise sailing down the Mississippi River, and it was fun to watch as we passed all the small towns along the shore.

The downside to the windows is it created a glare in some of the photos

Ugland… is that the boat that imports Ugg boots? Hehe

Before the cruise, I booked 6pm dinner reservations in the Steakhouse for tonight. It makes for a nice way to kick off the start of the cruise, and we like to take advantage of the free bottle of wine promotion. Before we get to that, here are some screen shots from the hub app of the dinner menus from the main MDR.

The steakhouse on the Dream is located all the way aft on deck 12. Since we were coming from all the way forward on deck 15 at Serenity, we walked down to deck 12 and walked back from there. We got all the way to the back of the ship on deck 12 and didn’t see the steakhouse so we went inside to the elevators and it still took us a few seconds to find it. The door to enter the steakhouse is very well hidden. It is in the spot where the elevator door is on the other decks so we didn’t even see it at first.

Do you see it down there? Here’s a better look… this photo was taken early in the morning on the last sea day when the steakhouse was closed. It was even harder to notice it when the steakhouse was opened because instead of a white door, there was a dark void that just didn’t stand out at all. I think they should set up the hostess stand outside of the restaurant where it is obviously visible in the elevator bank to minimize confusion.

Once we found the door, we checked in with the hostess and she led us to the last available window table. The view as we cruised down the Mississippi River was so neat! When our waitress came over to greet us, we ordered the free bottle of Chardonnay to sip while we perused the menu.

Just a word of warning… the downside to eating in the steakhouse tonight on this specific cruise is that it takes several hours before the ship enters the Gulf of Mexico so we were technically still in America and that meant we had to pay sales tax on all purchases. They charged tax on the drinks we purchased this afternoon, but we were used to that on other sailings as well if we bought drinks before sailing away. On all of our other cruises, it only takes a few minutes to get far enough out to sea that the ship is in international waters and stops charging sales tax. Everyone who eats in the steakhouse on the first night of a cruise leaving from New Orleans will be charged sales tax on the cost of that meal (the meal costs $38 and we paid around $3.50 per person in sales tax). It would be nice if they warned you about that instead of letting you be surprised when the bill comes at the end of the meal. We just looked at it like our bottle of wine cost $7 (the price we paid in tax for the 2 of us) instead of being free. Not a huge deal, just something we didn’t think about in advance.

The menu in the steakhouse on Carnival ships changed a year or two ago, so this was our first time trying it. I was excited to taste some of the new appetizers.

Two kinds of butter

Mini hamburger, compliments of the chef

DH ordered the Stuffed Mushrooms

I started with the Bone Marrow and Hand-Cut Beef Tartare. This was one of the best appetizers I have ever eaten. I really loved everything about it!

DH also ordered the Baked Onion Soup, which he said was very good

My second appetizer was the Risotto, which was just as tasty as my first appetizer. It was on the heavier side, which I expected, but I still finished every drop of it hehe

Such pretty views as we continue sailing down the River

For my entrée, I ordered the Surf and Turf. Both items were cooked perfectly, and I really liked the grilled flavor on the lobster. I thought the presentation looked a little funny with such a large plate and it made the portion of food appear small. Not that I needed there to be more food, as I could barely finish it as it was, but a smaller plate may have given a better presentation.

I didn’t get a photo of it, but DH ordered the Filet Mignon and said it was cooked perfectly as well. For our sides, we shared the mushrooms and DH also had the baked potato.

I know they try to create an upscale environment in the steakhouse, and that lends itself to a more leisurely pacing of the meal, but we found this process to be way too slow. Thanks to the time stamps on my photos, I can attest that we sat down at 6pm, received our appetizers at 6:34pm and 6:52pm, we received our entrees at 7:25pm, and our desserts at 8:07pm. There were only two of us at the table, so it just doesn’t take THAT long to get through each course. With bigger parties, there is more talking and people eat at different paces so their meal may take longer to complete, but it would have been nice if our waitress noticed that we were sitting with empty plates in front of us and cleared them promptly. We tried looking for her to let her know we were ready for the next course, but she was never visible and I think she may have been hiding in the galley when she wasn’t serving us food. By the time our waitress brought over the dessert menu, we were just over it and didn’t want to be there anymore. We asked if we could order our desserts to-go but the waitress insisted that we had to take one bite of each dessert before she could wrap it up. That seemed like another excuse to hold us captive longer, but we obliged. We had a feeling the plates that they served the desserts on would be too big to fit in the mini-fridge in our cabin as that had been a problem on prior cruises, so we asked if she could plate the desserts on smaller plates, but the waitress said they only have one size of plates. I actually tried to save the rectangular plate that they used to serve the baked potato but she cleared it from the table and would not let us use it. Alrighty then!

Dessert menu

Cheesecake with hazelnut biscuit for me

Selection of cheese for DH (DH has developed a love for ordering cheese plates on cruises ever since our cruise with Paul Gauguin haha)

Sure enough, these plates were way too big to fit in our fridge so we ended up leaving it out on the counter and hoped for the best when we ate them later that night. We left the steakhouse at 8:15pm, so we were there for 2 hours and 15 minutes… buyer beware, the steakhouse is not a speedy dining experience!

