Tag Archives: planning

Uncategorized

Detailed Photo Review of Paris and London Trip in June 2019

Leave a comment

Paris and London have been at the top of my travel to-do list for decades.  When my parents told me a year in advance that they wanted me to visit them in New York for their 40th wedding anniversary, the wheels started turning.  Coming from California, Paris and London are not exactly “on the way” to New York, but if we are already traveling cross-country in that direction, it made perfect sense to tack on a few days in Europe too. 

The first thing I needed to do was find out if this was even a possibility in terms of flights.  My plan was that we would be away for 2.5 weeks, flying to either Paris or London first, then take the train to the other city, then fly to New York in time for my parents’ anniversary, and then fly back to California.  Unfortunately, when this idea originally occurred to me, the airlines had not released their June/July 2019 schedules yet.  The schedules were finally released in October for most of the airlines.  After checking the options from every airline and at every airport in the Bay Area, I discovered Norwegian Airlines.  They are a budget airline offering a direct flight from Oakland to Paris, and they also offer direct flights from Gatwick airport in London to JFK airport near my parents in New York.  I loved the idea of a direct flight and not needing to change planes, even if that meant an extremely long 10 hours on the plane for the first leg of our journey!  The one downside was that we would be flying out of Oakland, which is a one hour drive from our house on a good day.  That flight was scheduled to leave at 8pm so we needed to drive in rush hour, potentially doubling the time to get there.  Another logistical issue was that our flight back at the end of the vacation was going to land in San Jose, so we would not be able to drive to the airport in Oakland because there was no way to retrieve our car two weeks later.  Hopefully an Uber ride from San Jose to Oakland in rush hour, plus an Uber ride from the San Jose airport back home at the end of the trip, would cost less than paying for two weeks of parking at an off-site lot near the airport!

Norwegian Air has 3 seating options with different price levels.  The cheapest option is very bare bones.  They guarantee you will have a seat on the airplane and you can bring one carry on item weighing less than 10kg (22 pounds), but that’s about it!  The ticket does not include picking your seat, a checked bag, or any food or drink during the flight (including water!).  The flight attendants won’t even collect your trash as they pass through the cabin!  That was not going to be an option for us for two long-haul flights, so I looked into the middle tier options.  These tickets cost about $90 more, and included picking our seats on the plane, a checked bag in addition to our carry on bag, and a meal during the flight.  Since Norwegian is a budget airline, the price for the 10-hour flight from Oakland to Paris for the middle tier tickets came to $329 per person!  I did check back on the pricing as the trip dates came closer and the prices went up by $200 per person, so it pays to buy tickets way in advance.  Norwegian uses the 787 Dreamliner planes, with a 3-4-3 seat configuration in the coach section.  The idea of sitting in a middle seat for a long haul flight didn’t thrill either of us, so we investigated alternate possibilities.  At first we seriously considered buying 3 tickets so the 2 of us could have our own row.  The seats were cheap enough that it wasn’t such a crazy idea, and if we divided out the price equally, paying less than $500 per person for a 10 hour direct flight was still a great deal! 

Our third option was to purchase seats in the premium section of the plane.  Norwegian does not have a first class section, but they do have a premium section which is similar to business class on other airlines.  The seats don’t go fully flat, but they do recline significantly more than the seats in coach, and the rows are in a 2-3-2 configuration so we could get 2 seats together with one of us at the window and the other on the aisle, and no extra middle seat between us.  The premium section also includes 2 free checked bags per person, which is helpful when they only let you bring one 10kg bag as a carry on so we could check the rolling carry on bags we usually put in the overhead bin on the plane and just use a backpack for our carry on bag.  Finally, the premium section includes 2 meals on the flight that are supposed to be better than the meals served in coach, free wine and beer during meal service times, access to the priority lounge at both Oakland and Gatwick airports, and fast track access for security at the airport (which is great for us because we don’t have TSA pre-check or Global Entry).  When I priced out the tickets for the London to New York leg of our trip, it was only $180 difference between the middle and premium tiered tickets, so it was a no-brainer and we immediately booked those tickets before the price difference went up!  The seats in coach were $500 per person, and we were able to book our premium seats for $680 each.  We thought that was an amazing deal for business class on an 8-hour international flight!  We needed to think through the costs versus benefits for booking the premium seats on the Paris flight because the price difference was $500 per ticket more than the middle tier tickets.  Since we were not going to want to risk being stuck in the middle seat with a stranger on the aisle, had we bought the middle tier tickets we would have purchased the third seat, bringing the price difference down to $336 per person.  This flight was going to be a red eye, leaving Oakland at 8pm and landing in Paris at 3:30pm the next day, and this was how we were kicking off a 2-week vacation.  To us, paying $336 per person was well worth it at the slight chance of being able to sleep on the plane (neither one of us sleeps well on planes in coach, but maybe we had a chance at falling asleep if we could recline our seats and have a bit more space around us?), and it seemed like a more relaxing way to start our vacation.  Before we had a chance to second guess our decision, we purchased the non-refundable tickets leaving on Thursday, June 20 and arriving in Paris on Friday, June 21.  We were officially going to Europe!

Let’s break up this text-heavy post with some pretty photos from Paris…

Our flight to New York was on July 2, so we needed to decide how to split up our 12 days in Europe between Paris and London.  We wanted to keep things pretty even, but since it seemed like there was more to do in Paris than London, we picked Thursday, June 27 as our travel day between the two cities.  That gave us 5 full days in Paris, plus the evening of the night our plane arrived, and 4 full days in London, plus the afternoon after the train ride from Paris, and the morning on our last day because our flight to New York didn’t leave until 5pm. 

There are 2 main ways to travel from Paris to London.  If we chose to fly there, the flight itself is not very long, but we would need to get from central Paris to either CDG or Orly airport, and we would need to arrive early enough to allow time to check our bags and go through security.  When the plane landed in London, we would need time to wait for our bags to arrive, and then we would need to travel from Gatwick or Heathrow into central London, so the door to door time would probably be much longer and it would definitely cost more money than our second option. 

