Last year, we took our son Ian on his first cruise and he LOVED it! He was 2 and a half years old at the time, and he spent the next few months talking all about the “crew sip!” I knew we had to plan another cruise soon. That cruise was on the Carnival Panorama sailing to the Mexican Riviera out of Long Beach. There were a lot of benefits to us cruising from California since we live in Phoenix and can drive to the port. Not only did it save us the cost of airfare, but it let us be more flexible with packing and bringing all of the stuff that comes with traveling with a toddler. I considered looking into a cruise from Florida for this year’s winter break, but decided to hold off until Ian gets a little older. The logistics of flying with his car seat, stroller, pack-n-play, diapers, and all his other stuff was daunting and it just made more sense to stick with a cruise out of Southern California.
I looked into the options for Carnival, but I didn’t really want to take the same cruise on the same ship 2 years in a row. This seemed like a good opportunity to check out a new cruise line since Royal Caribbean, Norwegian, and Princess all offered cruises from Los Angeles. The Royal Caribbean cruise was significantly more expensive than the other two choices, so I ruled it out immediately. Upon further research, the NCL Joy was a Sunday-Sunday cruise. Last year, it was very hectic to drive back to Phoenix on the same day we left the ship, and we didn’t even get in the car to start the drive until after noon, so that was one point against NCL. Also, the port times with NCL weren’t ideal and the NCL cruise was more expensive, so in the end, Princess won the battle.
Here is our itinerary and port schedule:
A few months after I booked the cruise, I discovered something that never occurred to me before. Did you know that there is no age minimum to join AARP?! While the organization does focus on services for people over age 50, they allow anyone over age 18 to become a member and take advantage of their rewards and various benefits. I have known for a while that AARP sells discounted gift cards for Carnival, Princess, and several other cruise lines, but I had no idea that I could take advantage of this discount until now! They were running a promotion where the 5 year membership fee was reduced from $80 to $45, so $9 per year. At the same time, Rakuten was offering $20 cash back on 5 year memberships, making it more like $25. Considering we had only paid the minimum deposit so far for this cruise, the $25 membership fee would more than pay for itself as we would save over $300 using the discounted gift cards to pay off our balance. It was really a no-brainer to sign up! I was then able to purchase Princess gift cards at an 8% discount and apply them to our balance due to pay off the cruise. Unfortunately, just a few weeks after making the final payment, AARP stopped selling Princess gift cards. I am not sure what the reason was, but I was glad we at least benefited with the discount on this cruise. Interestingly enough, I checked the AARP website in mid-January for Carnival gift cards, and none were available, but Holland America was still being sold. I wonder if Carnival Corporation is gradually weaning away from the AARP discounted cards?
In October, I completed the online check in process using the Princess App. Having the Plus Package, I knew that Jason’s and my medallion would ship to our home for free, but I wasn’t sure how they handled Ian’s medallion. As a child and as the 3rd passenger in our cabin, he doesn’t have the Plus Package, so I didn’t know if they would charge me $10 to ship Ian’s medallion, or if I would need to pick up just his medallion at the port? As it turned out, I was able to order Ian’s medallion through the app when I ordered mine and Jason’s, and Princess shipped all 3 medallions together in one package for free. That was nice of them and it definitely made things easier so I wouldn’t have to wait in line to retrieve Ian’s medallion at the embarkation port. Exactly 3 weeks before our sail date, I got an email saying our medallions were shipped, and they arrived 1 week later. As a Princess newbie, I was impressed by the packaging and presentation of the medallions, and I appreciated that they came with a case and lanyard, even though we already bought wearable Airtag bracelet cases.
Disclaimer: This cruise (and subsequently, this review) has a different vibe from our usual vacations. We had a lot of things happening in our personal/family life in the weeks leading up to this cruise. I am not going to share the details in this online forum, but I will say that we seriously questioned if we should just cancel this cruise. I don’t mean to start this review off on a negative note, but I felt it necessary to mention this because this cruise was not like others we have taken. It became a very low key week where we didn’t do nearly as many things as we usually do on cruises, and we had to make changes to our plans along the way. I didn’t take as many photos as usual, I forgot to take photos of certain things along the way (which, if you have read my previous reviews, you will know that is out of character for me and I am usually excessively thorough), and while Ian is the subject of several photos, Jason and I are hardly in any photos because we were not in the mood. As a result, this review will be less detailed and have fewer photos than my prior reviews (roughly half the number of photos from last year’s New Years cruise). I even questioned if I should bother writing the review at all. When we returned home, I needed a few weeks to handle these family matters, hence the delay in starting this thread. In the end, I decided to proceed in writing this review since we did enjoy our first experience with Princess, and I do hope that some of you will find value in my posts.
And
just like that, our Western Caribbean cruise on the Carnival Dream
came to an end. Gary provided an early wake up call
for us at 7am when he started making announcements that we had docked
but they were not ready to start debarkation yet. When I peaked out the window, I could see
that we were indeed docked back in New Orleans, with a view of the bridge.
One
last photo of our towel animal gang!
We got
dressed and finished packing up our belongings, making sure to check every
shelf, drawer, and closet for anything left behind. At 7:30am, Gary made another announcement
that Deck 12 was cleared for self-assist debarkation, and he cleared one more
deck at a time every 10 minutes or so.
We were on Deck 1, so had we opted to do self-assist debarkation, it
would have been a slow process to wait our turn!
We had
to be out of the cabin by 8:30am, which was the same time they
stopped seating people at the MDR for breakfast. We made sure to leave the cabin by 8:15am to allow a few minutes to wait
for an elevator so we wouldn’t have to carry our rolling carry on bags up two
flights of stairs. We always try to eat
breakfast in the MDR on the last morning of our cruises because the Lido buffet is such a madhouse with
people and luggage everywhere and rarely any tables available. This cruise may have been different because I
think many more people did the self-assist debarkation to get back to their
cars in the garage and start their long drives home, but I wasn’t curious
enough to go upstairs to find out for sure!
When we arrived at the hostess stand, there was no wait and hardly any
one else eating in the dining room. I’m
not sure if people had already finished eating and left before we arrived, or
if it just never got crowded to begin with, but either way, the hostess walked
us to a booth towards the back of the room, with space to leave our bags
nearby. This was our first time eating a
regular breakfast in the MDR during this cruise (brunch has a different menu on
sea days). There were a few options on
the menu that looked good, so I was glad we had a chance to try it out.
Short
Stack Pancakes
Broken
Egg Sandwich (this was REALLY good!)
Vanilla
French Toast and a side of Corned Beef Hash for DH
We
finished breakfast by a little after 9am. The FTTF instructions said to meet in the
mid-ship MDR by 8:15am (I think?), so we knew we weren’t going to arrive
that early since that’s when we were first leaving our cabin to head to
breakfast. We figured we would just go
there now, and if they had stopped providing priority debarkation already, so
be it. Of course, it’s no easy feat to
get from the aft MDR on Deck 3 to the mid-ship MDR on Deck 3 because the galley
sits between them and blocks your path.
There happened to be an empty elevator waiting with the doors open when
we left breakfast, so we were lazy and rode it down one deck so we could walk
all the way forward on deck 2. When we
got back up to the lobby, there were hundreds of people on a huge line that
wound all the way around the spiral staircase, the lobby bar, and back towards
guest services. I left DH on that line
with our bags and I made my way over to the MDR to ask about where we should go
for FTTF debarkation. The guy there said
that they had already opened up debarkation to the higher luggage tag numbers,
so we could just wait in line and get off with everyone else. Good thing I left DH on line! The line moved surprisingly fast, and DH was
already close to the exit by the time I got back to him.
We did
one final scan of our sea pass cards, stepped off the ship onto the bridge
walkway, and frowned knowing that we were officially done with our cruise. It was a slow process to walk down the
zig-zagging walkway, back into the port terminal, down the escalator, down
another hallway, and finally into the room with all the checked luggage. We had followed the crowds ahead of us to
this point, but then realized that we were led into the section with higher
luggage tag numbers, so we asked an employee to point us towards where our zone
was. I wish I took a photo of it, but
our big blue suitcase looked so lonely with only two or three other bags around
it. Part of me was relieved because it
just occurred to me that someone could have taken our suitcase by mistake, and
they’d be long gone by the time we got there to realize it!
Luggage
in tow, we quickly passed through customs and immigration (the guy barely
glanced at our passports and waved us on our way), and out to the sidewalk
where we had been dropped off by our Uber driver just one short week
earlier. We were jealous seeing the
handful of people lined up and waiting for their turn to board the Dream for
the next cruise. By now, it was around 9:30am, and our flight home didn’t
leave until 4:30pm, so we had a few hours to spare. Before the cruise, I did some research about
places we could store our luggage for a few hours. The Port of New Orleans offers a luggage storage
service that will transport your luggage to the airport, and you pick it up
whenever you arrive at the airport. That
idea sounded interesting, but they were charging $40 for our 3 bags, so I
wanted to find a better option.
The
Hilton New Orleans Riverside hotel offers a luggage storage service, charging
$2 per bag (any size), and it is even available to non-hotel guests! That was such a great bargain compared to the
$40 that the port was charging! It wasn’t
a big deal to take our own bags to the airport because we’d be using Uber and
could easily fit our bags in the trunk, so the luggage transport part of it
wasn’t necessary. The one issue was that
we would have to get our bags from the port to the Hilton, which was about a half-mile
away. We considered getting an Uber, but
decided against it when we saw the massive amount of cars coming and
going. It would have taken a long time
for an Uber to get to the port, find us in the crowds of thousands of people,
and then drive us over to the Hilton in all of that traffic, and we knew we
could walk faster than that.
Unfortunately, the area back there is not exactly
pedestrian-friendly. There were sections
with no sidewalk, and even no shoulder, so cars were driving by very close to
us, plus we had 3 rolling suitcases with us so it’s not like we could move out
of the way quickly. Luckily, there was
enough traffic that the cars were moving slowly, and about halfway through our
walk, we were directed up to another street that did have a sidewalk. The walk took us about 20 minutes, so it
wasn’t too bad.
After
we dropped off our bags with the porter at the Hilton, we doubled back to walk
back towards where we started for our next activity: Mardi Gras World! A few weeks before the cruise, I saw a
Groupon for discounted tickets to tour Mardi Gras World and thought it would be
the perfect way to spend a few hours before going to the airport. The Groupon was good for any day in a 4 month
window, so had it been very rainy during our days before the cruise, we could
have used it then as an indoor activity.
Mardi Gras World is located in a warehouse right next door to the cruise
port, so it was very convenient! Had we
checked our luggage at the port, we would have had about a 5 minute walk to
Mardi Gras World, but now that we were at the Hilton, we were one mile
away. We walked back along the road that
goes in front of the two cruise terminals, so we had to pass all the people
still getting of the Dream and the NCL Breakaway, but at least we didn’t have
luggage in tow this time!
Finally,
at 10:25am, we spotted this:
We
actually had perfect timing because tours started every 30 minutes, so we were
just on time for the 10:30am tour! I presented our two Groupon vouchers to the
sales clerk, and she handed us each a strand of beads and said to wait by the
theater entrance. They have a gift shop
where you can browse the souvenirs if you have a wait before your tour starts. While I was getting us checked in, DH found
this stuffed alligator puppet to play with haha
At 10:30, a guide named Meredith
gathered us up and led us into the theater.
There were only 10 people on the tour with us, but the theater had seats
for at least 50 people so I guess sometimes they have large crowds or tour
groups. Meredith said that first, we
would watch a 15-minute video about the history of Mardi Gras, and how the
floats and parades originated. It was
really interesting to learn about it and I really had no idea about most of
that information so I learned a lot!
When the video ended, Meredith explained the tradition behind a King Cake, and then handed out pieces of the cake for us to sample. Too bad I was still stuffed from my yummy breakfast on the Dream so I only tasted a bite of it and gave the rest to DH. As Meredith led us back out into the gift shop to start the rest of the tour, the sales clerk made an announcement for the people on the 11am tour to line up near the theater entrance. There was a huge group of elementary school-aged children lining up for that tour (Meredith said they were visiting New Orleans on a school trip), so we were really happy we made it in time for the 10:30am tour and only had 10 of us in our group and that we did not have to be on a tour with all of those kids!!
Meredith
explained that there are 20 full time employees who work on all aspects of
creating the Mardi Gras floats, all year long.
They start working on the theme and creative ideas for next year’s
parades right after Mardi Gras ends, and then a team of designers draws
renderings of each float. The bigger
features on the float are either made with Styrofoam and then covered in paper
mache, or they are made with fiberglass.
Meredith showed us these two examples of how you can identify the
material used: Styrofoam pieces are
always mounted on wood palates like the face with the flower crown, whereas
fiberglass features are free-standing like the lion.
This is
Meredith explaining how the big features on the floats can be repaired and
reconfigured for parades year after year.