When we got back to our cabin to drop off the desserts, I found that Jennifer had delivered my free drink voucher and Carnival pin. I stashed the voucher in my planning binder on the page for the last day of the cruise so I wouldn’t forget to use it (which is probably what Carnival hopes will happen when they give you a voucher on Day 1 that cannot be used until after 5pm on Day 7… nice try, Carnival! I will never forget an opportunity for a free drink!)

We went upstairs to Deck 5 Aft to check out some of the evening entertainment. I really liked how there were 3 venues side by side for the comedy club, piano bar, and a smaller lounge for live music or karaoke, allowing us to hop between them and maximize our entertainment experiences. First we went to the piano bar to listen to Zack Daniels (is that his real name because it is just too perfect for a guy who works in a bar! LOL). Funny story about him… when we were wandering around the ship this afternoon, we got to the piano bar and were looking at the sign listing the hours it was opened for the cruise. Do you notice something odd about Zack’s photo?

There’s no piano in that picture! We were joking about how our piano bar entertainer doesn’t play piano (at least according to that photo), and then we noticed someone sitting with his back to us on the couch nearby. It was Zack! Oops! He laughed about it and said that yes, of course he plays piano, but he also plays guitar on a handful of songs. So we were looking forward to stopping by later tonight to see him perform. Sure enough, he whipped out his guitar on one of the first songs!

But he proved that he is also very talented at playing the piano!

At 9:30pm, we went next door to the Burgundy Lounge for the adult comedy show with Geoff Keith. We really enjoyed his show and thought he was one of the better comedians on our cruise. These comedy shows were very popular with our fellow cruisers, so although the comedy lounge on the Dream is one of the biggest in Carnival’s fleet, it still filled up with standing room only by at least 10 minutes before each show. We were always able to find a seat, but sometimes we had to get creative and move chairs around the room to be able to sit together.

The show was about 30 minutes long, so then we went back to the piano bar for a bit until it was time for bed.

Step Tracker Daily Total: 13,777 steps; 5.6 miles; 13 flights of stairs

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Saturday, March 9, 2019 ~ New Orleans, Louisiana

March 31, 2019 deladane Leave a comment

With less than 48 hours to spend exploring New Orleans before the cruise, we had to maximize our time to see as much as possible. We had talked about maybe taking a swamp tour in the Everglades when we cruised out of Florida in 2016 and 2018. Since we never managed to fit it in to those trips, I really wanted to do it here in New Orleans. We did not have a rental car, and we needed to find a company that included transportation, so that helped to narrow down our options. While several companies provide transportation, most of them require you to meet at their office somewhere in the French Quarter. For people staying at hotels in the French Quarter, this is a great option, but for us, we didn’t want to deal with getting over there very early in the morning and preferred to find a company who picks us up at our hotel. Cajun Pride Swamp Tours provides that service, so we decided to book with them. They offer 2 versions of the swamp tour, with the regular tour in a bigger boat that holds up to 40 passengers versus the VIP tour boat which only holds up to 16 passengers. Either way, the tour is an hour and a half long, and travels along the river in their private swamp that protects the wildlife, with no fishing and no hunting allowed so the animals are not afraid of humans and are more likely to approach the boats. We decided to book the VIP tour because the reviews said we would have more opportunities to interact with the animals and the guide, and it seemed worth it for the $18 additional cost. It was easy to book the tour online through their website, and they offered free cancellation with at least three days notice. The one quirk was that when you tell them where you need to be picked up, they use a drop down list of all the hotels in New Orleans. We were staying in an AirBNB, so that was obviously not listed as one of the options. Luckily, the Garden District Bed and Breakfast hotel was located just two short blocks from our AirBNB, so I just picked that as our pick up spot. The directions said we needed to be outside “our hotel” by 8am and the shuttle would pick us up between 8 and 8:30am. Of course it would have been better to be able to sit in the lobby to wait for the shuttle, but I figured we’d just quietly loiter outside the bed and breakfast and hopefully no one minded.

This morning, we woke up at 7am, got dressed and packed up our day bags, and left the AirBNB in search of somewhere to eat breakfast. Most of the restaurants on Magazine Street don’t open for breakfast until 8am or later, but that would not work for us as we needed to be outside the bed and breakfast by then. A few blocks from our hotel, we found District Donuts which was perfect for our needs. They offer all sorts of funky flavors for their donuts, and DH was able to get some good coffee so he was happy.

I ordered the Samoa donut (coconut caramel glaze, vanilla pastry cream, toasted coconut, hot fudge drizzle) and DH got the Blueberry Cheesecake donut (blueberry glaze, cheesecake filling, blueberry, crushed graham cracker). Both were really good, and they were filling because they were both stuffed with cream so we were held full for a good 3 hours after eating.