The second option was to take the Eurostar train through the Chunnel (although apparently only Americans call it the Chunnel haha).  The Eurostar train leaves from Gare du Nord train station, towards the northern side of central Paris, and arrives into St. Pancras station, towards the northern side of central London, saving us a lot of travel time and avoiding the logistics of going through the airport.  The train ride itself is 2 and a half hours long, but thanks to the time zone difference, it would only feel like 1 and a half hours!  Eurostar has several tiers for their seats, but we would be fine with the cheapest option, which allows you to pick your seat and includes 2 checked bags plus one carry on bag.  They do recommend that you arrive at the station one hour prior to departure, but overall it would still be way faster than flying.  The ticket prices fluctuate just like airline tickets, and they go on sale 6 months in advance.  We were in Puerto Vallarta the day our train tickets went on sale, so the night we returned home, I immediately logged onto the website to book our tickets.  The Paris to London route operates about once an hour, so we opted for the 10am train, which arrived in London at 11:30am.  That seemed like a perfect train time because it wasn’t too early in the morning, knowing we would need to finish packing and eat breakfast before going to the train, and it arrived before lunchtime in London, giving us most of the day left for touring.  The nonrefundable tickets cost $68 each, and I made sure to pick seats facing forwards on the train.

With our dates in each city finalized, the next step was to find hotels.  At that point, I knew absolutely nothing about how either city was laid out and it felt very overwhelming to pick which part of town would be best for us to stay in, let alone picking a specific hotel!  I decided to slow things down and tackle one city at a time.  For each city, I created a map on Google Maps and plotted out all of the touristy landmarks that I wanted to visit.  That gave me a good idea of where we’d be spending most of our time, so I tried to look at hotels in those neighborhoods.  Of course, hotels located very close to the major attractions also tend to be the most expensive, so I looked at options slightly further away, but with good access to public transportation.  When we travel domestically, especially for just two or three days over a long weekend, we often book vacation rentals on AirBNB and VRBO.  When we travel internationally, I prefer to book real hotels because they are more reliable (ie: less likely to cancel our booking at the last minute, leaving us without a place to stay in a foreign country!).  I have had a lot of success using Booking.com as they tend to offer good rates on a huge number of hotels in any given city, with a convenient way to search that inventory to select the amenities that matter most to me.  We did have one major problem with a hotel in Mexico that cancelled our Christmas/New Years week hotel just 2 months in advance (even though we booked a year ahead!), and all of the other hotels in our budget were sold out.  Booking.com totally took care of us and found us a new hotel in the same area where we wanted to stay, and they paid for the difference in price!  After that experience, I was happy to try their site for hotels for this trip.

In the end, I selected a boutique hotel called Hotel Chopin in Paris’ 9th arrondissement, located close to a metro station, and around a mile walk to the Louvre going south, and Gare du Nord going north.  For London, I knew we would have an unlimited ride pass for the metro, so being close to a transit hub was very important.  I also wanted to be close to St. Pancras station as that’s where we would arrive via the Eurostar, and we could get a direct ride from there to Gatwick at the end of our stay, so it would mean convenient access when schlepping our luggage.  I decided to book our reservation at Central Hotel, located on a quiet side street directly across from St. Pancras Station (for the Eurostar) and Kings Cross Station (for the Tube).  Central Hotel included a daily free breakfast, but Hotel Chopin did not.  Upon further thought, I realized that was a good thing because it would allow us to sample different French pastries and baked goods from different shops and markets each day!  Both hotels offered free cancellation until a week before the trip, free wifi, a non-smoking room with a private bathroom, and a hair dryer (a must for me, so I could save on precious space and weight in my luggage and to avoid the voltage change possibly destroying my hair dryer from the States!).  The only slight problem was that neither hotel had air conditioning.  Both said they have fans for the rooms, and I just kept my fingers crossed that it would be cool enough at night that we could sleep comfortably because the hotels with air conditioning were much more expensive.

This seems like a good place to break up the text with a few pretty photos from London…

I spent the next few months learning as much as possible about things to do, tours to take, places to eat, how public transit works, and what passes/attractions need to be purchased/reserved in advance.  I will talk about all of that in more detail as we get to each day of the trip, but as a general overview, I decided that we would benefit from purchasing a Museum Pass for Paris, but doing our touring in London a la carte.  For Paris, they offer something called a Paris Passlib, which includes a museum pass for 2, 4, or 6 days, an unlimited ride transit pass for 1-5 days, and a card for a 1 hour Seine River cruise and a 1-day Hop On Hop Off sightseeing bus, plus the option to add access to the Eiffel Tower for €20 more.  We will have 5 full days in Paris, so I was seriously considering the 5-day Paris Passlib for €155 per person, but as time went on, I started second guessing that decision.  I broke down the value of each item included in the pass and realized it was not such a great deal for us.  While the HOHO bus can be a great way to get an overview of a new city, traffic in Paris makes this bus impractical.  I found a walking tour which would cover many of the same sites in the same time frame, and it seemed like a better option for us.  Paris is known to be a wonderful city for walking, so while we did plan to use public transit to travel longer distances across the city, I was able to arrange our days such that we will tour sites close together on the same day and not need as many metro rides.  It seemed unlikely that we would get the full value out of the unlimited ride transit pass, and would probably save some money by buying the discounted 10-packs of transit tickets called a carnet, at €1.49 per ride.  We can share those 10-packs between the two of us, so we are less likely to buy more than we can use.  There are multiple companies who offer cruises along the Seine River, all costing between €10 and €15 per person.  While we might end up riding with the one company included with the Paris Passlib, it is better to just buy this tour on our own when we can pick whichever company is convenient for the day we want to do it, especially since it is a relatively inexpensive attraction.  The added option of spending €20 per person for 2nd floor access to the Eiffel Tower still baffles me… you can buy that same thing directly from the Eiffel Tower website for €16.30!  Why would you ever spend more than that??  On top of that, we wanted to go all the way up to the top of the Tower, so we wouldn’t have purchased that option anyway.  In the end, it seemed that the only features of the Passlib which we would take advantage of were the Seine River cruise and the museum pass.  The 4-day museum pass costs €62 per person and can be purchased at the tourism desk in the airport, at the tourism office in Central Paris, and at many of the museums included with the pass.  There is no advantage or reason to pre-purchase the pass, and it can actually be inconvenient to pre-purchase it because you can only pick it up at the airport or their tourism offices.  Their offices are located at Gare du Norde and Hotel de Ville, so that would require going out of our way to retrieve them, and I wouldn’t have selected to pick it up at the airport in case our flight was delayed and we didn’t arrive until after they closed, forcing us to return to the airport the following day to get the passes.  They do have an option where they will mail the pass to your home or deliver it to your hotel, but that comes with a hefty €24 or €12 shipping fee, respectively.  No thanks!  With all of that in mind, I decided that we would buy our 4-day museum pass after arriving in Paris.  If our flight landed on time, then we could get it at the airport, and if not, we could get it at a museum.