They may keep the head and bust, but decorate it with a different hat or
shirt depending on the theme.
Next,
we entered a huge warehouse where all the features on the floats are
created. Today was a Sunday, so I was
surprised to see people working today.
Apparently there was a big music festival the following weekend which
would bring lots of traffic to the area and make it hard for these employees to
get to the warehouse. Instead of dealing
with that, they chose to flex their work days and come in today instead when it
wasn’t so busy.
This
lady is applying paper mache to the Styrofoam ape. When she finishes, a different team of people
will paint it.
This
queen was used in a parade that happened while it was raining so her paint
washed off. Someone will need to
touch-up that peeled paint before she can be used again in another parade. Also, note the wood palates underneath this
statue- the base material was Styrofoam.
This warehouse
was huge, and set up like a maze so there are lots of sections for people to
work on different pieces.
Sorry
for the slightly blurry photos… we were not allowed to use flash photography
because it might distract the workers. Just
look at the scale of the painter and this giant statue that is twice his
height!
This
was used on a float the year that Kiss performed in one of the parades
As we
continued walking, the room opened up to an enormous space where they housed
all of the floats. They were all lined
up, one next to the other, being stored in a climate-controlled facility until
next years parades. Meredith explained
that the floats are all rented by the different krewes and each krewe has a
different theme that they tend to use year after year, like flowers on these
floats….
This
float has a theme of musical instruments…
A
pirate float
Next,
we went outside to look at something in a different building. This photo is looking back towards the
warehouse that we just walked through.
It was really huge! You can see
the bridge in the background, which is the same bridge next to where the Dream
was docked on the other side.
Meredith
took us into another building which was designed to be used for formal events,
and I think it was also used as a casino, but then the city of New Orleans made it illegal to gamble on
land, so the building stopped being used when they had to move the gambling out
to boats on the river. Everything in
these photos is manmade, even the trees and the stones in the walkway, and is
located inside of a warehouse… it was all very impressive! They keep the lights dim so it feels like
nighttime, so again I apologize for the quality of these photos as I could not
use a flash.
The
tour lasted about 2 hours, and at the end, we were allowed to stay in the
warehouse as long as we wanted to walk around and look at all the floats. There were hundreds of statues and floats, so
it was a lot to take in. We greatly
enjoyed our time at Mardi Gras World, and thought it was the perfect activity
for after the cruise and before a late flight home. Here are a few last photos as we walked back
towards the exit after the tour.
When we
got back outside, there were tons of cars and delivery trucks trying to get to
the 2 cruise ships. This photo was taken
at 12:45pm, so definitely plan to arrive early if you want to beat
the traffic before your cruise from New Orleans!
Going
no where fast!
I
really wished I was getting back on the Dream right now instead of heading to
the airport
We
still had an hour or two before we needed to go to the airport, so we walked
back to the Riverwalk Marketplace.
Earlier this morning when we were walking to the Hilton, I really wanted
to walk through the Marketplace with our luggage because it would have been
easier than walking on the sidewalk. Unfortunately,
I could not find an elevator (or even an escalator), and there was no chance we
were going to climb all these stairs with 3 heavy suitcases! Now that we were empty-handed, we had no
trouble walking up these stairs to access the Marketplace.
This
walkway provided a great view of the Dream and all the activity loading
supplies and luggage on the ship.
We
thought they were going to put this giant crate through the hole in the ship to
offload new supplies. The crane kept
moving the crate up and down and couldn’t get it to line up to the hole. We finally figured out that they don’t need
to fit the crate through the hole (which was good because it was barely too big
to fit!), and the crew on the ship just unloaded the crate while it dangled in
the air, and then the crane lowered the empty crate back to the ground.
One
last photo of the Dream before we officially said goodbye…
As we
kept walking, we got a great view of the NCL Breakaway docked behind the Dream.
We
walked around the mall for a few minutes, with one destination in mind: Café du
Monde! There is a smaller location of
the famous café located inside the Riverside Marketplace, and it tends to have
shorter lines as compared to the original location in the French Quarter. I still wasn’t hungry (wow, that breakfast in
the MDR was very filling!), but I couldn’t resist the chance to eat just one
beignet.
There
were a lot of people on line when we arrived, but it moved quickly and took
exactly 20 minutes from the time we got on line to the time we received and
paid for our food.
They
have a small seating area, but the turnover is fast enough that there was
always at least one table available while we were waiting in line.
There
are big windows into the kitchen area so you can watch them prepare the
beignets while you wait in line
Look at
all those little beignets bobbing in the pool of oil!
They
have a full menu with lots of drink options in addition to the beignets
We got
one order of beignets to share (they only sell them in sets of 3), and DH got a
coffee.
Just
look at all of that sugary powdery goodness!!
We found an empty table and tried our best not to get any powdered sugar on our clothes. I wish I took a photo of the floor… it was coated in a thin layer of sugar, and even though there were a few employees walking around and trying to clean up the tables as people left, they were fighting a losing battle against that messy sugar haha The last time I had a beignet was when I visited New Orleans for a conference for work in 2010, and they were just as delicious as I remembered!
By the
time we finished eating, it was 1:45pm and we were kind of ready to
wrap things up and head to the airport.
We originally planned to walk around the French Quarter a little longer,
but we were tired and decided to skip it.
We walked through the food court in the mall looking for something we
could buy to bring to the airport to eat for a late lunch, but none of the
options looked like they would travel well.
I used Google Maps to search the area for a better option, and saw that
there was a Subway sandwich shop located across the street from the convention
center just a few blocks away. Thanks to
the construction on Convention Center Boulevard, it was a little tricky to get
there, but we eventually found a place we could cross the street and get our
sandwiches. It was very crowded when we
arrived, and when we tried to order our sandwich, they said they only had the
plain Italian bread available. I’ve
never been to a Subway before when they only had one kind of bread! No biggie, we ordered our sandwiches to-go,
and walked back to the Hilton to retrieve our luggage from the porters.
Another
huge advantage to checking our bags here instead of at the cruise port was that
it was really easy for an Uber to pick us up.
Had the Uber needed to pick us up near the port, it would have taken
forever to get through all the traffic of people being dropped off for their
cruise, so it was much easier to direct the Uber to the front entrance of the
Hilton where there was space for him to pull over and load our luggage in the
circular driveway.
The
Uber driver picked us up within minutes of submitting the request, and it took
about 30 minutes to drive to the airport.
There was virtually no line to check our bag, and luckily it weighed in
at 48 pounds so no need to shift things around in the airport. There was a small line at security, but it
moved fast and we had plenty of time to spare anyway so it wouldn’t be a big
deal if we did have a long wait. We
found seats near our gate and waited for an hour until it was time to board the
plane. At the last minute, they changed
us to a different gate on the other side of the terminal, so everyone marched
down the hallway like a parade to reach the new gate.
The
first thing I did when I got to my seat on the plane was to look at the
airplane safety information pamphlet. I
think this is the first time I have ever looked at it, but I just wanted to
make sure that we were not on a 737-Max plane!
Of course, by now, President Trump had announced he was grounding all
737-Maxs so it was highly unlikely that this was that style of plane, but I
needed to double check for my own sanity.
While I
was looking through the pamphlets in the seat back in front of me, I took a
look at the drinks menu. Today was our
lucky day… literally! It was St.
Patrick’s Day and Southwest was offering free drinks on all flights today! They do this for random holidays throughout
the year, but it was surprising that they picked this holiday as it fell on a
Sunday which is a popular travel day. In
the past, I have seen them pick Valentine’s Day and Halloween because they fell
on random days mid-week when there were fewer people flying, so we were excited
that they happened to pick today for the free drinks.
The
flight attendants made no announcements or mentions of the free drinks, so I
think they were hoping people wouldn’t notice as that would make way more work
for them haha Luckily, DH and I have a
radar to detect free drinks in any situation so they couldn’t hide this from
us! In fact, we were able to order a
second round later in the flight and that was free too!! Southwest really knows how to lessen the
sadness of the last day of vacation.
The
flight was nearly 5 hours long, but the time passed quickly as I spent the
whole time sorting through photos on my iPad.
We also had some beautiful views as we flew over the Rockies.
Our
plane landed on time at around 7pm California time, so it was just in time
for a beautiful sunset over the Bay.
Of
course, our long day of travel wasn’t over just yet. After collecting our checked bag, we called
the shuttle to bring us back to the off-site parking lot to get my car, and
then had a one hour drive to get home.
By the time we walked in the door, it was 11pm New Orleans time and we were exhausted
after waking up at 7am to Gary’s announcements. We dropped our suitcases in the living room,
unpacked just the essentials, and got ready for bed as we both had to wake up
early on Monday to return to work.
What is
it about cruises that seem to make time move faster than regular days at
home? Somehow it was already the last
full day of our cruise and we were sailing back towards New Orleans. This is usually the time in my vacation when
all of the action-packed port days and physically exerting excursions catch up
with me, and all I want to do is plant my butt on a lounge chair, write in my
trip journal, and eat (after all, I won’t have the excuse that “vacation
calories don’t count” after the vacation is over!). Of course, that doesn’t mean that I’ll
suddenly adjust to sleeping late, so I was wake around 7am. I quietly got dressed and tip-toed out of the
cabin so I wouldn’t wake DH, and I found these fliers in our mailbox. The first was about the debarkation
information, but it was a general form for all passengers on board. We were supposed to get a different form
specific to FTTF but it wasn’t delivered until later this afternoon.
My
first stop today was up to the Serenity Deck to stake out my claim on a lounge
chair. It was around 7:40am by the time I got up there, but
it was almost completely deserted and I had my pick of wherever I wanted to
sit.
It was
a little cloudy this morning, and also a little chilly, but the water was
pretty smooth.
No need
to worry about being a chair hog at this early hour, so I dropped off my tote
bag on one of the clamshells, then headed down towards the Lido buffet to get a quick
breakfast. On my way down, I caught the
end of a beautiful sunrise!
Blue
Iguana had just opened so I could have gotten a breakfast burrito, but I
decided to change it up and see what other options were available.
In the
end, I sampled a little bit of everything in the carbs department…
Unfortunately,
most of these items were a let down.
They were either stale, soggy, or a combination of both! The round cinnamon pastry was the best of the
bunch (but I already knew it was something I liked because I tried it earlier
in the cruise too). I will also say that
the hard boiled egg was surprisingly good… it was still so hot that I was burning
my fingertips as I tried to peel it (that is NOT a complaint, by the way!), but
the shell peeled off easily in one big piece, and the yolk came out as one
solid ball. I hate when the yolk
crumbles and it’s hard to remove it, but the crew member in charge of boiling
eggs has mastered the skill and I was pleasantly surprised.
I still
had a few minutes before I needed to get back to my clamshell to be within the
40 minute limit, so I walked around taking some more photos of the ship. It was now a little after 8am, and there were still plenty of
lounge chairs available at the aft pool.
The
clouds broke up and it was turning into a beautiful morning at sea
hmm, or maybe not… lots of clouds out in the other direction!
The lounge chairs around the main Lido pool were filling in, but there were still plenty available at 8:10am.
Back up
on Serenity Deck, I set up camp on one of the half-clam shells and spent about
an hour jotting down notes in my trip journal.
In that time, maybe 2 or 3 other couples came by and sat for a bit, but
it was almost completely empty for most of the time.
At
around 9am, I remembered that we could pick up luggage tags in the Ocean Plaza. Yesterday, I had stopped by at Guest Services
to ask how the luggage tags were distributed for FTTF and they told me that we
would get zone 2 tags. Based on the
information on the debarkation flyer, that meant we would be called to leave
the ship around 8:30am. DH and I
had a few things planned for tomorrow, but we didn’t really need to be the
first ones off the ship, and 8:30am was a bit too early for
us. I was originally planning to just
let our luggage sit in the collection room with the zone 2 tags, and we’d get
it when we got there, but then it occurred to me that I could also go get a
higher zone number. When I got
downstairs, there were about 20 people on line ahead of me to pick up luggage
tags, but the line moved fast and I had my pick of nearly any zone I wanted
when I reached the front of the line (I think the zone 5 tags were already
gone, but there were still tons of tags for all the other zones.)
I was
getting a little hungry again since I didn’t eat much for breakfast, so after I
took my luggage tags, I went back to the pizza place for a Quattro Formaggi
pizza. Yes, it was 9:20am, but people eat cold pizza for
breakfast all the time, so why can’t I eat hot pizza?! As I expected, there wasn’t anyone else on
line when I arrived, and they didn’t have any pizzas pre-made and sitting there
waiting to be taken, so they needed to make one fresh for me. The guy said it would take about 5
minutes. This was the photo I showed on
the first sea day, but I’ll show it here again too since this was actually when
I took it…
I took
my pizza to-go and went back upstairs to Serenity Deck. When I got there, DH was sitting on one of
the bigger clamshells and he had moved my bags so we wouldn’t hog 2 spots. By now, it was getting very windy and quite a
bit colder, so the clamshell was helpful to block some of the wind, but we also
needed to get towels to use as blankets.