These donuts were super messy, so we made sure to finish eating at the restaurant and got back over to the bed and breakfast by 7:55am. At exactly 8am, we saw the shuttle driving down the street, and the driver, Byron, greeted us with a smile. It turned out that we were the first pick up of the group, which is not all that surprising because we were probably staying the furthest from the French Quarter of all the pick up locations. We spent the next 30 minutes driving around to the other hotels in the French Quarter to pick up the rest of the people in our group. At 2 of the hotels, there was no one waiting outside to be picked up so our driver had to call those groups, and both of them said they were told they would be picked up at 9:30am. Something tells me that they just misunderstood the instructions because all of the paperwork said we would be picked up between 8-8:30am for a swamp tour that starts at 9:30am. I guess they just heard the 9:30am part and didn’t realize that is when the swamp boat leaves the dock, not the pick up time from the French Quarter. Anyway, both of those groups were instructed to call the office to reschedule their tour. Hopefully there was space on some of the tours later this afternoon and they could be picked up on the next round of the shuttle.

When we were done with all the pick ups by 8:30am, the driver headed for the highway to drive out to the swamp in La Place. It was very foggy this morning, so we didn’t have the most exciting view from the bus. Fingers crossed that the fog would lift before the swamp tour started!

We arrived at the Cajun Pride Swamp Tours office by 9am, so we had 30 minutes to check in for our tour, browse the gift shop, and use the rest rooms. This was the bus they used for the shuttle…

While we were waiting for our tour to start, we took some time to check out their grounds. They had 4 or 5 big swamp boats tied up to the dock and I was immediately happy we booked the VIP boat. Here is the boat for the general tour…

Notice how there are 4 long metal benches? Once the boat was fully loaded with all the passengers, it didn’t seem like anyone had a good view! The people sitting on the two benches on the outside of the boat had their back to the river so they had to turn around to look at the animals behind them. The people who sat on the two middle benches would be looking directly at the people on the outside benches, so they would have to look between those people to try to see the animals. It just didn’t seem well thought out and I can imagine everyone on this boat had a back ache after 90 minutes of twisting and turning to see the animals.

This is our boat for the VIP tour…

The bench is along the middle of the boat, and has a back rest and thick foam padding on the seats, which the bigger boat did not have. We sat with our backs to the middle of the boat, facing out towards the water with no one blocking our view. We ended up only having 9 people on our tour, plus 1 tour guide, so there was space to stand up and walk around, or we could kneel on the bench if the animals were on the opposite side of the boat from where we were sitting. Considering this was a tour I only planned to take once in my lifetime, it was well worth the extra $18 to have this VIP experience!

Just to point out one more thing about both of these boats… These are flat bottom boats with a canopy overhead to provide protection from the sun (or rain). Some of the other companies I researched had the stadium seating style air boats, but those do not have any cover overhead and I didn’t want to worry about weather issues on the day of our tour, so this was another perk for using Cajun Pride.

Here’s a few more photos from the visitor center grounds…

They have lots of picnic tables so if you pack a lunch, you can eat comfortably. I think they also offer some lunches to purchase in the office.

Some of the animals we might find out in the swamp…

Can you see the two baby alligators? One is right up front on the grass, and the other is sitting on the wood ramp out in the lake…

At 9:30am, the guides came out and gathered everyone up to board the boats. We were given yellow wristbands to indicate that we were on the VIP boat, so our guide could easily identify us. Our guide’s name was Danny, and he helped us all safely board the boat and get comfortable before undoing the lines and taking our boat out into the river.

Swamp tour selfie!

The name of this swamp is the Greater Man Shack Swamp, and it is supposedly haunted (although I didn’t really see any evidence of that!). Danny explained that alligators don’t come out of bromation (the name for hibernation for cold blooded animals) from the winter until late April or May, so with our tour being in early March, it was still too cold for them. He said we probably would not see any big alligators, but that some of the smaller alligators were out and we would see lots of those. We saw many, many alligators on this tour, but they topped out at four feet long, whereas had we taken the tour over the summer, we could have seen alligators four or five times that length! Oh well, what can we do? This is when we are here and we will make the most of it!

Captain Danny

Danny was great at making sure we all had a good experience on this tour. Whenever we approached wildlife on the shore of the river, he gave a few seconds for one side of the boat to observe, then he turned the boat around so the other side could see it. The alligators move very slowly, so there was plenty of time for everyone to see them, and we traveled the same path out and back so most of them were still in the same place when we passed on the way back at the end of the tour. I took several hundred photos during this tour, but I’ll try to narrow it down to just a few to share with you.

One guy in the water and another up on the log

We followed the bigger boat down the river, but they stayed in the middle of the river whereas we could get closer to the sides where the animals were hiding.

These raccoons were an unexpected surprise! There is a group of 3 raccoons that live here and they recognize Danny’s voice and come out of the trees, knowing he feeds them every morning. They were so fuzzy and chubby!

A turtle on a log

Don’t forget to take a moment to look up at the beautiful trees!

It looks like this gator wants to jump up on the turtle on the log. I loved how pretty the reflection looked in the water…

This was the site of a mass grave for people who died in a hurricane in 1915

Check out how crowded the bigger boat looked!

3 gators hanging out on the log

At one point, this alligator swam up really close to our boat. He was just a few feet away and I was hoping he would open his mouth or try to jump up or something, but he just stayed in the water with his eyes staring right at us.