For Paris, I added up the admission charges to all of the museums and attractions that we planned to visit, and the museum pass easily paid for itself, so it made sense to get it.  For London, all of the museums we planned to visit (or even slightly considered visiting just as a rainy-day option) were FREE!  How great is that?!  We had no interest in the pricier attractions like the London Eye and Harry Potter World, and we were happy to see all of the palaces and castles from the outside (both to save time and money because we have fewer days to tour London).  There were a few tours we wanted to take which would cost extra money, but none of them are included in any of the tourism passes, so in the end, it just made more sense to book each thing individually.  Funny enough, our approach to London is exactly the opposite of Paris in that although we bought a museum pass but no transit pass in Paris, for London, we did buy the transit pass and skipped the tourism pass! 

There are many different transit pass options in London.  By far the cheapest option is the Navigo which costs about 22 Pounds for 7 days of unlimited pubic transit.  The problem is, those 7 days must specifically fall from a Monday until the following Sunday.  We arrive in London on a Thursday and leave on a Tuesday, so that pass was not an option for us.  Instead, we purchased the 7-day Travelcard, which can be used over any 7 consecutive days.  The Travelcard costs £35.10 per person, and can be added to their contactless transit card called an Oyster Card.  The Oyster Card must be bought first for £5, but that money is refundable when you return the card at the end of your trip.  If we didn’t buy the Travelcard, London’s public transit has a daily cap of about £7, meaning if we paid per ride, we would not be charged for any rides after we reached that £7 cap.  Because we have 4 full days in London, plus most of the day on the day we arrive and all morning on the day we depart, I went back and forth on if it made sense to get the unlimited ride pass since we would probably just break even in the end, but we had the chance to save a little money if we didn’t use public transit as much on one day.  It was going to be very close whichever way we did it, so it made more sense to get the unlimited and not have to worry about topping up extra money on our Oyster Cards throughout the week. 

Once all of my planning was complete, I created this calendar to hang on the wall in our hotels to keep track of our daily agenda.  Of course, things did get moved around a bit, but we mostly stuck with the original plan:

That concludes the planning section of this trip report, so now it’s time for the fun part… a detailed account of each day of our action-packed trip to Paris and London!  I took over two thousand photos on this trip, so it will take me some time to organize everything and write up my posts.  In the meantime, I will leave you with more pretty photos from Paris and London…

Uncategorized

Planning

Leave a comment

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

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

  1. It stops in Belize… pretty much the only requirement I had in mind going in haha
  2. 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. 
  3. 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).
  4. 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.
  5. The cruise is on the Carnival Dream.  We have never cruised on a Dream-class ship, and while I honestly would prefer to see the newer Carnival ships with their more current features and décor, I was still intrigued. This would be by far the biggest ship we have sailed on, with a maximum passenger capacity at 3,646 (approximately 800 more than our current biggest ship, the Celebrity Eclipse!).  If that proved too crowded for us, at least we’d be getting off the ship for 4 of the 7 days! Haha

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

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

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

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

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

Date – Port – Excursion

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

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

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

Mon. 3/11 – Sea Day

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

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

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

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

Sat. 3/16 – Sea Day

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

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

I have made countdown candy jars for all of our cruises.  The idea is that we eat one piece of candy each night and gradually watch the jar become empty as we get closer to the start of the cruise.  Since we were going to Puerto Vallarta for New Year’s, I waited until we got home to start the cruise countdown.  Just 65 days to go!

Up next… let’s get this vacation started!

Uncategorized

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

Leave a comment

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

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

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

Cruise

Celebrity Eclipse ~ Pre-Cruise Planning

Leave a comment

Hi Everyone!  My name is Dana and my husband and I just returned from a fabulous 14-night cruise on the Celebrity Eclipse (March 4-18, 2018 sailing).  As you can see from my cruise history listed below in my signature, I have taken several Carnival and Celebrity cruises in the last few years, and we just returned home from our honeymoon in French Polynesia six months ago.  I always write a detailed photo review when I return home from my cruises, with a journal-style day-by-day format.  This cruise will be no different!  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 over 3000 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!

image
image
image
image
image
image
image
image
image

We booked this cruise while we were on our 2016 cruise on the Celebrity
Equinox.  They were running a sale where if we booked the cruise while on that cruise, we received a $250 OBC for the cabin, plus 2 free perks on the future cruise. We were having such a wonderful time on the cruise so far, and we loved the Celebrity product and the vibe on the Equinox, so we knew we would love cruising on the sister ship.  One of the things on my cruising bucket list is to visit the ABC islands, so when I found this itinerary, I knew it was meant to be! Plus, we would get to revisit some of our favorite islands from our 2015 cruise, while visiting 4 other islands where we had never been before.  This looked like the perfect cruise for us, and we were even able to book the same cabin we had on this cruise- 7222, a 2A Veranda cabin between the forward and mid-ship elevators on the starboard side.  

With nearly 2 years to go until this cruise, and with our honeymoon cruise coming first in 2017, it took a while before we started specific planning for this cruise.  I had a few ideas of things I wanted to do on each of the islands from reading other reviews, but we didn’t plan anything specific until last March when we had 1 year to go.  At that point, I dove head first into reading private vendor reviews from Trip Advisor and scouring the Ports of Call forum here on Cruise Critic, all in hopes of planning the best possible days for us on this cruise.  Much like on my prior Celebrity and Carnival cruises, I did not want to book any excursions through the cruise line.  I usually find that I can get a better tour which does more things/visits more sites, has fewer people on the tour with us, and costs less money if I book through a private vendor.  I usually try to plan for a good balance of boat tours, beach days, and island tours, so this was our itinerary and the excursions we booked for each day. Spoiler alert: Life doesn’t always go according to plan…