While DH was sitting there, he noticed the crew member walked around and
put stickers on the chairs around him that had belongings on them.
Sure
enough, at 9:55am, that same crew member came back and gathered up the
belongings from our neighboring clamshell.
We thanked him for taking care of that because even though it was not
crowded due to the cold and the wind, the rules still remain that you can only
reserve a chair for 40 minutes and people need to be more respectful of
that. On other cruise lines, the staff
is reluctant to enforce policies like that, so it was great to see that
Carnival actually enforced their policies.
I
stayed up there until around 11am when I just couldn’t tolerate
the wind anymore. By now, I assumed
Jennifer would have finished cleaning our cabin, so I left DH reading his book
in the clamshell and I went back downstairs to start the grueling task of
packing. On the bright side, this was only
a 7-day cruise, so we didn’t have nearly as many things to pack up as we did on
our last few cruises, but it still has to get done and it still eats away at
time I should be out enjoying the ship.
When I got back to the cabin, this little guy was hanging around,
waiting to greet us…
I took
him down and added him to our windowsill collection…
I spent
about an hour putting a big dent in the packing process, then decided to take a
break and find something to eat. I had
been craving another lunch at Pasta Bella, so I went up there at around 12:15pm and OMG! It was crazy crowded! The hostess said it would take about 40
minutes to get my dish, and I immediately wished that I had this idea 30
minutes ago so I could have been there right when they opened at noon, and not now at the tail end of
the initial rush. Oh well, I had my trip
journal with me so I found a table, filled out my request paper, and passed the
time by writing in my journal. Exactly
40 minutes later, a waiter came over with my pasta bowl, and it was totally
worth the wait!
By the
time I finished, it was a few minutes after 1pm, so I took a little walk around
the ship to see what else was happening.
It looked like the Hairy Chest Contest was in full swing at the Lido pool. I also didn’t see any vacant lounge chairs,
so I guess you need to claim your spot before lunch if you want to spend time
out here.
I went
back upstairs to Serenity to find DH, and we went back downstairs to the cabin
so he could pack up some of his stuff.
At around 2pm, I remembered that I wanted to try the Mongolian
Wok one last time since I only had it once on embarkation day. Yes, I fully acknowledge that I ate something
every hour or two throughout the day, but I tried to keep the portions small to
maximize how many venues I got to experience around the ship. It would be a shame to miss out on anything!
Haha
I got
to the line at Mongolian Wok at 2:10pm, knowing that there would be a
line, but wanting to make sure I was served prior to their 2:30pm closing time. The line reached back to the doors from the
elevator bank. While I waited on line,
DH went around to the other line and came back to say that it was equally long. I wish they had a better system for the
Mongolian Wok because this line moved incredibly slowly. Part of the problem was that nearly everyone
on line ahead of me was making two bowls (one for the person in line, and one
for someone else who was not physically standing there). This meant the line was twice as long as it
seemed, and it took 45 minutes from when I got on line to when my food was
ready. There is only one guy cooking on
each side, and he cooks 3 woks at a time, so it is just a very slow process. At 2:30pm, one of the crew members stood
at the end of the line with a sign saying “buffet closed”, so as long as you
are in the line by 2:30pm, you will be served, even if
you don’t get your food until long after the printed closing time.
It was
fun that they had calamari as the seafood option today instead of shrimp, so I
asked for that and the guy was extremely generous when he scooped it out of the
bowl. I have a feeling not many people
ordered it and since I was one of the last bowls he was cooking, he probably
wanted to use it up. I also ordered my
dish to be cooked with soy sauce instead of one of the 3 sauces on the menu,
and that was no problem at all for him.
Although
I didn’t love waiting in line this long, I must admit the food is always really
yummy!
Unfortunately,
this whole process took way longer than I was anticipating and I had to miss
the Q and A session with Gary. I usually like going to those sessions
because I like hearing about what it’s like to work on a cruise ship, and the
cruise directors are usually entertaining and funny, but it just wasn’t meant
to be today. The next event I wanted to
attend was trivia about the TV show Friends in the Ocean Plaza at 3:15pm. DH isn’t a big fan of Friends, but I have
seen every episode multiple times and wanted to put my knowledge to the test. The questions were very fair, and definitely
the kinds of things you’d only know if you watch the show, so that meant I was
completely on my own as DH had no clue about any of the questions haha In the end, I got 16 out of 20 correct, and I
was kicking myself over the ones I missed because I knew them immediately when
they announced the answers. There ended
up being a tie with 2 people both getting all 20 questions correct, so they
brought both those people up to the front of the room for a tie breaker. They had to take turns saying the name of a
TV show (past or current were both okay), and the first person to not think of
a reply or to repeat something already said lost. I think one of them was nervous standing up
there because he only answered 2 TV show names and the other woman was
announced the winner. DH and I could go
back and forth for an hour listing TV shows, so I have a feeling that guy
probably just got nervous in the moment.
Trivia
ended at 3:45pm, just in time for us to walk down the hall to the
Caliente Night Club for karaoke at 4pm. It seemed a little weird that they had
karaoke in the middle of the afternoon, but there were no other activities that
interested us at this time, and DH had yet to sing for karaoke, so this was our
chance. It was already pretty crowded by
the time we arrived (not sure if all these people were camped out here all
afternoon in anticipation of karaoke, or if they were just ahead of us in the
crowd leaving Ocean Plaza after trivia?), but we managed to find 2 seats
together towards the back of the room.
When we
first arrived, it was 3:50pm and DH approached the host to
make his song request. The host said he
wasn’t ready yet and he would make an announcement when it was time to come
back up. DH was sitting at the edge of
his seat, ready to go as soon as that announcement was made, so he ended up
being the third person in line. That was
a really good thing because there were about 50 people who ran up to request
songs, and the host had to cut off any requests after that because we’d be here
all night at that rate!
DH
rocked out on air guitar while singing Sweet Child o’ Mine by Guns N’ Roses
Three
or four songs later, they had a technical malfunction and the host had to call
in help from a technician. It took them
about 20 minutes to get things up and running again, and lots of people gave up
and left at that time, so DH was really happy he got to sing before the machine
broke. They did eventually fix it and we
stuck around to listen to a few more people perform. Karaoke is always a fun time, and even if the
person singing doesn’t necessarily have the greatest voice, it’s still fun to
cheer them on.
While
we were watching karaoke, I needed to check in for our flight home
tomorrow. Luckily, the signal in the
Caliente Nightclub was really good, so I was able to type in my information
into the Southwest app, and DH’s information into the Southwest website, and I
was ready to go the second it hit 24 hours prior to our flight. I ended up getting B-17 for me and B-30 for
DH, so that was impressive considering those are the kinds of boarding numbers
we get when we check in right on time at home too.
We
stayed at karaoke until 5:30pm, but then we knew it was time
to go because we wanted to get changed before dinner and we still had to finish
packing. The debarkation flyer said our
luggage had to be placed outside of our cabin before 11pm, so we wanted to do it before
dinner. Otherwise we would need to
interrupt our evening activities to return to the cabin and finish packing, and
that’s not how we wanted to spend our last night on the ship! It wasn’t too hard to finish packing our big
bag because we maxed out our weight limit before the bag was full haha That meant that everything else had to fit
into our rolling carry on bags or backpacks, and if not, we could always
rearrange as needed when we got to the airport tomorrow. It’s always a sad moment when you put your
suitcase in the hallway…
At 6pm, we headed upstairs for our
last dinner in the MDR. All week, I had
been searching the menus for escargot but it had yet to make an
appearance. I hoped it would show up
tonight on the last night of the cruise, but it did not. That was a bit disappointing to me because I love
ordering escargots on cruises and I know it is offered on other Carnival
cruises, but for some reason, it was not offered on our cruise. Maybe it has something to do with New Orleans??
DH and
I both ordered the baked onion soup appetizer.
It was almost comical to compare this to the one DH had in the
steakhouse on Sunday! You know the piece
of bread/crouton they put in the bowl?
It was literally a slice of sandwich bread, with the crust still on
it! They folded the bread in half, then
in half again, and crammed it into the little bowl before adding broth and
cheese. Neither of us had any onions at
all! We just had to laugh…
We
ordered the BBQ Chicken flat bread to share, but we both loved it so much that
we probably should have gotten our own!
I
ordered the Penne, Shrimp, and Bacon dish for my entrée. DH had the Prime Rib, and I probably should
have gone for that too just because it’s a fancier dish and we rarely eat steak
at home, but I wasn’t in the mood for meat.
DH said his Prime Rib was good, as was my pasta dish.
Dessert
Menu… There were no cake options tonight aside from the Baked Alaska (which is
ice cream, not really cake), so I wonder if today is the pastry chef’s day
off?
I’m not
a huge fan of Baked Alaska because I try to avoid ice cream (stupid lactose
intolerance!), so I ordered the Carnival Melting Chocolate Cake with no ice
cream (as I always order it, much to my waiter’s confusion haha) When my dessert arrived, it had the ice cream
included, which isn’t a big deal because it is self-contained in its own
ramekin, and DH doesn’t mind taking one for the team and eating it on his own
so we don’t waste the food.
Just as
I was about to start eating, our wait staff came over with a cake and to sing
Happy Birthday to me! My birthday is not
until the week after the cruise, but that was nice of them to acknowledge it on
the last night. I just wish I had known
because I did not need two heavy chocolate desserts at the same time and I
wouldn’t have ordered the WCMC! The
birthday cake was more of a fudgey mouse than a cake, and it was really good,
so we ended up taking it back to the cabin to snack on later tonight. Luckily this plate was small enough to fit in
our fridge!
After a
quick stop at the cabin to drop off the cake, we went up to the Encore! Theatre
for the Lip Sync Battle main event.
Apparently they had multiple lip sync competitions that lead up to this
event throughout the week, but I have no idea when or where those occurred
because I never saw it! Haha We didn’t
spent much time out by the Lido pool, so I have a hunch they did some events out
there. This was the only show in the
theatre tonight and it was at 7:30pm, so it’s a good thing we had a
speedy wait staff in the MDR or we would have missed it.
The
show is modeled after the Lip Sync Battle TV show on Paramount Network. They had two contestants and each performed
two lip sync songs, the second of which included dancers from the production shows. The contestants get to dress up in crazy
costumes and they really got into it.
Here is
Gary explaining the rules, while one
of the guys from the entertainment team displays the winner’s belt.
The two
contestants were called on stage so Gary could introduce them
I
forgot to write down which songs they sang, but I have a feeling they are
heavily coached by the singers and dancers on board because the songs were all
big crowd pleasers that everyone was familiar with. They had a little intermission after each
contestant finished their first song, and they invited up children from the
kids club to sing and dance on stage. I
think they had practiced with each age group and this was like their final
recital. After that, the lip sync contestants
returned for round two, and this was when they went all out.
The
first lady did a good job of getting the crowd pumped up, and she really owned
the stage.
The
second contestant “sang” Tina Turner’s Proud Mary. This guy was incredible! He’s a recently retried police officer, but
wow did he have some great dance moves!
The whole crowd was laughing and cheering him on, and you could tell he
was having such a fun time up on stage.
And
then, this happened:
The
dancers helped him strip off the black shirt and pants, and they put on that
wig, and bam! Nothing like a macho guy
dressed in drag to get the crowd on their feet!
There
was no question as to who should win this battle, but Gary still gave us a few
minutes to think it over while he performed a lip sync routine with the dancers
to a medley of 80’s songs.
I think
the assistant from the entertainment team also did a medley, maybe to 70’s
songs? I don’t remember and I forgot to
take a photo to jog my memory. Anyway,
after that, they brought the two main contestants back on stage for the final
judging. By a deafening round of
applause, the guy was announced the winner!
The
lady did try hard and she was a good sport about it, but that guy just won
everyone over. They awarded him to
winner’s belt…
The
show lasted about 45 minutes, but when it ended, there was a big gap in the
activities schedule. Kudos Strings was
performing in the lobby, but they were just about to finish their set, and the
only other two options were country music with Machine Company or country music
with the BlackJack Duo. Hey, wait a
minute! I know what we can do now… I need
to redeem my past guest coupon for a free cocktail! Carnival thought I would forget to use it,
but I’ll prove them wrong! The coupon
says it is good for a drink up to $9 in value, but I must say that is quite
challenging because nearly every cocktail on the ship costs more than that, even
if it’s just by a few cents. I stopped
by the piano bar because it was empty since Zack didn’t start his set yet, and
that meant the bartenders were sitting around just waiting for someone to order
a drink. I asked the bartender if I
could use the coupon towards a drink that costs more than $9 and I would just
pay the difference, and he said that was fine.