Danny tried to entice the gator to swim closer by sticking out his hand, but this is as close as he got…

Now it was time for show and tell! First, Danny passed out the skins of 8 or 10 different animals. Is it weird that we look so happy to be holding a skunk and raccoon skin? Haha

Two crawfish in a cage

a baby ribbon snake

For the grand finale, Danny introduced us to his friend Bruce, a 3.5 year old alligator who was stowed in a cooler in the boat this whole time! He put a rubber band around his mouth so he wouldn’t bite us, then he showed us how to safely hold him. Danny wasn’t really concerned that Bruce would hurt us, but that we would hurt Bruce. The worst thing that could happen would be if he wiggled out of our hands and ended up in the water. With that rubber band around his mouth, he has no way to feed or defend himself and he would not live long like that out in the wild. Danny said that if Bruce did try to wiggle away, to make sure that he lands inside the boat so Danny could catch him.

I’m holding an alligator!!

After everyone had a chance to play with Bruce, Danny told me to come up to the front of the boat, and he plopped Bruce down on my shoulder!

Me, Danny, and Bruce

After that, Danny brought the boat back to the pier and the tour ended promptly at 11am. Overall, we both thought the tour was fun and we learned a lot about alligators and the swamp so we were glad we took the time to take this tour. At around 11:20am, Byron returned with the shuttle bus to drive us back to New Orleans. He dropped us off in the reverse order of how he picked us up this morning, which meant we were the last ones off the bus. Luckily, it only took about 15 minutes to drop everyone off, so we were back at our AirBNB by 12:15pm. We ran upstairs to quickly get changed, then went down to the restaurant in the building next door to our house.

Tracey’s is a sports bar with a restaurant where you order at the counter in the back. They serve fresh oysters and crawfish, and have a full menu of sandwiches.

DH ordered a roast beef poboy.

I ordered a half order of the Muffuletta sandwich, which is a New Orleans sandwich filled with olive salad, cheese, and a variety of meats like ham, salami, mortadella, and capicola, served on a loaf of Italian bread. It was such a delicious combination of flavors, but even though I only ordered a half size order, it was so huge that I only ate half of it! It was too bad we were only going to be in New Orleans for a short time because, while I did have a fridge and microwave in our AirBNB so I could have taken it back to eat later, there was not going to be a chance to actually eat it.

After lunch, we took the bus back to the French Quarter. We got off the bus at Canal Street and walked down towards the river to check out the sites. It was extremely windy, and it started to drizzle, but luckily it stopped quickly and that was the only time we had any kind of rain over the entire vacation.

While we were walking, we saw this Holocaust Memorial and walked over to look at it, but we didn’t really understand what it was. We walked along the path and then realized why we were so confused… they temporarily removed the art panels for refurbishment! The sign said it would take four months to complete the work, so I guess we were just here at the wrong time.

As we continued to walk along the water, we saw this statue- Monument to the Immigrant. Apparently she had a lot of fun during Mardi Gras because if you look closely, you can see that she is holding green beads in her hand!

This time tomorrow, we will see our cruise ship at this spot!

The Natchez Steamboat was boarding for an afternoon tour. There were hundreds of people waiting in line, so I can only imagine how crowded the boat would be for this tour!

We continued along the path until we came to the terrace overlooking Jackson Square and the famous St. Louis Cathedral. You can see the flag is held out to the side, blowing in the strong winds. The weather forecast actually predicted “strong, damaging winds” for this weekend, and they weren’t kidding!!

Our next activity for today was a free walking tour of the French Quarter with Free Tours By Foot. We have had great experiences with free walking tours in other cities like Chicago, Puerto Vallarta, and Cartagena, so we wanted to take one here in New Orleans too. They have all sorts of tours throughout the day, covering different topics and areas of the city. This two-hour tour of the French Quarter was scheduled for 2:45pm, which worked perfectly as it gave us time to get back to the AirBNB after the swamp tour, change clothes, go out for lunch, and get back down to the French Quarter with a few minutes to spare. Our guide, Matthew, sent us an email the night before with directions to meet him at the Andrew Jackson statue in the center of the Square.

About 25 people showed up for this tour, which made it a little tricky to stay together and hear what Matthew had to say once we got deeper in the Quarter. Matthew was good about gathering us together safely in a way that we wouldn’t get hit by a car driving down the street but also wouldn’t block pedestrian traffic on the sidewalks. We zigzagged all around the tiny streets of the French Quarter, stopping every few minutes for Matthew to share stories and anecdotes about New Orleans history.

I was totally obsessed with the beautiful wrought iron balconies, one more intricate and ornate than the next. My favorite story that Matthew told us was about the “Romeo Poles.” As the story goes, men used to climb up the poles on the street level to get to the ladies on the balconies of the higher floors. The same thing happens during Mardi Gras as people down on the streets try to climb the poles to get to the more exclusive parties up on the balconies. Some of the hotels apply grease to these poles to prevent people from climbing up! I thought that was really funny and interesting.

The tour ended at 4:20pm, so it was closer to an hour and a half long instead of the 2 hours originally planned, but that was okay with us as we got to see plenty and were ready to move on anyway. We started walking back towards Bourbon Street and saw this sign stating “cell phone use prohibited”… That just seemed really odd to us. Was it because of the school? Did it just mean you can’t use your phone while driving? Hopefully it didn’t mean you can’t use your cell phone while walking around because that would be impossible to enforce!