Date                 Port                 Excursion

3 / 4/18              Miami              Embarkation Day

3/5/18              Sea Day

3/6/18              Sea Day

3/7/18              St. Maarten      Great Bay Beach and Boardwalk        

3/8/18              Antigua            Eli’s Eco Tour

3/9/18              St. Lucia          Spencer Ambrose Land and Sea Combo

3/10/18            Barbados         Boatyard Beach

3/11/18            Sea Day

3/12/18            Bonaire           Woodwind Snorkel Sail

3/13/18            Curacao           Irie Beach Hopping Tour

3/14/18            Aruba              ABC Tours- Natural Pool Safari; Mi Dushi Sunset Sail

3/15/18            Aruba              Octopus Tours Champagne Brunch Snorkel Sail

3/16/18            Sea Day

3/17/18            Sea Day

3/18/18            Miami              Ft. Lauderdale Water Taxi, then flying home

A week or two before final payment was due, we noticed there were a few Concierge Class cabins available for a nominal upgrade fee.  There is a lot of debate on Cruise Critic about whether or not Concierge Class is worth the upgrade fee.  We decided that the extra Captain’s Club points for a 14-night cruise, the guarantee of foot stools on our balcony (something I definitely enjoy having), and the few other minor perks were worth the small per-night upgrade charge, so we went for it.  We did consider upgrading to Aqua Class, but the only cabins available were directly below the pool, solarium, or spa.  I definitely didn’t want to risk hearing noise overhead for 2 weeks straight, so being sandwiched between 2 cabin decks was a high priority which ruled out the remaining Aqua Class cabins.  In the end, we picked cabin 1068, located on the starboard side of deck 10, mid-way between the two elevator banks, and with the bed in our preferred location near the balcony.  

Cruise

Our Honeymoon- Planning Phase

Leave a comment

Ia Orana! Hi Everyone!  My name is Dana and my husband and I just returned from our honeymoon in French Polynesia.  We spent an incredible 6 days in Moorea before boarding a 10-night cruise on the Paul Gauguin to the Society Islands and Tuamotus (September 6-16, 2017 sailing).  As you can see from my cruise history listed below, I have taken several Carnival and Celebrity cruises in the last few years, so sailing on a ship as small as the PG was a totally new experience for me. The one thing this cruise did have in common with my prior cruises was that it was an extremely port-intensive itinerary… we only had 1 sea day on the 10 day cruise!  I love the process of planning for a cruise, and I am obsessed with reading everything I can on Cruise Critic and Trip Advisor that will prepare me for my upcoming vacation.  After sailing with the larger cruise lines, I was used to finding tons of reviews about my ship, itinerary, what to do in ports, and information about pre- and post-cruise stays.  Unfortunately, my resources were much more limited when planning for this PG cruise. With only one ship in their fleet, and that ship only holds about 300 passengers per cruise, it is no surprise that the PG forum on Cruise Critic only has a handful of active participants. Luckily, these active participants were EXTREMELY helpful in answering all of my questions!  Many thanks to those who were extremely extremely helpful in my cruise-planning process!

As you can see in my signature below, I always write a detailed photo review when I return home from my cruises, with a journal-style day-by-day format.  This cruise will be no different!  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 closely resemble novels.  On the other hand, if you like reading about lots of details, and if you want to see TONS of photos, this is the review for you!  Given the limited number of detailed reviews written about PG and specifically the Tuamotus itinerary, I hope my review will help some of you to plan for your upcoming cruises!  Please feel free to ask questions and post comments along the way… I welcome your feedback 🙂

I took over 3500 photos on this vacation, and we were away for 17 days, so I have a lot of work to do to get this review posted. Please be patient with me as it will likely take a while to get everything written up and all of my photos sorted and loaded onto my computer.

Before I start writing about our time in French Polynesia, I wanted to give a little background information.  Back in September of 2015, DH proposed to me on a romantic sunrise hot air balloon ride.  We immediately began planning our wedding for September of 2016, and talking about where we wanted to take our honeymoon.  We already had our Celebrity Equinox cruise booked for 2 weeks in March 2016, so that used up most of our 2016 vacation days (Many people suggested we just call that cruise our honeymoon, but we definitely did not want to take our honeymoon 6 months before we were married!).  We knew we wanted to take a fairly substantial vacation for our honeymoon, so we decided to delay it until 2017 when we would have more vacation days available.  We both love cruising, so I looked into some itineraries in Europe, Asia, and Australia, but DH said he wanted a more romantic, low key, beachy honeymoon as opposed to the city-based touring that those cruises offered.  My next thought was to go to Hawaii as many of my friends from the East Coast have done for their honeymoons. While I have never been there and definitely want to go sometime soon, it is a very easy flight from where we live in California, so it just didn’t seem honeymoon-worthy (unlike my friends on the East Coast who can get to Europe faster than Hawaii! haha)  

That’s when I started to investigate French Polynesia.  My friends on the East Coast would never even consider this, being that the flight would take up half of their vacation time lol  Living in the Bay Area meant DH and I could get to LAX in a quick one-hour flight to connect to our flight to Tahiti. This seemed doable so I started to look into our options.  At first, I assumed we would fly out there for about 2 weeks for a land-trip and spend a few days on the 3 main islands: Tahiti, Bora Bora, and Moorea. I started to look into hotel options and some logistics when I stumbled upon something I never knew existed… a cruise line that sails year-round around French Polynesia!  This was so perfect for us as it combined our love for cruising with our desire to visit some of the most unique tropical islands in the world!  It didn’t take much convincing before DH agreed that we should book this as our honeymoon!!  By now, it was December of 2015 and PG had not yet released their itineraries for 2017. My research told me that September was a great month to visit French Polynesia as it tends to be less rainy and humid, and there would be fewer children on board as they had just started their school year, so when PG finally released their 2017 dates in January 2016, we booked this 10-night cruise for early September.  An added bonus was that we would be away over Labor Day weekend and could use one less vacation day.  