I looked through the menu and decided to order the Music, Sweet Music,
with Bacardi Rum, Malibu Coconut Rum, Disaronno Amaretto, pineapple juice and
orange juice.
When the
bartender handed me the bill, it came out to zero dollars. I am not sure if he did something special to
make that happen, or if the coupon really does work on more expensive drinks,
but either way, I was happy. I would
have paid the 50 cents (plus tip) difference, but I guess that was not
necessary.
Just
something to keep in mind for people sailing on cruises out of New Orleans… Once you re-enter the Mississippi River, they do start charging tax
again. I asked about that at guest
services and they told me that I would need to pay tax on this drink if I
ordered it after we re-entered US water space, and he estimated that to be
around 10pm tonight. I made
sure to get my drink much earlier than that at about 8:30pm, just to be safe, but that means
these “free” drink coupons for New Orleans-based cruises are extremely limited
on the hours when the drink really will be free!
Cocktail
in hand, we went over to The Song lounge to listen to BlackJack Duo. Neither of us really listens to country
music, but there was nothing else to do at this time and we wanted to stay
close to the Burgundy Lounge for the 9:30pm comedy show, so since this was
right next door, it just made sense. The
duo were pretty good, and there were two or three couples dancing on the small
dance floor, so it made for an entertaining way to pass the time, even if we
didn’t know any of the songs!
At 9:15pm, we went next door to get seats
for the comedy show. Tonight’s adult
show was with the forth comedian on our sailing, Caroline Picard. She is from the south, so I think she is a
good fit for this cruise ship. She did a
whole set about her experiences traveling the country as a comedian, and she
had the whole room laughing. I
especially enjoyed the part about her time in a blizzard in Michigan when all of the locals were
unphased and came out to see her show despite the weather.
When
that ended, we popped back into the piano bar for a few last songs with Zack. It wasn’t very crowded in there tonight, so
maybe people were back in their cabins packing their luggage and going to sleep
early?
We were
both getting hungry again around 11pm, so we went upstairs to the
deli for a late night snack. I ordered
the meatball sandwich again, and it was just as good as when I had it for lunch
yesterday!
We sat
at a table by the windows, and it was so weird to see lights outside! We must have already entered the Mississippi River so we were seeing lights from
the little towns and buildings along the shore, but that was so rare as I was
used to seeing nothing but darkness on that last night of the cruise when
returning to ports in Florida. On our way back to the cabin, we noticed that
the casino was still open and there were lots of people taking advantage of it
being legal to gamble on the Mississippi River. We got back to the cabin around 11:30pm and called it a night, knowing
that the debarkation announcements would start bright an early tomorrow morning
and we wanted to get a good night’s sleep before that!
For our
last few cruises, the idea has started to cross my mind that I want to try
scuba diving. We did an underwater
helmet walk in Moorea in 2017, and the perspective from being several feet
under water let me see so much more than snorkeling and looking down from the
surface above. When we booked this
cruise, I knew this was the time to take to make it happen. Cozumel is the biggest of the 4 ports we visited, so
there were tons of vendors to choose from, and I liked that this would be our
last port, making our first scuba diving experience the grand finale of our
cruise. We are not certified scuba
divers, but luckily that isn’t a problem because there are discover scuba
diving courses offered by many vendors where they teach you everything you need
to know in the first 30-60 minutes of the tour, and then they closely supervise
you during the dive. To be honest, as
excited as I was about this experience, I was also a bit nervous and scared so
I liked that I would be supervised by a certified guide just to make sure
everything went safely.
I read
a ton of reviews on Trip Advisor and Googled the websites of a bunch of
different companies, trying to find one with the best fit for us. In the end, we booked with CozumelH2O for a 2
tank dive from their boat. I liked the
idea of diving straight from the boat because that meant I wouldn’t have to
carry the heavy tanks across the beach, and as soon as we dropped down into the
water, we would be right at the reef (as opposed to having to swim to the reef
from a beach). I was originally only
going to book a one tank dive, just in case we didn’t like scuba diving or had
some kind of problems that we needed to stop early, but they only offered a 1
tank dive if going from the shore, and I really wanted to go from a boat so
that meant we had to do 2 tanks. Go big
or go home, right? I emailed back and
forth with CozumelH2O to ask them tons of questions, and they were always quick
to reply and help me feel less anxious about the experience. We paid a deposit of $20 USD per person via
paypal and we were all set for our tour.
Here is a description of the tour from the CozumelH2O website:
Always
wondered how it is to breath underwater, but you’re not scuba certified and not
sure if you want to get certified? Or you are a snorkeler and just want to try
it once? No problem! The Cozumel Discover Scuba Experience is a great introduction
to scuba diving. Our professional dive instructors will teach you the basic
theory, basic skills and safety rules you will need to know for a safe first
dive, this will take around 45 minutes. After that it’s time for the fun part…
your first dive to a maximum 40 ft.
The
Discover Scuba Experience is a one or 2 tank dive. We do this course in the
ocean where it’s very shallow, right before a beautiful reef, so after you
learned the skills we will dive this reef.
We
also offer this experience with a two tank boat dive. At the first spot El
Cielo, we will practice the skills with you, after that your first dive will be
at Colombia Shallow and your second dive at
another beautiful reef, which one will decide your instructor based on your
abilities. Expect to see beautiful colorful reefs and reef fishes, lobsters and
big fish as barracudas, groupers, parrot fishes and probably even sting rays,
turtles and so much more.
Can
I do the Discover Scuba Experience?
Basically
everybody who’s older the 10 is able to do this course. No experience needed.
It will take a few minutes before you’re used to breathe underwater and get
comfortable with it. But once you do, you’ll realize how easy and fun it is! If
you like snorkeling then you will love diving as you will see so much more once
you’re under water.
Price
per person with 1 tank: $89 USD
Price
per person with 2 tanks: $120 USD
Includes
marine park fee, 1 or 2 tank from shore, weight belt and weights, fins, mask,
wetsuit, bcd and regulator, no hidden cost!
Price
per person with two tank boat dives: $140 USD per person
Includes
marine park fee, tanks, weight belt and weights, fins, mask, wetsuit, bcd,
regulator, fruit, snacks and purified water, no hidden cost!
Today’s
Fun Times:
We had
an extremely early wake up time today of 6:30am. We were due to dock at 7am, so after I finished getting
dressed, I peaked outside to see where we were.
I really wished the window was cleaner because this looked like an
incredible sunrise over Cozumel!
It was
our last port day which meant it was my last chance for a breakfast burrito and
arepas! Tomorrow, we planned to go to
brunch in the MDR.
After
breakfast, we made our way off the ship, through the duty free store that you
are forced to walk through on the way from/to the ship, passed all the stores
and vendors in the port, and out to the taxi stand. By the way, at some point along that path, we
had to go through an agricultural check point where they looked inside
everyone’s bags to make sure we did not bring any food into the port. We had bottles of water in our bag, but
either they didn’t see them or they didn’t care about water because they didn’t
say anything about it to us.
Once we
found the taxi stand, we asked for a taxi to the Fonatur Marina. The ride was probably only a mile and cost $8
total for the taxi, not per person. We
probably could have just walked, but I didn’t know exactly which port we were
docked at and had we been at the further cruise docks, the walk may have been
longer. Also, I didn’t know if there was
a sidewalk or if it was safe to walk from the port to the marina, so it was
just easier to take a taxi. Our
instructions said to wait at the ramp by the water for our guide, and when we
got there, we saw lots of other people waiting for guides for their tours
too. I guess this little marina is
popular for tours for cruise ship passengers because it is so close to the
port.
We
checked in with one of the guides from another company and he showed us where
we could sit and wait for our guide to arrive.
Right on time, a representative from CozumelH2O arrived at 8:45am and gave us all the release
forms to sign. After we signed away the
right to sue them if we died while scuba diving, he walked us over to where our
boat was docked and introduced us to Miguel, our instructor, and Lupe, who
would be driving the boat. We ended up
having a private tour because while one other woman was going to dive with us
(her name was Chantal), she was a certified diver and was just tagging along on
the boat. I love when it works out like
that! Miguel did try to find others to
join the tour, but lucky for us, everyone else at the marina either had another
scuba tour booked or preferred to go snorkeling. I’m sure he would have liked to have more
people on the tour so he could make some more money, but honestly, I was much
more comfortable knowing that it was just DH and I on the tour so Miguel could
focus on us and our safety. I’m not
really sure how it would have worked out anyway if he recruited more people to
take the tour because the boat was all set up with equipment for us (notice the
name tags hanging from the vests?), so I don’t know where the equipment would
have come from if there were more people added to the tour.
As Lupe
drove the boat out of the marina and south along the coast of Cozumel, Miguel used the time to teach
us our introductory lesson. I was kind
of surprised that he was going to teach us this material while we were on a
moving boat considering how loud it was from the motor of the boat. It was a really good thing that he was only
speaking to the two of us because there’s no way we would have heard him if we
were sitting further away, and this was important information! Miguel did a great job of explaining some
basic concepts of how the lungs react to the pressure of being deep under
water, and how to operate all of the equipment we would be using today. He showed us a few techniques to equalize our
ears from the pressure under the water like blowing our nose or
swallowing. He also suggested we could
move our jaw up and down or yawn, but I’m not quite sure how that would have
worked out without swallowing a bunch of salt water! After that, he taught us some of the
important hand signals so we could communicate under water. This was something that really worried me
because if there was a problem, it’s not like we could verbalize it to Miguel
to get him to help us. Miguel explained
that most of the time, people encountered the same problems so he taught us how
to communicate those problems to him using hand signals.
After
about 30 minutes, we arrived at our first stop: a shallow section of water that
was about 5 feet deep with a soft, sandy bottom where we could practice some
skills. Miguel taught us 4 skills that
we needed to demonstrate for him before we could move on to diving in deeper
water. First, he demonstrated them to us
on the boat and showed us how he would cue us to do them on our own when we
were in the water. Then we got suited up
on the boat. This was my first time ever
putting on a wet suit, and suddenly I regretted my choice to take this tour at
the end of our cruise. Holy moly! It was so hard to get into that wet
suit! Maybe it would have been easier at
the start of the cruise before I ate all that food! Haha
After
we were wearing our wet suits and fins, Lupe and Miguel helped us put on our
weight belt and BCD (Buoyancy Control Device), inflate the BCD, and to sit up
on the edge of the boat with the oxygen tanks supported on the edge. It was all so awkward and uncomfortable, but
mostly because I was nervous and this was a totally new experience for me. Don’t I look happy to be scuba diving? Haha…
maybe not!
On the
count of 3, he told us to just fall backwards off the side of the boat. It seemed so weird to wear such a heavy tank
on my back but still be able to float, but I guess that was just the BCD doing
its job! We slowly lowered into
position, kneeling on the sandy ocean floor, and went through all of our
skills. First, I had to remove the
regulator from my mouth, blow bubbles, put the regulator back in my mouth and
clear it of the water that got inside.
Next, I had to repeat that process and also show that I could retrieve
the regulator in two different ways. The
point was that if it somehow fell out of my mouth under water, I would know how
to retrieve it so I could breathe again.
Breathing is important! The final
skill was to let some water get inside of my goggles and then to clear it
out. While DH and I took turns
demonstrating our skills, Chantal used the time to go snorkeling in the area,
so I thought that was nice that she had something to do and it wasn’t like she
was twiddling her thumbs on the boat, waiting for us to be ready.
After
Miguel gave us both the thumbs up and high-five that we had passed our skills,
we swam back to the boat and climbed on board.
Miguel removed my BCD and handed it up to Lupe on the boat so I didn’t
have to climb the ladder wearing the tank.
That was much appreciated because DH didn’t get the same treatment and
he said it was really hard to climb the ladder with all that equipment! Sometimes
it’s awesome to be a girl! Haha
Lupe
drove the boat a short distance away to the Palancar Reef, and Miguel said it
was time for our first real dive! I just
kept telling myself to stay calm and keep breathing. There was no turning back now! We dropped backwards into the water and all
gathered together to slowly lower down to the reef. I actually did really well with it and was
pacing with Chantal to get about halfway down to the ocean floor.
OMG!
I’m scuba diving!!
When I
looked around to see where DH was, I realized he was still close to the surface
and Miguel was helping him with something.
I thought maybe I had gone down faster than I was supposed to, so I went
back up to see what was going on. Chantal
kept going deeper and started to explore the reef on her own.