When we made it back to Bourbon Street, it was a total mob scene! It was much more crowded than when we were here last night, and it was so loud that we could barely hear each other talking. I guess Saturday is a more popular night to go out on Bourbon Street, but this was just too much for me… at least without any drinks in my system! Haha I had wanted to check out the piano bar in Pat O’Brien’s, so this seemed like the perfect time to rest our feet, order a cocktail, and sing along to some fun music. As we approached the bar, there was a huge line of people lined up on the sidewalk. I left DH at the end of the line and headed to the front to make sure that this line was going where we wanted to go. As it turned out, Pat O’Brien’s is right next door to the famous Preservation Hall Jazz Club, so all of those people were waiting to go there and we had no wait at all to walk right into the piano bar.

Pat O’Brien’s is divided into three sections… to the left is a traditional bar, to the back is a huge outdoor patio, and to the right is the piano bar. The piano bar section had a really cool atmosphere with dark lighting, brick walls, ceramic beer steins hanging from the ceiling, and 2 piano players set up on the stage at the front of the room.

This was the outdoor patio area:

Their signature drink is the Hurricane, so of course we had to try it. Just be careful when you order drinks here, as they serve their specialty drinks in a souvenir glass and they automatically charge you $4 per glass, but you can get a refund if you return your glass to the bartender.

The Hurricanes were very strong and they were so large that it was like two drinks in one!

We stayed for about an hour and enjoyed singing along with the piano players. Tables turned over fairly quickly, so while there was always groups of people coming and going, it never felt too crowded at any one time. We left around 6pm to walk around on Bourbon Street, and somehow it was more tolerable after drinking those Hurricanes!

Our first stop was to buy a 64 ounce fish bowl filled with rum punch. There were a lot of places selling these and they were all the same price at $10 for the original bowl, and $7 if you wanted a refill. It wasn’t as tasty as the drink from Pat O’Brien’s, but I guess you get what you pay for! Haha

Originally, we planned to go to a sit down restaurant for a Louisiana-type of dish, but we were tired and just wanted to get something quick for dinner. It didn’t take much thought to decide to return to Crescent City Pizza Works for another delicious slice of funky pizza. As tempting as it was to get the same BBQ pork slice that I had last night, I decided to try something new and opted for the “It’s Easy Being Green” slice with pesto, green tomatoes, and mozzarella cheese. I tried putting my hand in the photo for a reference to the size of the slice…

Funny enough, there is actually a second slice of pizza below this one. They said they burned the original slice, or it was too crispy, or something like that, and they gave us a second slice to replace it. We both like our pizza extra crispy so we had no complaints about the original slice, but there was no chance we’d let either slice go to waste and DH helped me finish the second slice.

After dinner, we walked around a little more and listened to some of the street performers. This guy was very talented at playing his violin.

By 8pm, we were both really tired and decided to head back to Canal Street to catch the bus back to the AirBNB to pack up for Embarkation Day tomorrow!

Step Tracker Daily Total: 18,561 steps; 7.7 miles; 4 flights of stairs

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Friday, March 8, 2019 ~ Flying to New Orleans and Exploring Bourbon Street

March 27, 2019 deladane Leave a comment

The week leading up to this vacation turned out to be really hectic for both of us. My schedule at work was packed, and DH had a work trip to North Carolina, leaving very early on Monday morning and not returning home until 10pm on Thursday night. My heart was racing and I was seriously freaking out that he might have a flight delay and couldn’t get home that night, so as soon as I knew his plane took off from the east coast, I breathed a huge sigh of relief that we could officially go on vacation on Friday. We packed our big checked suitcase last weekend, but DH needed to unpack from North Carolina and repack his carry on rolling bag and backpack. We did this as fast as possible so we could get to sleep because our alarm clock was set to go off at 5:30am on Friday morning!

Since DH was out of town for 4 days, we made sure to finish off our countdown candies before bedtime…

I don’t think it is possible for Friday morning to have gone any smoother than it went. Maybe it was the excitement for the trip, or the nervousness about oversleeping, but I woke up at 5:24am, six minutes before my alarm went off. We ate a quick breakfast, reset all the clocks in the house because daylight savings time would happen while we were away, loaded all our bags in the car, and pulled out of the driveway at exactly 6:30am to drive up to Oakland. We were super lucky as there was no traffic on our 45 mile drive, despite driving during rush hour. I prebooked an off-site parking lot near the Oakland airport, and the whole process was seamless when we arrived. There were lots of spots to pick from, and the shuttle van was ready and waiting for us. When we got to the airport, there were no lines to check our big suitcase, no lines at security, and we didn’t even need to take off our shoes! We were sitting at our gate by 7:45am for our 10:20am flight… I’m not sure if I should consider that a win or a fail? DH grumbled at me for making us wake up so early haha How could I know that everything would work out that perfectly?!

Our flight to New Orleans was uneventful. We left on time and had a beautiful view of the San Francisco Bay as we took off.

To pass the time of the 4 hour flight, we watched movies on our tablets and snacked on Subway sandwiches. We had clear skies for most of the flight, but as we approached Louisiana, the skies turned cloudy and we hit a bit of turbulence for the last part of the flight. We couldn’t see much during our final descent into New Orleans until we finally dropped lower than the clouds and saw the vast swamp lands everywhere. It seemed like the plane was going to land in a swamp!