With our honeymoon cruise booked a year and 9 months in advance, we had plenty of time to iron out the rest of the details. Luckily, it was too far in advance to do too much planning for the honeymoon, so that gave us plenty of time to focus on the details of planning our wedding.  Our year-long engagement flew by, and before we knew it, it was September of 2016 and time for our wedding!  I know this is a cruising forum so I won’t talk too much about our wedding, but I just wanted to post a few of my favorite photos (if for no other reason than to break up all this text! haha)

image
image
image

With our wedding being nearly a year before our real honeymoon, and since our wedding was on Long Island (where I grew up), we spent a few days out east in the Hamptons as a minimoon to hold us over. It was a great way to relax after the big wedding, and it was exciting to spend our first few days together as husband and wife!

image
image
image

Once we returned to California after the wedding week, I could really devote my time to planning this French Polynesia vacation.  Around this time, the hotels and airlines opened up booking for our dates.  We knew we wanted to fly out a few days before the cruise to have some time to get over the jet lag and to spend a few days enjoying one of the islands.  Thanks to those on this forum, I knew that we should spend as little time as possible in over-commercialized Tahiti, and that while Bora Bora is beautiful, it is also very expensive and requires approximately a $450 flight to get there, so that left us with Moorea.  Moorea was said to be a beautiful island with plenty to offer for both land- and sea-based activities, and we could get there via an easy, inexpensive, and fast ferry ride from Tahiti.  Sounds good to me!  I looked into our hotel options with everything from AirBNB rentals to small boutique hotels to major high-end resorts.  

In the end, I found a little hotel called Moorea Fare Miti on the west coast of Moorea where we could reserve a private bungalow on the beach for less than $150 per night.  That sounded like a fantastic option, offering us the romance and intrigue of a private beach-front unit but on a budget that left us money to spend on daily activities.  The one downside to staying out there was that it was a bit remote from many of the things we would want to do during our stay, including accessing the ferry terminal. We decided to rent a car for the duration of our time in Moorea.  By the time we paid for a taxi to and from the ferry terminal, and with needing to travel around the island for excursions and meals, and knowing we would want to go to a store to buy groceries to make use of the kitchen in our hotel room, it just made more sense to get a rental car.  There are two main places to rent a car in Moorea:  Avis and Albert Transport.  Both have helpful websites where you can price out the cost of renting a car.  While I have read that Avis cars tend to be newer, Albert’s prices were over $100 cheaper for the 5 days we needed the car. I sent them an email about renting a car with an automatic transmission and they replied within 20 minutes!!  The whole process was very easy- they did not require any deposit or credit card information until we pick up the car once in Moorea, and they wanted to know what time ferry we are taking so they can pick us up at the terminal.  Their rates include unlimited mileage (not that we can really rack up that many miles on an island so small haha), liability insurance, and all taxes/fees.

Up next was booking our flights.  There are two main airlines that fly direct from LAX to PPT in Tahiti:  Air France and Air Tahiti Nui (ATN).  There are other airlines that will get you there with a layover in Hawaii or New Zealand, but we only wanted a direct flight.  Paul Gauguin does include airfare on ATN in their cruise pricing, but since we did not book our Moorea hotel through PG, we would be charged a deviation fee and we would be on our own for transfers.  We decided it made more sense to take the $1700 per person flight credit and book our own airfare.  At first, we planned to fly with Air France as they get much better reviews on the flight experience as compared to ATN, and they tend to have cheaper pricing.  The problem with Air France was that they only have return flights to LAX on Friday and Sunday mornings. We couldn’t take the Friday morning flight because the cruise didn’t dock back in Tahiti until Friday night, and if we took the Sunday morning flight (which would have involved a 4am wake up time- yuck!), it didn’t land at LAX until 6:30pm Sunday night, and it was unlikely we could catch a flight back home to San Jose that night.  We would probably have to book a hotel in LA for Sunday night, and fly home on Monday morning, possibly involving another day off of work.  Another down side to Air France is that the seats on their plane are in a 3-4-3 configuration, meaning one of us would need to be in the dreaded middle seat for the 8 hour flight.  

That lead us to flying with ATN.  We found a redeye outbound flight on Thursday night which would land in Tahiti at 5am on Friday morning, and we planned to fly back on the Saturday redeye the night the cruise ended, so we could easily catch a flight back to San Jose on Sunday afternoon.  Plus, ATN’s seats are configured as 2-4-2 and we loved the idea of having the window/aisle for just the 2 of us.  But then we realized some bad news…. ATN was charging $500 more per person than Air France!  We actually started to second guess our decision to fly with ATN, but if we needed to pay for a hotel in Tahiti on Saturday night and in LA on Sunday night, and if we each needed to use an extra vacation day to fly home on Monday, ATN would still be less money than Air France.  Thanks to some recommendations from Cruise Critic, I priced out our flights with ATN’s partner airlines, and lucky us!  American Airlines co-listed our flights for about $250 less per person than ATN!  I was a little bit nervous about booking our flight through a partner airline and not direct with ATN, but it was actually completely seamless.  We booked our flights on the American Airlines website and almost immediately received an email with our e-tickets.  We then called ATN the next morning and they found our reservations and assigned us our choice of window/aisle seats.  Easy peasy!  

Insert gratuitous palm tree photo to break up all the text…

image
image
image
image

As a rule, I never book excursions through the cruise line.  In my experience and based on the comments of other cruisers, they tend to cost more money to see fewer attractions with more people on the tour, and in a shorter time frame than private excursions.  With one exception (see the Panama section of my Celebrity Equinox review!), I have had nothing but wonderful experiences working with private tour companies on all of my cruises.  The problem was that I was used to planning cruises in the Caribbean and Mediterranean where far more cruise ships and tourists visit on a regular basis, so there were always plenty of options from which to pick and lots of variety to find a tour that suited our specific needs.  This time around, I hoped to have the same experience, but I was worried that I would have trouble finding tour companies on such small islands (especially the less touristy atolls).  I spent a lot of time reading through reviews on Cruise Critic and on Trip Advisor, and I was pleasantly surprised that I could find at least one highly-recommended private tour company on each island.  Of course, I had more options in Bora Bora and Moorea than in Rangiroa and Fakarava, but that wasn’t a surprise.  

Sometime soon after we booked the cruise, PG had a sale where they offered $500 onboard credit per cabin.  I called them and they immediately applied that OBC to our account. We are not spa people, and with all the alcohol, specialty restaurants, and tips already included in our cruise fare, we considered breaking my rule and using our $500 towards PG’s excursions. We would only be in Rangiroa for 5 hours, so perhaps it would be safer to just go with a PG excursion and not have to worry about missing the ship?  We kept our options open, but knew we could fall back on this option if we didn’t think of anywhere else to spend that OBC.  