It
looked like DH was having trouble clearing his ears, but it only took him a few
seconds to work it out and then we were on our way. Miguel looped one arm around mine and his
other arm around DH’s arm and led us down to the ocean floor. When he was explaining things on the boat, it
sounded like we could swim independently, but once we were under water, he
would not let us go off on our own. I
was okay with that because I was still unsure and nervous about the whole thing,
but DH kept trying to wiggle away and Miguel wouldn’t let him. Once again, I was glad that we only had two
of us on the tour because I’m not sure how it would have played out with 2 more
people… would we have made a big caravan of 5 of us all strung together?? That would have been a bit ridiculous! Lol
Luckily,
Miguel looped under my left arm so I still had my right hand free to take
photos!
Whenever
I go snorkeling, I make sure to adjust my camera to the underwater setting so
the colors will come out correctly. I
knew that going deeper under water would cause the photos to turn blue, but
since this was only my first time scuba diving, I wanted to test the abilities
of my camera and see what I could capture without an extra filter. If I book a scuba excursion in the future, I
will probably look into one of those red filters to neutralize the colors, but
for now, here is just a small sampling of the hundreds of photos I took on this
dive.
Thus
far, we had seen a ton of coral but no fish at all. Miguel pointed at something to my left… there
was a small school of fish swimming a few feet away. It almost made me laugh because that was so
not exciting compared to the beautiful coral I was staring at on my right
side! I took a quick photo of it to let
him think I was impressed…
Ok, now
back to the amazing coral…
One of
the downsides to being looped under Miguel’s arm was that I couldn’t get closer
to things I wanted to take photos of, and I couldn’t linger to take the perfect
photo. I basically just snapped photos
with one hand (which means the camera wasn’t very steady) and it was as I was
floating past the subject so a lot of the photos came out blurry.
This
was that spongy coral that I saw in St. Lucia between the pitons
If you
look VERY carefully, there is a small turtle swimming just above the coral in
the middle of this photo. I really
wanted to chase after him but Miguel led us in a different direction.
Here we
go… I zoomed in so you can see the turtle a little better, just to prove that I
didn’t make it up that we saw him hehe
We must
have been getting closer to the surface because all of a sudden, the color came
back to my photos
Towards
the end, we saw a few more fish swimming around
Just
look at the amazing bright yellow color of that coral!
A whole
lot of those round spongey things… I’m sure they have a more technical name
than that, I just don’t know what it is lol
I just
loved how everywhere I looked, there was SOOOO much to take in and see. This was a wonderful place to have my first
scuba diving experience!
Hi Mr.
Fish!
Oh
look! There’s another fish poking out of the coral!
I wish
we could have gone in between those rocks as I’m sure there was some amazing
stuff in there.
Around
this time, DH looked down at the meter monitoring the oxygen in his tank and
saw it was in the red zone, so he pointed it out to Miguel. That was our cue to start heading towards the
surface before DH ran out of oxygen, but afterwards, Miguel told us we were
going to finish around that time anyway.
I slowly kicked up towards the surface, equalizing my ears along the
way. When I reached the surface, both of
my calves started to cramp, but Chantal and Miguel were right there and each
grabbed a leg to stretch me out while I floated in the water. They knew exactly what to do and they were
amazing! The whole time we were diving,
Miguel held a line attached to a flotation device that hovered on the surface
of the water so Lupe could follow us with the boat. They purposely planned our route that we were
drifting underwater with the current, so we really didn’t have to swim at all,
especially since Lupe was just a few feet away when we came up to the surface
at the end. Miguel had told us from the
start that scuba diving is not a sport, it’s a leisure activity because if you
do it right, it is not strenuous and can be very relaxing. He was right!
When I reached the ladder for our boat, Miguel helped to remove my
weights and BCD, and I slipped off my fins and climbed back on board.
In
total, our first dive lasted 45 minutes and Miguel said we reached a depth of
32 feet, and I loved every minute of it!
The one issue I had was that every time I tried to clear my ears, I
pinched my nose to blow out as Miguel told me to do. When I did that, it let water get into my goggles
because pinching my nose made a gap in the seal of the goggles, so then there
was water in my eyes. I knew how to fix
it, but it got really annoying to have to stop every few minutes and clear my
goggles. While we were on the boat
heading towards our second dive site, I asked Miguel what to do and he
suggested I should try swallowing instead.
Ok, that’s a good idea, I hope that works out!
I
forgot to take photos of it, but Miguel passed around a container with cut up
melon, papaya, and mango. It was a
much-appreciated snack and helped to get rid of the salty flavor in my
mouth. They also had bottles of water
for us if we needed it, but we had brought our own from the ship.
Lupe
drove the boat back to very close to the marina where we started the tour. At first I was a little confused and thought
maybe that was the end of the tour? I
thought we signed up for a 2-tank dive, but maybe I misunderstood something? Just as I was about to ask Miguel about it,
Lupe stopped the boat. Our second dive
was at the Paraiso Reef, located very close to the marina and where the cruise
ships were docked. Time to suit up for
round two!
Back in
the water, I felt a lot more relaxed this time around
DH is
getting his mouthpiece in place, and you can see the cruise ships in the
background.
Miguel
started to loop his arm around my right arm so DH and I would switch sides from
the first dive. Nice try Miguel… that
means I won’t be able to take photos because I need my right hand free for that! I let go, grabbed his other arm and looped my
left arm through, then held up my camera in my right hand to show him why I
needed to be on this side. I think he
understood, or if not, then he just thought I was crazy!
As we
dropped deeper and deeper into the water, I was a little skeptical about this
reef because it seemed very sparse.
Where’s
all the coral??
We
drifted a little further and started to see some colorful coral.
And
then… bam! A huge yellow spotted snake
eel slipped right through the coral! So
cool! Do you see him there in the middle
at the bottom third of this photo?
That’s
some funky looking red coral
This
reef wasn’t as dense as the other one, so we’d see a whole lot of cool things,
and then we’d see lots of sandy floor for a while.
Lots of
little fish swimming around
We kept
drifting a few minutes with nothing all that exciting happening, and then
Chantal waved us over because she saw something hiding in the shadows… a HUGE lobster! This photo is horrible, but as I mentioned
earlier, we didn’t really stop to look closely at anything so I couldn’t focus
on the lobster, but I did my best. You
can kind of make out one of his arms reaching up, and some of his smaller legs
right in the middle of the photo…
A few
seconds later, we came up on a huge crab hiding in one of the other
cracks. Again, this photo is horrible,
but you can kind of see him hiding back behind the coral in the middle of the
photo…
I
wished I could stay still for just one second to take a photo… this was
definitely the downside to Miguel towing us through the water. Sure, he wanted to keep us safe, but it was
hampering my chances for amazing photos!
Doesn’t he know that’s the most important thing to me??? Here is a very blurry photo of the crab…
At
least the photos came out better when I had the camera zoomed out all the way!
This
was something I’ve never seen before… a yellow spotted stingray! So cool!!
Another
first for me… a sea anemone!
A
trumpetfish
I like
how this one came out, with the trumpet fish swimming through the coral
a conch
shell
After
that, we entered an area with a whole lot of nothing. All we saw were thousands of these little
things poking up from the sand that looked like poppy flowers.
We
drifting along for at least 10 minutes (based on the time stamps of my photos),
and it started to get a little boring because there was seriously nothing
around us. I was kind of confused why we
didn’t just loop around to spend more time back at that other section of the
reef… surely this isn’t the first time Miguel dove this reef and he knew that
there was nothing to see down here?
At some
point, I looked at the screen of my camera and it showed a big warning sign
that said “warning: depth”. Oh no! I forgot to mention it but my “waterproof”
watch died during our first dive. I wore
it snorkeling in Roatan and Belize without incident, but I guess
the pressure from being so deep underwater was too much for it and when we
emerged from our first dive, the screen was blank and there was a big black
spot in the corner. Oops! Good thing today was our last port day and
the watch cost less than $8 from Walmart so it’s easily replaceable. Anyway, I know my Olympus TG-5 camera has a
waterproof rating for up to 50 feet, but I didn’t know exactly how deep we were
right now. I would be so upset if my
camera died because it cost quite a lot more than $8, but there really wasn’t
anything I could do about it now.
Spoiler alert: my camera survived
the dive just fine! At the end, Miguel
said we went down to 40 feet on this dive, so I wonder if the camera just gave
me a warning that I was within 10 feet of my limit so I wouldn’t go any
deeper? I really have no idea how that
little camera knows my depth underwater, but that’s another story lol
Finally,
we came along this small section of the reef.
There were other scuba divers down here, so that was kind of fun to see
them, but there really wasn’t a whole lot coral or fish in this area.
This
coral looked kind of cool…
Funky
pink spongey coral
A few
sparse fish
Around
this time, we had been in the water for 40 minutes so Miguel started leading us
up towards the surface. On the way up,
we saw this really cool spotted wing comb jellyfish. As it drifted in the water, it kept morphing
into different shapes. It was so elegant
and graceful!
Before
we started this second dive, I asked Miguel if he could take my camera at some
point to take photos of DH and I scuba diving.
I had thoughts of beautiful photos of us with the reef in the
background, showing us swimming along from head to the end of our fins, and
really capturing the moment. Miguel said
he would do it towards the end of the dive, but when the time came, he was so
reluctant to let go of us that this is the best of the 4 photos he took. Not exactly what I had in mind, but at least
it’s better than nothing lol
Right
after he handed me back the camera, he looped his arms under ours and we
continued our journey to the surface.
Then he stopped! Why are we
stopping? There’s nothing around us… or
is there? If you look very closely in
the middle of this photo, you can see a faint white line. It was another type of comb jellyfish, called
a Venus Girdle.
A few
seconds later, we reached the surface of the water, where once again, Lupe was
waiting for us with the boat. This
second dive lasted 45 minutes, and as I mentioned, we reached a maximum depth
of 40 feet. I don’t know which dive I
liked better because they were so different.
Our first dive featured very dense and varied coral, nonstop for the
entire dive, but hardly any fish or other creatures. Our second dive was much more sparse and had
limited coral, but we saw the most amazing animals… lobster, crab, spotted
stingray, sea anemone, spotted eel, and 2 kinds of jelly fish! I honestly think the combination of these two
reefs made for the most perfect first scuba diving experience. We got to see a little bit of everything and
it left me wanting more. I greatly
regret not trying a discover scuba diving course sooner because I can only
imagine what we would have seen had we done this in French Polynesia or Bonaire! Of course scuba diving is very expensive and
costs a lot more money than the typical snorkeling tour, but I know for sure
that we will want to repeat this experience if/when we take another cruise!
Oh, one last comment about my ears… On the second dive, I took Miguel’s advice and tried the swallowing technique to equalize my ears. It worked like a charm and I was able to clear my ears without getting any water in my goggles. When the tour ended, I felt great, and I continued to feel normal until about 36 hours later. We were on the ship on Saturday night and my ear started hurting whenever I sneezed or blew my nose. Uh oh! That’s not good! I woke up on Sunday morning and the pain was worse. I was worried that maybe I burst my ear drum or something, and we were flying home that night so I was really afraid that I would have problems during take off and landing. Luckily, the flight was uneventful (I just chewed gum during the take off and landing like I usually do), but my ear continued to hurt and I also felt dizzy. I showed up to work on Monday morning and felt so dizzy that I couldn’t stand in the hallway to talk to my manager and I needed to go find a chair to sit down. She sent me home because neither of us thought I was safe to treat patients when I felt like this. My hearing was fine, so I ruled out the idea of a burst ear drum, but the ear pain and dizziness were worrying me enough that I went to see my doctor. She said I had some congestion built up in my nasal passages and that was preventing the congestion in my ear from draining. She prescribed a nose spray to clear the congestion, and luckily, after 5 days of using it, the spray worked and my ears finally stopped hurting. I was fighting this problem for about a week after the dive, so that wasn’t exactly the souvenir I wanted to come home with, but I still think it was worth it for such an incredible experience. Next time, I will buy some Flonase and make sure all of my passages are cleared out before scuba diving!
Since
the second dive site was so close to Fonatur Marina, we had a very short ride
back at the end of the tour. We thanked
Miguel and Lupe profusely for a wonderful experience, then went in search of
the bathrooms at the marina. This map
was posted on the wall of the waiting area at the marina. It was cool to find the reefs where we had
been diving on the map. I marked them
with arrows in the photo…
By now,
it was around 1:30pm. DH found
a convenience store at the marina and they were selling bottles of local beer
for $1 each. Back in December, we had a
few pesos left over from our trip to Puerto Vallarta. Rather than trying to exchange them back for
USD and losing money in the process, I stashed them away with plans to spend
them on this cruise, knowing we had 2 ports in Mexico. We hadn’t had a chance to spend them yet, and
we knew that beer would cost more money if we bought it at the cruise port, so
this seemed like a good way to spend our pesos.
We bought a few bottles, and found a taxi to take us back to the
port. DH wanted to walk back to save
some money, but I was starving and wanted to get back ASAP to eat lunch (and we
had to drink those beers before we could board the ship so if DH wants his
beers, then I get my taxi!)