Of course, that didn’t really happen, and a few seconds later, the plane safely touched down on firm land at MSY. We got off the plane and quickly got downstairs to baggage claim, and then we waited… and waited… and waited some more. It took over 30 minutes before the luggage from our flight finally came out, and that seemed like an unnecessarily long time considering MSY is not that big of an airport. Our good luck from this morning was still with us because once the conveyor belt finally started to turn, our suitcase was the second bag to come out!

We requested an Uber to pick us up, and after the usual chaotic and frantic search to find our driver, we loaded up our bags and were on our way. The ride from the airport to our AirBNB took about 35 minutes with a little bit of Friday afternoon rush hour traffic. When we pulled up to the address of our AirBNB, I was very impressed! We were staying in a huge, beautiful Victorian house.

The house was located on Magazine Street, which is a hub of cute shops, boutiques, and restaurants. There were several other vacation rentals in the house, and I think the owner of the house lives there too. We had our own private entrance at the back of the house, but unfortunately, we had to climb 2 flights of stairs to reach our apartment. It wasn’t such a big deal for most of our stay, but it was definitely a struggle to get our 48.5 pound suitcase up there. It’s a good thing my husband is so strong and chivalrous, and he lugged all 3 bags up the stairs like a champ! Our apartment looked just like the pictures I saw online, with a little kitchen area, a couch, and an ensuite bathroom. My only complaint was that I thought we booked a room with a queen sized bed, and this was definitely just a full. Fingers crossed that we will be so tired from the early wake up call this morning that we don’t even notice the small bed!

Once we got settled in our room, it was time to explore a bit of New Orleans! There was a bus stop just a few steps from our house for Bus #11 which goes down Magazine Street to Canal Street, and from there, we could walk 3 blocks up to Bourbon Street. The bus costs $1.25 per ride, and you must have the exact amount because the driver can’t give you change. Instead of having a schedule listed at each bus stop, they have a sign with a code number that you can text to find out how many minutes until the next bus will arrive. We took the bus several times over the weekend and always found this prediction to be accurate. The bus was clean, and we appreciated that they announced the name of each upcoming stop in addition to displaying the name of that stop on a digital display at the front of the bus. It is often confusing and frustrating to know when to get off the bus in a foreign city, especially after dark when you can’t read the street signs, so this bus system made things really easy for us.

It was now around 7pm on Friday night, so Bourbon Street was fairly crowded. If you ask me, we were very lucky in the timing of our trip as Mardi Gras was 3 days prior to our arrival, and by now, most of the people who visited NOLA for the festivities had come and gone and things were much calmer here this weekend. Had we taken our cruise one week earlier, it would have been packed with people everywhere, making it very hard to walk around the French Quarter. As it was, tonight was a bit more crowded than I would prefer, but I understand that is just part of the “charm” of Bourbon Street!

We were very hungry as the last thing we ate was a Subway sandwich on the airplane at noon, so we wanted to find something quick and easy for dinner. We didn’t want to go to a sit down restaurant as it would take a long time to get our food, and we wanted to maximize the time we spent out on the streets. I had read some good reviews on Yelp about Crescent City Pizza Works, which served huge slices of specialty pizzas that you could order at the counter.

DH ordered the Buffalo Blues with buffalo chicken, blue cheese, green onions, mozzarella, and buffalo ranch sauce, and he said it was pretty good. I ordered the BBQ Pork pizza, which came with pulled pork, cinnamon apples, mozzarella and provolone cheeses, and Sweet Baby Rays BBQ sauce.

It is hard to tell from this photo, but the slice was HUGE!!! The pies are extra large, and they cut them into 6 slices (instead of the usual 8 slices), so it was like a double slice. If you look closely at this photo, you can see the white paper plate showing from behind the slice to give a little perspective… the slice overhangs the plate on both the front and the back, and is so wide that only a small portion of the plate shows from the sides. Not only was it huge, it was also delicious!

After we finished eating, we walked around Bourbon Street in search of something to drink. Everywhere we looked, we saw people carrying these green cups, and we figured out that they came from a place called Tropical Isle, where their specialty drink is the Hand Grenade. They won’t tell you exactly what is in the drink, but it is sweet and tastes like melon, and it’s really strong! They make it both on the rocks and blended, and they offer a regular or a skinny version with fewer calories. The bar had lots of funky décor and a cover band playing live music.

We listened to the band for a few minutes, then took our drinks to go. Part of the fun of New Orleans is that you can take your drinks out onto the street to walk around while you are drinking, so we wanted to take advantage of that!

Notice how you can see 3 people in the background of that photo who are also drinking Hand Grenades? Hehe

Nearly every bar had some kind of live music. We were not allowed to enter with a drink from another bar, but we joined the other people standing just outside the open windows/doors to enjoy the music from the street. There is a lot to see out on the streets too, with street performers and all sorts of crazy things. Looks like Homer Simpson had a bit too much to drink…

This was from the back of one of the churches in the French Quarter. I loved the spooky effect of how the light created a shadow of the statue on the wall.

After an hour or so, we were getting tired from a long day of travel. At around 9pm, we left Bourbon Street, crossed Canal Street, and went to CVS to buy 2 bottles of wine for the cruise. We then took the bus back to our AirBNB to call it a night. By the way, I checked the cost of taking an Uber back to our hotel and it was over $20, so riding the bus for $1.25 per person was a real bargain!

