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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A little Mardi Gras humor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Breakfast room service door tag

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

Welcome letter explaining the benefits of FTTF

The 12 pack of water bottles that I preordered online

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

Other information…

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

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

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

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

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

We’re growing quite the collection of these photos!

Looks like the Breakaway also has not started to sail away

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two kinds of butter

Mini hamburger, compliments of the chef

DH ordered the Stuffed Mushrooms

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

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

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

Such pretty views as we continue sailing down the River

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

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

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

Dessert menu

Cheesecake with hazelnut biscuit for me

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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