Then, about a year later, PG offered another promotion for Valentine’s Day 2017 where your cabin could get a box of chocolates, a bottle of sparkling wine, and $200 OBC (probably meant to spend on a couple’s massage at the spa, but it was just a normal OBC that could be used any way we wished!).  The fine print on the promotion specified that it could be combined with one other promotion!  Sweet!! So I called up PG and once again, they quickly applied this promotion to our cabin!  As luck would have it, DH’s birthday was that same week and my parents got him a $100 OBC to spend on the cruise as his birthday present haha  They did not know we already had $700 OBC, but no worries, by then I knew we would take a few of PG’s shore excursions. With $800 to spend, we could book 4 exciting tours that we probably wouldn’t have taken otherwise.  Although the thought still lingered on my mind that cruise ship excursions should be avoided whenever possible, I decided that with the PG being a small ship, it was not likely to have large groups on the tours, so it would likely be a good experience.  

I have made countdown candy jars for our last two cruises from the day we booked the cruise.  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.  DH said I wasn’t allowed to do that this time because we booked it over 600 days in advance!  I thought I waited long enough, so I started up our countdown once we were home and settled after the wedding.  It’s fun to have a daily reminder of such an exciting vacation coming up!

image

So now all that’s left to do is wait… and wait… and wait some more!  20 months is a LOOONG time to wait for a cruise!  One of the nice things about PG is that if they have a drop in price for your cabin category before final payment is made, they will honor that lower price.  I found it really interesting that over the 18 months between booking and final payment due date, there were no changes in price for our cabin category.  The price didn’t go up or go down- it stayed exactly the same the entire time!  I have never had that happen before, and I am not sure if that is typical of PG cruises? If so, I guess I didn’t need to be as diligent with checking for price drops as I do with other cruise lines haha

As promised, at exactly 60 days prior to embarkation, PG posted the shore
excursions on their website.  The process to pre-register for excursions was surprisingly easy!  They listed all the excursions offered on each port day, and all you needed to do to sign up was click the check box next to your name.  That was it!  Since you don’t pay for the excursion until you are on the ship, there was no need to enter payment info at this time.  I wasn’t even sure that I did it correctly since there is no “submit” or “done” or “okay” button.  After I signed DH and I up for our choice of excursions, I noticed that the overview page for our account listed all of our tours at the bottom of the page, so I took that as a confirmation that we were all set.

I will go into more details about each of our tours later in the review, but here is an overview of our itinerary and the names of each of our excursions:

Wednesday, 9/6           Tahiti               Embarkation Day

Thursday, 9/7              Huahine           Huahine Iti by 4×4 with PG

Friday, 9/8                  Bora Bora       Raanui half day Lagoon Safari Excursion, PG’s sunset catamaran sail

Saturday, 9/9               Bora Bora       PG’s private beach

Sunday, 9/10               Rangiroa          Aquarium Snorkel Excursion with PG

Monday, 9/11              Fakarava         Ato’s Blue Lagoon Tour

Tuesday, 9/12              Sea Day

Wednesday, 9/13         Taha’a              Motu Mahana (PG’s private beach)

Thursday, 9/14            Moorea            Aquablue Underwater Walk with PG

Friday, 9/15                Moorea            Nothing specific- just relaxing on the ship for our last day

Saturday, 9/16             Tahiti               Downtown Papeete before flying home

image

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

image

I also created a map with the locations of a bunch of the restaurants in Moorea, tour operators offices, the major hotels, and a few other key locations.  We wouldn’t have access to a GPS and we were renting a car for 6 days so this map would be handy so we didn’t get lost (not that you can get lost on an island with only one main road haha)

image

About one month before the cruise, we got a package in the mail with our cruise documents and luggage tags.  It comes in a nice leather folder, and includes a few brochures about shore excursions, bon voyage gifts, and other ship information. Most of this was information we had already seen on the PG website, but it still makes for a nice keepsake.  

image

Three weeks before we were flying out, I bought some XPF from Wells Fargo Bank.  We do not have a bank account there, but they were happy to sell us as much foreign currency as we wanted, with a $7.50 flat rate fee. The exchange rate wasn’t as good as it will be when we get to Tahiti, but I didn’t want to arrive without any local currency in my wallet.  We knew we needed some cash to pay for the taxi from the airport to the Moorea ferry, and if the airport’s ATM machine was broken/out of money/any other problem, we didn’t want to end up stranded after our plane landed so early in the morning.  It was worth the peace of mind to have some local currency on hand, so I ordered $100 worth and it arrived at the bank 4 business days later.  When I went back to pick it up, they told me I can also sell back any unused XPF bills (not coins) when I return from my trip.  

Cruise

Celebrity Equinox ~ Pre-cruise Planning

Leave a comment

Hi Everyone!  My name is Dana and I recently returned from an 11-night cruise on the Celebrity Equinox (March 14-25 sailing).  I am still sorting through the over 1,200 photos I took, but I wanted to get my review started!  As you can see from my cruise history listed below, I have taken several Carnival cruises in the last few years, as well as one Celebrity cruise on the Summit in 2010 (pre-dry dock renovations for the Solstice upgrades).  I tend to prefer port-intensive itineraries with fewer sea days, and I pick cruises based on the itinerary more than the ship itself.  I am a total Cruise Critic-aholic, and I love reading as many threads as possible to help me research my upcoming cruises. As you can also see in my signature below, I always write a detailed photo review when I return home from my cruises, with a journal-style day-by-day format.  This cruise will be no different!  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 closely resemble novels.  On the other hand, if you like reading about lots of details, and if you want to see TONS of photos, this is the review for you!  With all of my pre-cruise research, I didn’t find very many detailed photo reviews of the Equinox (specifically for this itinerary), so hopefully my review will help some of you to plan for your upcoming cruises! Please feel free to ask questions and post comments along the way… I welcome your feedback 🙂  

I took a Southern Caribbean cruise on the Carnival Valor last March with my boyfriend (he doesn’t want his name listed on this site, so I’ll just call him J), and within a few weeks of returning home, I felt that urge to book another cruise.  Life just isn’t as fun without an upcoming cruise to plan for!  I had my eye on a Carnival Breeze 8-night sailing when I checked my email and found an interesting email from Celebrity.  I have been getting emails from Celebrity since 2010, and I always intended to sail with them again.  The email said they were introducing new itineraries with overnight stays in one of the ports.  Strangely enough, when I opened the link, none of the itineraries that interested me had an overnight stay!  I found an 11-night cruise on the dates we wanted to sail, and the oceanview and balcony cabins had the same price!  This deal seemed too good to be true and we didn’t want to miss out on it, so that night, J and I called Celebrity and booked the cruise!  We decided that we were better off booking then while the balcony price was affordable, and taking the time to think it through (and get vacation days approved from work!) afterwards since we could always cancel if we changed our minds.  Also, we booked during a Pick You Perk sale so we opted for the Classic Beverage Package (more on that later!).