Step Tracker Daily Total: 12,756 steps; 4.9 miles; 6 flights of stairs

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Planning

March 24, 2019 deladane Leave a comment

We tend to book our vacations a year or more in advance, so this cruise was very different for us. When we got home from our Celebrity Eclipse cruise in March, we were kind of cruised-out. We were out of town for a cruise for over 2 weeks in September, and then again in March, and we needed a break from cruising. I know… first world problems! We planned several land-based vacations for 2018 including Memorial Day Weekend in Chicago and New Years week in Puerto Vallarta, and we started planning a 2 week vacation to Paris and London for summer of 2019. That held me over for a while, but some time in October, I starting thinking there was something that just didn’t feel complete. With no plan to take another cruise in the foreseeable future, I just wasn’t fully satisfied with our vacation plans. I had an itch and it needed to be scratched!

I have been saying for years that two of my travel goals are to go snorkeling in Belize (since it is said to be the top place for snorkeling in the Caribbean), and to hold a sloth (which should have happened on our Celebrity Equinox cruise in 2016, but you’ll have to read that review to learn why this remains on my to-do list!). I started looking around on the various cruise line websites, just to see what options were out there, and that’s when I found this itinerary. This cruise tempted me for several reasons…

It stops in Belize… pretty much the only requirement I had in mind going in haha
Our last 3 cruises have been 11, 10, and 14 nights long, so the idea of a 7-night cruise made it feel a little less like a big vacation, which was a good thing considering we already planned to go to Europe for 2 weeks in the summer.
It included 4 port days, satisfying my desire for a port-intensive itinerary. Three of the 4 ports are new to us, with Cozumel being the only repeat. That’s fine though considering that Cozumel is a huge port with tons of things to do, so we could do something different from our last time there (although we also would have enjoyed returning to Chankanaab if need be).
The cruise starts and ends in New Orleans. We have both been there before, but that was many years ago and we’ve never gone there together, so it would be fun to explore NOLA for a few days pre-cruise.
The cruise is on the Carnival Dream. We have never cruised on a Dream-class ship, and while I honestly would prefer to see the newer Carnival ships with their more current features and décor, I was still intrigued. This would be by far the biggest ship we have sailed on, with a maximum passenger capacity at 3,646 (approximately 800 more than our current biggest ship, the Celebrity Eclipse!). If that proved too crowded for us, at least we’d be getting off the ship for 4 of the 7 days! Haha

DH and I talked it over and decided to go ahead and book this cruise. This was less than 5 months before the cruise, so many cabins were already booked and there weren’t many options left. We considered booking a balcony, but the prices were higher than we wanted to spend and there were only a handful left, so it was unlikely to see big price drops in the coming weeks. Instead, we opted to save a little money and book an oceanview cabin. There was just ONE mid-ship oceanview cabin left on Deck 1 on the day we booked our cruise, so I’m glad we booked when we did! I didn’t want to be on Deck 2 since many of those cabins have public spaces overhead and I was worried about noise, and I always try to book mid-ship cabins for easy access to the elevators. Being on Deck 1 actually sounded great because we would be a quick flight of stairs away from getting on and off the ship at each port, so no need to wait in long lines for the elevators! Another thing that looked interesting about this cabin was that it had 2 bathrooms… one with the standard stall shower, sink, and toilet, and the other with a mini bathtub and sink. I think these cabins are really designed for families who have 4 or 5 people in the cabin, possibly with little kids who need to take a bath instead of a shower, so 2 bathrooms is a bit excessive considering we would only have 2 people in the cabin, but it would definitely make things faster when getting ready in the evening. I just wish they gave us 2 toilets so we wouldn’t have to share at all! Haha

After I booked the cruise, I immediately checked to see if Faster to the Fun (FTTF) was available. I didn’t expect it, considering we booked somewhat last minute (or at least it was last minute in my opinion!), and sure enough, it was listed as sold out. I refreshed the page several times a day, every single day until around 7 weeks before the cruise. I hit refresh and, for the first time, it did not say “sold out” under the FTTF excursion. Wait, what?! That means I can buy it! OMG! Don’t blink, don’t think twice, just click purchase ASAP! My number one reason for wanting FTTF was for the priority tendering in Belize, so this just took off a lot of stress for that day. It would also be nice to have the other perks like shorter lines at Guest Services, priority embarkation, and immediate cabin access after boarding.

With the cabin booked, next it was time to book flights and a hotel. We always fly in at least a day in advance before cruises, but since we wanted some time to explore NOLA, we decided to fly down on Friday. We try to fly out of the airport in San Jose as much as possible because it is close to our house, but I couldn’t find any direct flights. Southwest had a nonstop flight from Oakland, departing on Friday morning and landing in NOLA around 4pm, and a nonstop return flight on the afternoon that the cruise ends. While it is not ideal to drive up to Oakland, which takes about an hour on a good day but would likely take longer for us as we’d be driving during rush hour, having a nonstop flight still made this our best option.