Back at
the port area, we found a bench in the shade to drink our beers while people
watching and using the free wifi. While
I did have access to my social media sites on the ship, I couldn’t read my
emails so I did still need to use this free wifi at the port, at least for a
few minutes!
They really did a nice job at decorating this cruise port, with tons of palm trees and wide sidewalks to handle the thousands of cruise ship passengers who visit here every day.
I wish
I had seen this sign when we first arrived this morning because it would have
made for a great photo with us in it. By
now, I looked like a drowned rat with my hair falling out of my braids and a
slight sunburn on my face, so there was no chance I was posing for a photo!
Haha
After
we had our fill of beer and email, we made the long trek through the cruise
port, through the duty free shops, and down the long pier to reboard the Dream
for the final time on this cruise.
At some
point after we had left for our tour, the Carnival Vista docked next to us,
creating a cruise ship canyon. I wonder
how many people accidentally tried to get on the wrong ship!
This
whole week, I had been meaning to try out the meatball sandwich from the
deli. Now was my chance, and OMG it was
totally worth the wait! I’m not sure if
it was because I was famished (it was now nearly 3pm) or because I still had salty
ocean coating my mouth, but this sandwich was seriously delicious.
In case
you were curious about what’s inside… there were 4 meatballs and a generous
amount of provolone and ricotta cheese, with just the right amount of marina
sauce to give it flavor but not make it all drippy and messy.
The
buffet was closing soon, so I made sure to get to the desserts section before
they cleared away all the yummy cakes.
Today, I tried the chocolate vanilla marble cake. It was moist and sweet, with a good
proportion of cake to frosting.
After
lunch, I took a few minutes to walk around the outer decks and take photos of
the port and the other cruise ships. It
was such a beautiful day, with the sun shining on the water to light it up to a
beautiful electric turquoise color, and bright white puffy clouds dotting the
sky like cotton balls. We were
incredibly lucky with our weather on this cruise, with bright sunny days in all
4 ports.
RCCL
Harmony of the Seas docked at the other cruise port
Puerta Maya Cruise Terminal
Lido deck wasn’t too crowded at this hour
Checking
out the Carnival Vista
The
Regal Princess was also docked near us
Lots of
people walking back towards the ships
After
that, I met back up with DH because we had one more mission to accomplish today…
riding the water slide! There have not
been any water slides on my last 3 cruise ships, so I was very much looking
forward to using the slide on the Dream.
This seemed like the perfect opportunity to accomplish that mission,
while I was already in a wet bathing suit and the ship was still docked so it
wouldn’t be too windy when I climbed up all the stairs to the top of the slide.
Added
perk: you get some great views from the top of the slide!
You can
actually see parts of all 6 waterslides from this view (2 kiddie slides side by
side, the giant twister slide, 2 medium racing slides side by side, and the
drain pipe slide)
When we
got up to the top, there were three or four kids on line ahead of us and a life
guard watching to make sure the previous person exited the slide before the next
person started. I can only imagine what
would happen if someone got stuck in the slide for some reason and then a
second person came shooting down the tube and slammed into them!
Here
goes nothing!
DH had
gone down the slide yesterday while I was in the shower so he warned me to hold
my nose when it got lighter inside the tube because that meant I was almost at
the end and there’s a lot of water down there that can go up your nose. He also gave me a pointer on technique that
he figured out when he was a kid… if you minimize the amount of skin you have
touching the tube then you will go faster.
He told me to press my heels and shoulders down onto the tube and to
lift my butt up, and that would make me go faster. Sure enough, that totally worked and I was
flying when I went down the slide!
I sent
him down the slide first with my camera so he could take a photo for me.
What a
rush! I know these slides are more
geared for children, but it was a lot of fun for me as an adult too! With that mission accomplished, I went back
to the cabin to get ready for the evening while DH went to the casino bar for
happy hour. I had read a few posts
before the cruise with people asking about this elusive happy hour and wanting
to know when it is held. Some people
said it was only on embarkation day, but at least on our sailing, they had it
on a few of the port days too! It always
included the same list of drinks, and was always limited to the Casino
Bar. If you read your Fun Times
carefully, they mention it there so you can plan accordingly.
When I
got back to the cabin, this little guy was hanging out off the foot of the bed…
Hmm,
something looks a little funny here…
Oh,
look! There is a notice on the bed…
Ooooh, okay, that’s what looked funny! I guess it’s a good thing they wash the dust ruffles, but we never saw it again so I guess they don’t put it back on the beds until turn around day in New Orleans. It seems a little weird that we only get our dust ruffle for 5 of the 7 days on our cruise. Does this happen on every cruise? Or do they just usually not clean them and we happened to be here for the random week that our cabin was due for a dust ruffle washing? Not a big deal, just something I never considered before.
Time
for dinner!
Vegetable
Spring Rolls
Seared
Tuna (honestly, this was more like well-done tuna, but close enough!)
Veal
Parmesan
Dessert
Menu
Apple
Pie
Funny
side story… Remember the girl on our tender yesterday in Belize? The one who accidentally boarded the FTTF
tender instead of meeting her Carnival excursion group in the theater as
directed on her ticket? DH and I had
been wondering what happened to her and if she was able to meet up with her
group or not. Just as we were finishing
dinner, I noticed that she was sitting two tables over from us! She was at one of the big tables in
Prudence’s section who only showed up for dinner on the first formal night, but
never again, so we didn’t realize who she was yesterday on the tender. After we finished eating, we went over to her
and her friend (they were the only two people sitting at the large 10 or 12
person table, but I think they were traveling with a large group and everyone
else skipped dinner tonight). They
thought it was funny when we told her we were seated two tables over from her
(what are the chances?!), and she said she did meet up with her group yesterday
and enjoyed her ATV excursion. On a ship
of nearly 4,000 passengers, sometimes it’s funny how small the ship can feel
when you run into new friends randomly.
Prudence
and her team did a wonderful job of getting us out of dinner in under an hour,
so we were able to make the 7:30pm show in the Encore!
Theater. We went into tonight’s final
production show with trepidation considering how we felt about the prior 3
shows on this cruise. The show was
called America Rocks, and featured rock and roll songs through the decades. Sometimes it is best to come in with low
expectations because this was by far the best show of the whole cruise! In addition to the core cast of 8 singers and
dancers that performed in the other shows, they brought in Machine Company, the
band who performs around the ship at night.
This meant we saw extremely talented musicians playing live on stage,
and the lead singer sang for some of the songs alongside the Playlist
Productions cast. I wish they could have
incorporated these guys into all of the other shows because it made a huge
difference!
Apologies
again for the blurry photos, but blurry photos are better than no photos,
right? We were happy to get our favorite
seats with unobstructed views in the front row of the balcony.
I don’t
remember what most of the songs were, but I do know that this was for Hotel
California (we got a kick out of that song choice since we live there!)
They
had everyone out on stage for the finale song, so you can tell there were a lot
more people in this song compared to the other 3 shows.
The
best part about seeing the earlier of the two production shows was that when it
ended, it was only around 8:15pm so we had plenty of time to
enjoy the rest of the nightlife on the ship.
They were doing karaoke in The Song lounge so we headed back that way
hoping that DH could participate. He
loves karaoke and hadn’t gotten to try it out yet on this cruise, but when we
got to the lounge, the host said it was over an hour wait. That wouldn’t work because we wanted to catch
the 9:30pm comedy show, so we decided to just hang out and watch
the other people perform. The Song
lounge is kind of small for a popular event like karaoke, so it was standing
room only by the time we arrived and we had to stand in the back. To be fair, the event did start at 8pm so I imagine people who weren’t
watching America Rocks at 7:30 could come back here, get their
names on the list to perform, and have their choice of seats.
At a
little after 9pm, we went next door to the Burgundy Lounge to get
seats for the 9:30pm adults-only comedy show. It was already quite crowded by then, but we
were able to find seats together. The
comedy club host came on the microphone around 9:15 to ask people not to save seats
because it was already standing room only, but I don’t know how well she could
enforce that if someone is saving a seat while their spouse/friend/etc. was in
the restroom or at the bar or whatever.
I can see not wanting people to save an entire row of seats but no one
was really doing that, and you can’t expect people not to save one seat for the
person they are watching the show with.
Tonight’s
comedian was Jersey. I did not really care for his
act because he was just shouting out profanities for shock value and hoping to
get a reaction, but he didn’t really have much content and the content he did
have was not very funny. Oh well, you
can’t win them all!
After
that, we finished out the night at the piano bar. We spent at least a few minutes in the piano
bar every night, and we were almost always able to get a seat right at the
bar. I need to make one complaint about
Zack… he only played song requests when they included tip money! I understand that in a piano bar on land, the
performers work for tips, but we are on a cruise ship and we are already paying
a lot of money per night to be here, so it shouldn’t be required to tip him on
every single song request just to get him to play our song. We submitted requests nearly every night and
he did not even acknowledge them (except for one time when we requested a song
and he just said he doesn’t know it and tossed our request paper aside. The song was We Didn’t Start The Fire by Billy
Joel which is a fairly easy song since it just keeps repeating the same melody
over and over again, and we even told him not to worry about the lyrics because
we know them by heart and would help him out!)
At the beginning of the week, we figured he gets tips from enough people
that he doesn’t need to play requests that don’t include tips and we might have
more luck at the end of the week.
Nope! He didn’t play our requests
then either. You might be thinking,
“well why not tip him if you want to hear your song that badly?” and we did consider
that, but it got to a point where we were doing an experiment to see if he
would ever play our song without money attached. Sure enough, that never happened. On our other cruises with a piano bar, our
requests were always played with or without a tip attached, and on Paul
Gauguin, the performer (Alex) went so far as to learn a song overnight when DH
requested something he didn’t know (City of Stars from La La Land). Now THAT was good service!
Ok,
I’ll step down off my soap box now. I
just wanted to share that with you.
Step
Tracker Daily Total: 11,862 steps; 4.79
miles; 11 flights of stairs (I definitely climbed way more flights than that
because I couldn’t wear my fitbit on the water slide and you need to climb A
LOT of stairs to reach the top of the slide… oh well!)
Fun
Fact: Belize is the only country in Central America where the official language
English.
For
several years, I have been reading about how Belize is said to have the best
snorkeling reef in the Caribbean, so it has been on my bucket list to experience
it for myself. When I started
researching ideas of what we could do with our time here, there was no question
that it needed to include snorkeling.
Belize is a tender port and is known for having one of the longest
distances to go between the ship and the tender dock, with most people
reporting the ride took them around 30 minutes.
When we originally booked the cruise, we didn’t have FTTF yet (in fact,
it wasn’t available for purchase until 7 weeks before the cruise… long after I
would have needed to book a tour for today if I didn’t want to risk my tour of
choice being sold out!), so I was a bit nervous about booking a tour through a
private vendor because we would not have priority access to the tenders. I have read horror stories about people not
getting off the ship until after 10am due to crazy long lines for the
tenders, or on some ships where they distribute tender tickets, you need to be
on line very early in the morning to get a good ticket number. Anyway, given my desire to avoid all of that
drama, I actually considered booking an excursion for Belize through Carnival. I know, that’s unheard of, right?? I usually avoid ship excursions at all costs
because they tend to be more expensive, more crowded, and let you spend less
time at the attractions as compared to private tours, and snorkeling excursions
through the ship are notorious for being over protective and not letting you go
out and do your own thing. Despite this,
I was still curious as to what options were available through Carnival because
some of their tours left directly from the ship, saving an hour or more on the
round trip tender rides, and then I wouldn’t have to worry about the tender at
all so no stress and no lining up crazy early for tender tickets. I found a tour which seemed interesting
called Sharks, Rays, Barrier Reef Snorkel, and Island Escape. The tour takes 5 hours, starting with a 45
minute ride by boat out to the coral reef to go snorkeling, then to a sandbar
called Shark/Ray Alley to swim with nurse sharks and stingrays, then to a
little island called Caye Caulker where you could buy lunch or explore on your
own for an hour or so before the 45 minute ride back to the ship. Carnival was charging $99 per person for this
tour, which actually sounded reasonable considering how much was included in the
itinerary. I was very close to booking
the tour, but I just kept having this nagging voice in my head, reminding me
about how people always complain about ship excursions and did I really want to
take that risk at a port which was so important to us?
Giving
into my apprehension, I started to research private tour companies to see what
other options I had. There were several
companies offering tours that sounded incredible, with small boats taking you
snorkeling at some of the best parts of the reef, but those tours seemed better
suited for people visiting Belize on a land vacation. You needed to be at their offices on Caye
Caulker very early in the morning and that was not possible for us coming from
a cruise ship in Belize City. One of the tours even has you take an
airplane to get out to their office, but that sounded very risky because we
wouldn’t know the details of tendering until that day and if we missed our
flight, we would also miss out on the entire tour! That sounded like more stress than I could
handle, especially considering this was 7 days into our vacation and I’d
probably be worried about missing the flight and not enjoying my time on
vacation.