Here was the itinerary we booked:  Fort Lauderdale –> sea day –> Grand Cayman –> sea day –> Cartagena, Colombia –> Colon, Panama –> Puerto Limon, Costa Rica –> sea day –> Costa Maya, Mexico –> Cozumel, Mexico –> sea day –> Fort Lauderdale.  The cruise started on a Monday so we could fly down over the weekend a day or two early, and ended nearly 2 weeks later on Friday of Easter weekend.  Yay!  We are booked on a cruise!

image

So remember how I originally found out about this cruise because it was listed in an email featuring cruises with overnight stays in port? Well, despite there being no mention of that either on the Celebrity website or in our booking confirmation letter, we were about to hear some big news.  The day after we booked the cruise, I hopped on Cruise Critic to find the roll call for our sailing.  This was quite an active day in the roll call because apparently, that was the day the people already booked on the cruise found out about a big change in our itinerary. The order of all of our ports was being reversed, we were no longer stopping in Costa Maya, and we would now have an overnight stay in Cartagena, Colombia!  This didn’t surprise me too much considering our sailing was mentioned in that overnight stay email, but I found it a bit annoying that Celebrity sent out the promotional email before updating the itineraries on their website.  Basically we had just booked a cruise that had a very different itinerary from the cruise we were actually going to take, and Celebrity knew about it at the time we booked, but didn’t tell us!  In fact, it ended up taking Celebrity several months to update the itinerary on their website, so I imagine many other people who booked around the time we booked had the same problem. Thank goodness for Cruise Critic or I might not have known until I got on the ship!  Now THAT would have been a HUGE surprise!!!

The itinerary change made a few impacts on our cruise.  Firstly, we would now be in Grand Cayman with over 20,000 other cruise ship passengers!  When I research itineraries, one of the first things I check for is how many other ships will be in port with us.  This would not have been my first choice, especially since it is a tender port and I had a specific private excursion in mind that I wanted to book.  Secondly, as I already mentioned, we were no longer going to Costa Maya.  This bummed me out because I prefer visiting as many ports as possible on my cruise.  We used to have 6 ports and now we would only have 5 ports on an 11 night cruise. Thirdly, on the original itinerary, my birthday fell on a sea day.  I was looking forward to this, knowing it was a formal night (based on reviews I had read from that itinerary).  With the changes, my birthday now fell on our second day in Colombia.  I know we could have planned to just stay on the ship and make it into a relaxing sea day while docked, but I can’t give up the chance to explore a port (even if it is a port that I just explored the day before!).  So now I needed to find something exciting to do in Colombia that would be worthy of a birthday excursion!  And finally, of all the ports on the itinerary, Cartagena was probably the least interesting to me, and that was the port we were staying at overnight!  Go figure! I had lots of things I wanted to do and explore in all the other ports, but I found Cartagena to be very limited in things to do, and I read several reviews saying people who had been there before didn’t think there was enough sightseeing to fill one port day, let alone two!  It’s a good thing I love researching my cruises because planning this was going to take a lot of work!!

So why didn’t we cancel the cruise and find a different itinerary?  Well, I really did want to go to the other ports on this itinerary.  I had never been to any of these ports before (including Ft. Lauderdale!!), most of the ports were new to J as well (he had only been to Cozumel and Grand Cayman on prior cruises).  We were both looking forward to experiencing this part of the world for the first time together, including setting foot on a new continent in South America.  I was also thrilled to be going back on a Celebrity cruise, especially one on an S-class ship (I had been waiting years to check out that hot glass show!!)  And all the other itineraries that week were charging more money per night for the balcony cabin, so this cruise was just too good a deal to pass up.  I was determined to find amazing things for us to do each day in port, and I was looking forward to exploring the beautiful ship on our 4 sea days.  After a bit of thought and discussing our options, we committed to staying on the Equinox for the March 14th sailing.

Here is our revised itinerary map:

image

Six weeks after we booked the cruise, JetBlue finally released their March 2016 flight schedule.  We live in San Jose, CA, and we usually prefer to fly out of the San Jose airport.  It is small, rarely crowded, has short lines at TSA, and is just an easy, enjoyable airport to use.  Unfortunately, the only way to get to Ft. Lauderdale from San Jose would involve several plane changes.  No thank you!  I prefer direct flights whenever possible.  Luckily, JetBlue flies direct to FLL from San Francisco’s airport.  We could take a redeye on Saturday night, land in Florida early on Sunday morning, and have all day on Sunday to recover from jet lag, shop for last minute necessities at the supermarket, and soak up some beach time, before boarding the Equinox on Monday.  Sounds like a good plan to me!  With our flights booked, it was time to book our excursions.

As a rule, I never book excursions through the cruise line.  I would much prefer to do the research on my own and find a smaller, private company to show us the sites.  In my experience, private companies cost less money, take fewer people on their tours, and bring you to more sites with better attention to detail and customer service than the tours offered through the cruise line.  Based on the reviews I have read over the last 5 years, I KNEW I wanted to swim with the sting rays in Grand Cayman.  After being rejected by 3 or 4 companies because they were already booked that day or because their tour times didn’t match up to our port times, I finally found a company that worked for our schedule and booked the tour.  I also had an easy time researching Cozumel because there are so many cruises that dock there and they are a very touristy port, so there was a lot of information available to me.  