At first, when I started looking for hotels, I thought we should stay in the French Quarter. After all, if we are going to spend a weekend in New Orleans, we should be as touristy as possible. It didn’t take long for me to rethink those plans because the hotels in that area are all very expensive and out of our budget. I then shifted gears and researched vacation rentals. While there were a few options in the French Quarter which may have worked out, they all had strict cancellation policies. I always prefer to book hotels/vacation rentals with a flexible cancellation policy, so if there is a fee to cancel, I won’t book it (unless there are no other options). I saw a listing for a studio apartment in a historic Victorian house on VRBO in the Garden District. It was priced well, located on Magazine Street right near a bus stop, just blocks away from lots of restaurants and shops, and featured nice amenities that would work perfectly for our 2 night stay. Best of all, it had a flexible cancellation policy and excellent reviews, so I booked the room online and immediately received a confirmation that we were all set.

I’ll discuss the planning for our days in port as I get to each part of the review, but just as a quick overview, here is what we had planned for each day:

Date – Port – Excursion

Fri. 3/8 – Fly to NOLA, French Quarter for dinner

Sat. 3/9 – NOLA – Cajun Pride Swamp Tour, then free walking tour of the French Quarter

Sun. 3/10 – NOLA – Cemetery Tour, then Embarkation Day!

Mon. 3/11 – Sea Day

Tues. 3/12 – Costa Maya – Chacchoben Mayan Ruins and Butterfly Farm

Wed. 3/13 – Roatan – Private Tour with Ronys Tours to Manawakie Eco Park, then snorkeling at West Bay

Thurs. 3/14 – Belize – Coral Breeze Shark/Ray Alley Snorkeling and Caye Caulker

Fri. 3/15 – Cozumel – Discover Scuba Diving with Cozumel H2O

Sat. 3/16 – Sea Day

Sun. 3/17 – NOLA – Debarkation, Mardi Gras Museum, Fly Home

To keep all of our days straight, I created this calendar to hang on the wall of our cabin…

I have made countdown candy jars for all of our 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. Since we were going to Puerto Vallarta for New Year’s, I waited until we got home to start the cruise countdown. Just 65 days to go!

Up next… let’s get this vacation started!

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Detailed Photo Review of Carnival Dream 7 Night Western Caribbean Cruise 3/10/19

March 24, 2019 deladane Leave a comment

Hi Everyone! I’m baaaack! After 3 consecutive Carnival cruises from 2012-2015, I’ve been on a bit of a Carnival hiatus for the last few years. Nothing against Carnival… it was just time to try something new and different. I always knew I’d be back sooner or later, and now that day has come!

My name is Dana and my husband and I just returned from a 7-night cruise on the Carnival Dream (March 10-17, 2019 sailing). I always write a detailed photo review when I return home from my cruises, with a journal-style day-by-day format. If you are looking for a short and sweet review, you might want to look elsewhere… I tend to write like I talk, and I can be a bit long-winded, so my reviews are very long and take a few weeks to complete. On the other hand, if you like reading about lots of details, and if you want to see TONS of photos (including all of the daily schedules and menus), this is the review for you! I do this as much to help others plan their vacations as to give me a travel log to look back on and remember my wonderful cruise. Please feel free to ask questions and post comments along the way… I welcome your feedback 🙂

It may take me a little while to get all of my photos sorted and loaded onto my computer considering I took nearly 2000 photos on this vacation, so please be patient with me. Here are some of my favorite photos from the trip as a little something to hold you over until it’s time to post the rest!

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Where I’ve Been

February 27, 2019 deladane Leave a comment

My Travel Map:

I have visited 30 countries (13.3%)

I have visited 33 states (66%)

I have taken 10 total cruises

I have sailed on 3 cruise lines

I have sailed on 10 cruise ships

I have visited 49 cruise ports

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Introduction

November 10, 2010 deladane Leave a comment

Welcome to my blog!

November 9, 2010

I plan to use this blog as a way to chronicle my vacations. I really love traveling, but unfortunately, I can only afford to take big vacations once every year or two. Therefore, to fill the time between vacations, one of my favorite hobbies is researching and reading all about the places I want to visit next. Then, when I return home from my travels, I enjoy documenting all about my experiences. Not only does this allow me to re-live my amazing memories from my trips, but it is my hope that this information can help other people plan their own vacations. Considering how much value I find in reading about the experiences that other people have, I hope I can pay it forward and help the people who read my blog to plan their own trips.

So with that said, I intend to post lots of details and photos from each of my vacations in a journal-style day-by-day format. I hope you enjoy reading along! 🙂 Please feel free to ask questions and leave feedback if you are enjoying the blog!

Dana's Destination Diary

Category Archives: Uncategorized

Wednesday, March 13, 2019 ~ Roatan, Honduras

Tuesday, March 12, 2019 ~ Costa Maya, Mexico

Monday, March 11, 2019 ~ Fun Day at Sea

Sunday, March 10, 2019 ~ Embarkation Day!

Saturday, March 9, 2019 ~ New Orleans, Louisiana

Friday, March 8, 2019 ~ Flying to New Orleans and Exploring Bourbon Street

Planning

Detailed Photo Review of Carnival Dream 7 Night Western Caribbean Cruise 3/10/19

Where I’ve Been

Introduction

Detailed Photo Travel Blog