I was
about to give up and just book with Carnival when I discovered Coral
Breeze. They offered a tour that sounded
identical to Carnival’s itinerary, but with the benefit of a smaller group on a
smaller boat, and this tour only cost $75 per person. Their website was very helpful in answering
all of my questions, including the biggest question: how to handle the time
difference. I think this may be the
first time I have ever been in a port where ship time and local time were
different! On all of my prior cruises,
either the ship changed its clocks to match local time at each port (Celebrity
does this, as did the Carnival Sunshine when I cruised in the Mediterranean), or the embarkation city had
the same time zone as all of the ports (as with my cruises out of Puerto Rico and Tahiti). Luckily, the Coral Breeze website does a
great job at understanding how to convert ship time to port time, even
detailing the difference between ships leaving from Eastern vs. Central time
zone in the US and between when Daylight Savings Time starts and ends. We got lucky for the other ports on this
cruise because Mexico and Roatan did not change their
clocks as we did on Sunday, so we ended up being on the same time as them, but
for Belize, ship time was one hour ahead
of local time. When I booked the tour on
their website, they required a $12.50 per person deposit, and the rest could be
paid in cash on the day of the tour.
Skip ahead to 7 weeks before the cruise when FTTF finally opened up, I
breathed a huge sigh of relief knowing that we wouldn’t have any problems
meeting up with our guides in Belize. The instructions that Coral Breeze emailed me
said we had to meet at 10am ship time at the pier at Terminal 4 (the tenders go
to Terminal 2, so it’s close by), so we would have had a little wiggle room and
not needed to be on the very first tender to get there on time, but it was a
whole lot less stressful when we knew for sure that we could take the first
tender if we wanted to.
Today’s
Fun Times
In case
you were wondering, here is the tendering information for people who don’t have
priority access
Waking
up this morning, we could tell that we had arrived near Belize from the ship map on our TV
set.
You
would never know it based on the view out our window! There was nothing but water, as far as we
could see.
We got
dressed, slathered on a ton of sunscreen, packed up our day bags, and went
upstairs to Lido in search of burritos. When we
stepped outside from the mid-ship elevators, we were greeted by tons of towel
animals! I had read somewhere that
Carnival does this on the last port day of the cruise, but we were due to
arrive at Cozumel at 7am tomorrow so maybe they did it today instead to have a
little more time to complete all the animals?
Who knows! Either way, it made me
smile! Unfortunately, it was verrrrry
windy today so a lot of the animals were decapitated because the wind blew off
their heads! Oops!
Once
again, there was hardly anyone in line for the breakfast burritos at Blue
Iguana. The lines for the regular
breakfast buffet and the omelet stations were always super long, so I’m not
sure if people didn’t know about the burritos or didn’t like them or what, but
I wasn’t complaining!
After
breakfast, we went down to the mid-ship entrance to the MDR for our priority
tender access. There were already about
100 people sitting at tables in the MDR and we were instructed to join them as
the ship had not been cleared yet. While
we were sitting there, one of the crew members came around to each table to
make sure we had FTTF and were NOT booked a Carnival shore excursion. Those people who were booked on Carnival
excursions were instructed to go to the meeting place listed on their tickets
so they could leave the ship with their tour group and they were not supposed
to make use of the FTTF priority tenders.
At
around 8:10am, they escorted us down the stairs so we could board a
tender which was specifically designated for people with priority access. Remember all of that wind up on Lido deck causing mass decapitation
of towel animals? Well that same wind
was wreaking havoc on the tender boat and it was bopping up and down in the
waves like crazy! They had two guys on
the ship and another two guys on the tender to assist passengers safely as they
transferred between the two boats.
Funny
little side story… While we were sitting on the tender waiting for everyone to
board, the girl sitting next to us started freaking out. Long story short, she booked an excursion
through Carnival and the tickets said she should meet in the theater. All of her friends were in the theater and
texting her through the Carnival Hub app that they were waiting for her and why
wasn’t she there yet? She told them she
was already on a tender, and they said she shouldn’t be on the tender yet! We finally figured out that she missed the
announcements that people with FTTF who booked excursions through Carnival
should not take the priority FTTF tender because they had to go to the meeting
place printed on their excursion tickets.
She tried asking the crew members who helped us to board the tender if
she could get off to meet her group in the theater, but they told her to just
stay on this tender because her excursion group would end up exiting their
tender on the same dock as us, but we would get there first so she could meet
up with them when they arrived. We told
her to make sure to communicate that with her friends ASAP because once our
tender pulled away, she would probably lose access to the Hub app and have no
way to communicate with her friends! We
also wanted to make sure her friends knew not to wait for her and to just go
with their group when their excursion was called. I can only imagine how stressful this whole
experience was for the girl on our tender, so learn a lesson from her… read
your excursion tickets carefully if you book a Carnival excursion!!!
It took
white a while to load up the whole tender, but we finally pulled away at
exactly 8:30am. I was happy that
we were able to find seats on the lower level so we could hide in the shade
because the upper level was completely exposed to the sun.
Holy
moly! It was sooooo rocky as we first
sailed away from the Dream. I honestly
thought they were going to turn the tender back around and abort the whole
thing for fear of our tender tipping over.
Luckily, that did not happen and once we got a little further away from
the Dream, the water was less choppy and we felt safer.
One of
the (only) benefits of a tender port is getting a pretty view of the ship while
we sail away!
The
tender pulled up to the dock in Belize City at 8:50am, so it was a 20 minute ride,
even in those rocky conditions. We
wished our new friend good luck in finding her tour group as we exited the
tender. The instructions from Coral
Breeze said that our tender would arrive in Terminal 2 and we should walk over
to Terminal 4 to meet our guide. The
walk was very short, but we needed to be careful not to get mixed up with the
people exiting the cruise port area. We
got to our meeting place just before 9am and checked in with the Coral
Breeze representative who was standing there.
He said to come back in 40 minutes to get fitted for flippers, and that
there were restrooms and free wifi if we wanted to go wait in the shopping mall
just a few steps away. Looking back, I
regret that I forgot to ask where the giant BELIZE sign was located because this
would have been the perfect chance to take a photo with that sign. I never did find the sign, but I have a
feeling it was to the right when exiting the tender and we missed it because we
went left towards Terminal 4. Oh
well!
Just a
warning… while it was probably smart of us to use the bathrooms at the port
shopping mall because we wouldn’t have bathroom access again for a while, those
bathrooms were surprisingly messy considering how early it was in the
morning! We had equally disgusting
experiences for both the men’s and the women’s bathroom. You have been warned!
We
returned to the meeting spot at 9:40am and at first, the guides didn’t
know where to send us. One guide told us
to go with this big group of 30 people, and at first, I obliged, but then I
thought to second guess it. Sure enough,
that was a group who booked directly through Carnival and we did not belong on
that boat. The guide sent me to speak
with the lady who was in charge, and I pointed out our name on her master list
so she could figure out which group we were with. I was under the impression that we booked our
tour directly through Coral Breeze, and that everyone else on the tour boat
with us would have booked the same way.
When we finally did get split up into the right groups, we were on a
boat with about 10 other people, including a family of 6 people who we were
wearing Carnival excursion stickers. I
meant to ask them about it later in the day, but I never got the chance. I have to wonder if they booked that Carnival
excursion that I saw online which cost $25 per person more than booking
directly through Coral Breeze’s website?
The other group was a family of 4 with two young children (perhaps 4 and
9 years old??), which seemed a bit odd considering we would be snorkeling out
in open water and this didn’t seem like an appropriate excursion for a child
that young.
They
led us out to a pier where they had a bunch of flippers lined up so we could
try them on and find our size, then they helped us load up onto the speed
boat. Our boat for today was probably
big enough to fit 20 people, so we had some space to spread out with only 12 of
us on the tour. We had 3 guides on the
boat with us, with Beto being the lead guide, Rocky was the assistant, and
there was a third guide but I never heard his name (he was the one who stayed
on the boat while we were in the water in case people didn’t want to swim or
came back early). They told us to get
comfortable because we had about 45 minutes to go before arriving at our first
stop, and we left the dock at exactly 10am (ship time).
Ready
for a fun day in Belize! Note that we’re both wearing long sleeve rash
guards… those things are life savers on all day boat tours like this where
there is basically no shade for the entire day!
I think
these were the boats they used as tenders to/from the Dream
We
spent the next 30 minutes speeding through the water and holding onto the
benches on the boat for dear life. Speed
boats are always a bit rough and uncomfortable when traveling at full speed
towards a destination that is far away, but it was even worse today given all
of the wind. We’ve taken enough tours
like this that I was prepared for it, but I still view these longer rides as a
necessary evil to get to the good part of the excursion haha
I will
say that the scenery was beautiful! The
water was a light shade of aqua, and we passed by lots of little islands filled
with lush green palm trees.
Finally,
we reached our first little “stop” at 10:30am… the mangroves. The reason I put “stop” in quotes was that we
were literally here for 3 minutes lol
The
guides slowed down the boat to a crawl and they talked about a few of the
animals we might see here, but we didn’t actually see any animals and we once
we exited the mangroves, we went right back to speeding along through the
water.
Finally,
at 11am, we arrived at Caye Caulker.
Beto
explained that we would tie up at the dock here for about 10 minutes so we
could order food for lunch if we wanted to eat at this restaurant. They would have the food ready for us when we
returned in 2 hours to save us time and give us more time to explore Caye
Caulker. DH and I usually eat a big
enough breakfast that we can skip lunch in port and we just eat a late lunch or
a snack to hold us over until dinner.
Yesterday, that kind of back-fired and ruined my appetite for dinner, so
we decided to order a grilled chicken breast sandwich to share. We weren’t sure how hungry we would be in 2
hours, if at all, but we figured sharing the sandwich would work out well and
one of us would probably be hungry enough to eat it.
This is
the restaurant where Beto recommended for us to eat lunch… The Magic Grill
The
sandwich we ordered cost $8 USD, and the waitress told us we could pay for it
after we ate.
Once
everyone placed their orders, we got back on the speed boat for a quick trip
over to the coral reef for some snorkeling.
I wish I thought to take a photo of how it looked when we arrived
because OMG it was crowded! There were
several other tour boats anchored in the same area, and some of those boats
must have had 50 people on their tours because they were super packed! Beto split our boat into two groups… the
family of 6 went with Rocky, and DH and I were going to stay with Beto with the
family of 4 with those two young kids.
The water looked very choppy, probably because it was still windy plus
there was a strong current. Beto said we
would swim out away from the boat along the reef for about 20 minutes, then
turn around and let the current push us back to the boat.
My
notes say we finally jumped in the water at 11:55am, so 4 hours after boarding the
tender, we were finally getting to snorkel here in Belize! Once we were all in the water, I could see
that Beto was holding onto that little boy and swimming with him in his
arms. Honestly, this really bothered me. As I suspected, that boy was not able to
safely swim for himself so he needed a lot of extra attention from our guides,
and that meant that DH and I had a lesser experience. I had read tons of reviews about this
specific tour both through Coral Breeze and through other tour vendors, and
most of them talk about how wonderful their guides were at diving down to pull
up interesting animals and pointing out things to see. We did not experience this at all because
100% of Beto’s attention was focused on that little boy. If that family knew their son was not a
strong enough swimmer to participate on his own, they should have paid for a
private tour where the guide could focus on them and the needs of their
family. Instead, they were put on our
group tour which meant that DH and I did not receive the experience we paid for. I really wish I had ignored Beto’s
instructions and stuck with Rocky and the family of 6 because at least they
were all adults and could swim for themselves, so Rocky had his hands free to
give them a great tour. I guess it just
comes down to luck of the draw as to who is on a group tour with you, but this
was very disappointing considering how much research I did to find the perfect
tour for us and how much I was looking forward to experiencing the snorkeling
in Belize.
On top
of that, with all of those people snorkeling in the same spot, it was extremely
difficult to stay together as a group.
At one point, DH was swimming behind me and then he got separated from
us and he blended into a different group.
He couldn’t figure out where we were and it was very stressful because
once you get separated from your guide in that situation, you have no way to
know where your boat is and you start to panic.
Luckily, he did eventually find us again, but it was a bit frantic for a
while and I’m sure that Beto would have done a better job of keeping us
together if he didn’t have all of his energy focused on towing that little
boy. Ugh! Sorry for the rant, it was just so frustrating!
With
all of that said, the reef was impressive and it was worth the struggle and
time it took to get here. It was very
similar to the snorkeling we did off the beach yesterday in Roatan and there
was a ton of coral, but I think a lot of it looked bleached out and dead. When I am snorkeling, I love to linger and
give the fish a chance to peek out of the rocks. That was totally impossible in this situation
as I had to keep up with Beto to avoid getting lost in the water, and the
conditions were so rough that I really couldn’t stop swimming and safely stay
afloat. I also always try to swim with
the sun behind me to get the best possible photos, but that was a lost cause in
this situation. These were the best of
the photos I took, but I had to delete a lot of them because they weren’t very
good.
I liked
seeing the purple coral as that’s a rare find
I’m
pretty sure there’s an anemone down there but we were moving so fast that I
couldn’t really check it out
At one
point, the coral was very close to the surface of the water. It wasn’t as scary as yesterday when I
thought I would bump into it, but it was still too close for comfort. I think this was around the point when we
turned back towards our boat.
This
was my favorite photo from today… my eye went right to the blue and yellow fish,
but it wasn’t until I got home and saw the photo on my computer that I saw the
bigger fish swimming up from between the coral!
Honestly,
I’ll give this snorkeling experience a solid B+. While we saw a high volume of coral, I
expected to see much more vibrant colors.
I also expected to see many more fish than we saw as there were really
very few fish, and like I mentioned, if there was anything else worth seeing
that I missed (which I’m sure there was), our guide did not point anything out
to us. I think our boat went to this
particular reef because of its close proximity to Caye Caulker, but I wish we
could have gone somewhere else, even if it was just a few minutes further away,
so we weren’t at the same place as all the other boats. I don’t know… I’ve just heard such amazing
things about the reefs in Belize so I had very high
expectations. Maybe I’m jaded, but I
don’t think those expectations were met.
Swimming
back to our boat was quite chaotic. We
had no idea which boat was ours because all of the boats look the same when you
are in the water. When we finally found
our boat, we had to swim against the current to get there so it took all of our
energy. By the time I climbed back onto
the boat, all I wanted to do was take a nap! Haha
Like it
or not, there’s no rest for the tourist because now it was time for Shark/Ray
Alley. We went about 5 minutes across
the water to a sandbar that was supposed to be shallow enough for us to stand
so we could play with the nurse sharks and stingrays. As we pulled up, we could see the sharks
circling around the boat next to us.
When I
jumped back in the water, I realized that the water was too deep for me to
stand. Not only that, but the current
was really rough and kept pushing me further and further from our boat. If I was able to stand, then I would have
anchored myself and it would have been okay, but since I was forced to float,
it felt like I was swimming in one of those endless spa pools you see on TV
lol
I
pulled on my snorkel mask and ducked under water to see about 10 stingrays
swimming all around us!
Even
though this is not the first time I have swam with stingrays (or sharks, for
that matter!), I still find it thrilling!
I know these animals are used to having humans in the water and it is
unlikely that anything bad will happen, but there is always that tiny part of
me that starts to over think the situation and worry that they might hurt
me. Don’t worry, that didn’t happen, and
I lived to tell the tale (and share the experience with you!)
When we
were in French
Polynesia,
we swam with black tipped reef sharks and lemon sharks. Today, we swam with nurse sharks, so it’s
another animal to add the mental checklist I have of amazing life experiences!
It’s
just so mesmerizing to watch these graceful animals swim along the floor of the
ocean
Crazy
as it may seem, I took all of those photos in under 3 minutes! It was so completely exhausting to swim
against the current, and I kept drifting further and further away from the
boat. I started to panic that I wouldn’t
be able to swim back to the boat, so I decided I had seen enough of the sharks
and stingrays and I used all of my strength to swim back to the boat. Just as I reached the ladder, Beto was
helping the little boy get in the water.
I let them get in the water, then climbed back on the boat and collapsed
onto one of the benches. The third guide
asked what was wrong, so I told him the current was too much for me and I had
to give up. He said “Why didn’t you hold
onto the buoy attached to the rope at the back of the boat?” Ummmm, what buoy?!? No one told me there would be a buoy! Well it turns out that Beto was so busy
helping the little boy that he didn’t throw the buoy out into the water until
after I was back on the boat! Once
again, that little boy got all of our guide’s attention at our expense. Maybe he could have made sure the rest of the
people paying to be on this tour were taken care of before he devoted all of
his time to that child?? That family
really should have booked a private tour.
Whatever, I was kind of over it at that point and didn’t have the energy
to get back in the water. The third
guide (I really wish I could remember his name!!) was awesome. He chatted with me while everyone else was
still in the water, telling me about the sharks and the stingrays, and a little
about his life in Belize.
There
were a few birds circling the tour boats, trying to snag some of the fish used
to bait the sharks and rays
Sorry
for the water spots on my lens! You can
see the floating buoy here, and yes, that would have made my life much easier
if it was in the water before they let any of us jump in!
Not
long after that, people started to return to the boat and Rocky broke out a
cooler of rum punch. Honestly, I was
still so tired from fighting the current that I didn’t feel like drinking at
that moment, but I took some and shared the rest with DH. The ride back to Caye Caulker took about 10
minutes, and I was looking forward to spending some time on solid land. I am sad to say that my experiences
snorkeling in Belize were disappointing. As cool as it was to be in the water with so
many sharks and stingrays, the high winds and rough currents made it
challenging to really enjoy the experience.
The mother in the family of 6 said she had taken this same tour on a
cruise in January and they had perfect weather with no wind at all. She said that made a huge difference and she
had a much better experience that day than she had today. Such is life, I guess!
Back at
Caye Caulker, Beto said we had an hour and a half until we needed to come back
to the boat, so we walked back to the restaurant to let the waitress know we
were ready for our lunch. Sure enough,
our sandwich was ready so she told us to take a seat and she would bring it to
our table.
Lunch
with a beautiful view
The
sandwich was plain (that’s what we expected given it was just a grilled chicken
breast lol), but it was tasty and the fries were great. We were both glad we only got one sandwich
because neither of us was hungry enough to eat a whole meal, but this was the
perfect light lunch.
The
restaurant has this two-story structure with dangling tables and chairs that
swing on ropes. It looked like a fun
place to sit but we opted to sit inside to be in the shade.
After
lunch, we walked around the island a little bit. I wish Beto had told us where to go because
we just kind of wandered around aimlessly.
I’m not sure if there was more to see that we missed out on, but what we
did see was very pretty. The island has
a relaxed, beachy vibe, and I’m pretty sure there are no cars on the island so
everyone either walks or rides golf carts or bicycles.
Not
knowing exactly where we were going, we turned left down one of the side
streets.
At the
next intersection, we saw this mini market…
We
walked inside looking for some local beer, and discovered Belikin beer. We planned to take it back to the beach to
drink there, but the store clerk said it would be okay to drink it as we walked
around the island. Gotta love the laid
back Caribbean way of life!
Cheers!
We
still had 45 minutes until we had to be back at the boat so we walked around a
little bit, then went back to the Magic Grill and sat in the adirondak swinging
chairs out front. At 2:30pm, Beto gathered us up and we got
back on the boat for the long ride back to Belize City.
This
was our boat for today’s tour
The
ride back was just as scenic as the ride this morning. I love when the water is nearly the same
shade as the sky, and just look at all of those palm trees!
Finally,
we saw the Dream anchored off in the distance and knew we must be getting close
to the end of our ride.
According
to my notes, we arrived back at the dock at Terminal 4 at 3:23pm. As we were pulling up, we could see them
loading passengers onto the next tender.
This morning when we were on the tender, they said the return tenders
would leave every half hour, on the hour, so we really wanted to make this 3:30pm tender. As soon as the boat was tied to the dock, we
hopped off, said a quick thank you to the guides, and booked it as fast as
possible to Terminal 2. Incredibly, not
only did we make it in time, but we managed to get a seat on the lower level in
the shade! We were really happy knowing
that we wouldn’t have to wait 30 minutes for the next tender because we were
tired and really just wanted to get back on the Dream ASAP.
Just
some final thoughts about our day with Coral Breeze… I am kind of torn about
how I feel about this tour. I know some
people don’t like Belize and opt to stay on the ship
instead of exploring this port. I think
that would be a mistake considering how beautiful it is, from the bright blue
water to the lush green palm trees to the soft white sand. I can’t speak to how things look on the main land,
but there is no question of the natural beauty on the outer islands. My research told me that the coral reef in Belize is the best in the Caribbean, but I honestly can’t say that
I agree with that. I already expressed
my disappointment in our experience snorkeling at the reef. I’m not sure if Coral Breeze just took us to
a bad spot, and maybe there was better snorkeling at a different spot along the
reef? Or maybe we just had unlucky
circumstances in having a young child in our group who demanded all of the
guide’s attention? Or maybe the rough
seas and strong winds and currents in the water hampered our experience? Whatever the case, I did not think what we
saw could be classified as “the best in the Caribbean” and it leaves me wanting to
return to Belize and go somewhere else to see if
we can find something better! In terms
of our experience at Shark/Ray Alley, I did enjoy my time in the water with the
animals, however limited that time turned out to be, but I think the guides
could have done more to enhance my experience there. Part of the reason I opt to book tours with
private vendors and not through the cruise line is to have more individualized
attention from the guides, and I just do not think I had that treatment from
these guides with Coral Breeze. Would I
book this tour again? Unfortunately,
probably not. For a tour that lasted
nearly 6 hours, I spent less than 1 hour in the water. I don’t think that is enough bang for my buck
to warrant repeating this tour. If I am
lucky enough to return to Belize, I will probably seek out a
different snorkeling experience at a different location if that is possible, or
maybe even a discover scuba diving course if it is available. Hmmm… honey… do you want to book another cruise?????
Haha just kidding!
The
tender ride back to the Dream took 30 minutes, but I think we had to wait a few
minutes for the prior tender to offload passengers before we could get
off. When we were eventually tied up and
it looked like people were starting to get off, we realized that although we
boarded on the lower level, we needed to get off on the upper level of the
tender. That meant we were the last
people to get off the boat. Oh well, at
least we made it onto this boat and would still get back to the cabin earlier
than had we taken the tender 30 minutes later, right? Once again, I was very appreciative of our
Deck 1 cabin as we could quickly walk up the flight of stairs and avoid waiting
for the elevator with everyone else.
This
little frog greeted us when we got back to our cabin.
Strange
enough, tonight was formal night again!
With 4 port days in a row on a 7 day cruise, I suppose it’s not that
surprising that one of the formal nights needs to be on a port day. I guess it does make sense to do it today as
this was the earliest all aboard time of all our ports with the last tender
leaving shore at 4:15pm. While I
showered and started the long process of blowing out my hair, DH went to the
bar for a drink since he didn’t need that much time to get ready. When he returned to the cabin, he was holding
not one, but TWO buckets of beer! Ummmm,
honey, what do you have there?? He said
the casino bar was having the same happy hour deal that they had on embarkation
day so he stocked up on some beers for us for the rest of the cruise! I knew that Carnival did the embarkation day
happy hour but it was great to hear they offered the same deal later during the
cruise too.
We both
got dressed and headed up to the MDR for dinner. Here is tonight’s menu…
Setting
up for another beautiful sunset during dinner
Stuffed
Mushrooms
Romaine
Caesar Salad (I ordered this nearly every night, and it was always delicious!)
Filet
Mignon
Dessert
Menu
Carnival
Melting Chocolate Cake
Cheese
Plate
I
usually like to take photos before dinner on formal night. If we are going to take the effort to dress
up, it’s nice to document the occasion and take some photos (on my personal
camera, not with the ship photographers).
With trying to get to dinner by 6pm, we didn’t have time for photos
before dinner tonight so we did our best to keep our clothes clean while we ate
so we could take photos afterwards.
Mission accomplished!
We
still had some time before the Playlist Productions show started, and our
favorite couch was available on Deck 4 overlooking the lobby, so we took a seat
and listened to the strings trio Kudos Strings.
I was very impressed with this group!
They found a way to make strings appealing to a mass audience by playing
unique arrangements of pop songs, so it was fun to try to name that tune as we
placed what song they were playing.
Tonight’s
production show was called Flick and featured songs from movies. Most of the big songs featured in movies are
ballads, so this had the potential to be very demanding on the singers who have
already proven to have questionable singing voices. We went in with high hopes and were
pleasantly surprised. Perhaps it was
just better song choice for the person singing each song, but the cast did a
good job with this show.
My
favorite song was actually the very first song of the show… Skyfall by Adele. Not only did the singer do a great job, but
they had a really cool effect for the staging with this piece of fabric
magically dancing around on the stage behind the singer. I think they controlled it with the fans on
the perimeter of that platform, but it made a cool visual (and somehow it never
managed to fall on top of her while she was singing haha)
I don’t
remember what other specific songs they sang, but here are some photos from the
show…
After
the show, we went upstairs to the Lido buffet for a quick snack, and then went back to
the cabin to repack our day bags. We had
another early wake up time tomorrow for our final port in Cozumel!
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!
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 3rd and 4th 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!
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.
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
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!
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!
Dana's Destination Diary 