On the other hand,  Puerto Limon is not a very popular cruise port, and Cartagena and Colon also don’t see the same volume of cruise ships as compared to the more touristy islands in the Caribbean.  As a result, there aren’t as many private companies offering tours, nor are there very many reviews online to help me decide what to do each day.  In the end, I found that I only had two or three companies with decent reviews from each port, and these companies took waaaay longer than normal to reply to my emails.  I will go into more detail about what we did each day when I get to the day-by-day part of the review, but in summary, here is a list of the tours we planned:

Cozumel: Chankanaab National Park

Puerto Limon, Costa Rica: Oscar Brown Tours- Jaguar Rescue Center and Tortuguero Canal Combo Tour

Colon, Panama: Almiza Tours with My Friend Mario- Gatun Locks, Canoe Ride, Waterfall, and Embera Village

Cartagena, Colombia: ‘Free Tour Cartagena’ Walking Tour, Chiva Bus Night
Rumba Tour, and El Totumo Mud Volcano

Grand Cayman: Captain Marvin Three-Stop Stingray/Snorkel Tours

By the end of July, we had all the port days planned out, and hotels and flights booked.  All that was left to do was count the days until we flew to Florida!  Or so I thought…

In September, J and I took a trip to visit his parents, and my parents went too so our parents could meet.  Little did I know, J used this trip as an opportunity to propose!  So now J is no longer my boyfriend but instead my fiancé 😀  It’s a good thing I was mostly finished planning for this cruise because now I had A LOT of planning to do for our wedding!!  J actually commented on that because he knows how much researching and planning I do for everything, and he knew I would be happy to focus all my efforts on planning the wedding without having to worry about the cruise too. Unfortunately, having this cruise planned meant that our honeymoon would have to be delayed until long after our wedding as this cruise used up all of our vacation days.  Despite that, I refused to call this our honeymoon as it was 6 months before the wedding!  

But anyway, back to stuff pertaining to this cruise hehe  In mid-February, I emailed all our private excursion companies to reconfirm that our tours were all set.  With all our tours confirmed and our cruise documents printed and organized, we were ready for vacation!

Up next: our pre-cruise stay in Florida, but here’s a little sunset photo to hold you over until then…

image
Cruise

Carnival Valor cruise ~ The Planning Phase

Leave a comment

I think I am setting a new record!  Somehow this is my 3rd Carnival cruise in the last 3 years, as well as the 3rd time my ship has changed itineraries shortly after my sailing!  I sailed on the Victory in 2012 on the Southern Caribbean route from San Juan, but then it switched home ports with the Valor a few weeks later.  Then I sailed on the Sunshine in September 2013 on a 12-night Mediterranean cruise which only had a few more sailings in Europe before she came over to the Caribbean.  And now, once again, I am sailing on the Valor on her very last sailing out of Puerto Rico before she switches home ports with the Liberty!  I’m starting to think that Carnival looks at my cruise bookings to decide which ships should change home ports haha  

Anyway, I always write a detailed photo-filled review after my cruise, but I sometimes wonder if anyone benefits from it since most people only think to search for reviews of their ship, but when the ship changes itineraries and home ports, the old reviews become obsolete.  I hope that some of you may find this review helpful, be it because you are sailing on the Valor and want to hear about the ship itself and see some current photos, or because you are sailing on the Liberty and want some ideas for planning what to do in each port on this very port-intensive itinerary.  Worst case scenario: no one finds this review of any use, but I get to re-live my amazing vacation as I write it, and will end up with a travel log that I can look back on when I miss having sand between my toes. It’s a win win!  As I always do, I will make all of my posts in a larger purple font so it is easier to find the review posts in case you want to skip over the comments.

So let’s start at the very beginning (It’s a very good place to start…)  Back in July, my boyfriend (he doesn’t want me to use his name on here, so I’ll just call him J) and I were drinking margaritas on my patio, and talking about how much fun we had on our July 4th weekend trip to Vegas.  We agreed that we wanted to travel somewhere together again, maybe in March for my birthday, and I suggested that we should take a cruise.  I loved every port on the Southern Caribbean itinerary I took on the Victory a few years ago, so I suggested that we take the Valor cruise.  We live in the San Francisco Bay Area, so we are quite far from Puerto Rico.  I was scared to think of what the flights would cost us, but it was worth a shot.  If the flights were too pricey, we could always look into taking a different cruise from Florida or California.  I checked the JetBlue website and was totally shocked!  They had roundtrip flights from San Jose (our closest airport) to Puerto Rico for $464 each!!  The flights were not direct (which I knew, because we can only fly directly to NYC or Boston from San Jose), so we would have to connect at JFK airport in NY.  So basically that meant that we were paying $116 for each leg of our flight (CA to NY, NY to PR, and back)!  Holy cow!! I usually pay close to $500 just to fly from CA to NY!  This was such an amazing deal on flights that we knew we had to book them ASAP. Fingers crossed that there won’t be a late-winter blizzard in NY to mess up our plans!  

After the flights were booked, we called Carnival to book the cruise.  I went back and forth a lot on what type of cabin we should book.  On my last two Carnival cruises, I was very happy in my inside cabin mid-ship on deck 7. We were two floors up from the bars and nightlife, and two floors down from the buffet and pools on Lido deck.  The problem was that on both of those cruises, I had the ‘two twin beds’ set up (the first cruise was with one of my best friends, and the second was with my mom). We arranged the beds to be perpendicular to each other, and had a ton of open floor space in the middle of the cabin so it never felt cramped.  I also really liked the value of booking an inside cabin since I spend very little time in my room and prefer to invest most of my budget into activities in port.

This time around, I would be cruising with my boyfriend so we would have the ‘one king bed’ set up.  Based on photos I have seen in other reviews, I knew that the one big bed in the middle of the inside cabin would leave nearly no floor space, and I was afraid we would be tripping over each other all week.  That lead me to consider an oceanview cabin.  It would be nice to have a couch to sit down on, and the extra square feet would be great for having more space to walk around. I ruled out a balcony cabin because they were twice the price, and there’s plenty of public outside space if we want to be outside so no reason to spend the extra money on that.  

Once I decided on the oceanview cabin, I had to choose a deck.  I definitely wanted to be mid-ship.  The kitchen galley for the Valor takes up most of deck 3 mid-ship, and I have read many comments on these boards about the risks of having a cabin below the galley because they start preparing breakfast very early in the morning, and I did not want my beauty sleep to be interrupted by the banging or cleaning or whatever it is that they do up there!  Our cruise was in March to coincide with my birthday, but I know that also is when colleges have spring break.  It made me a bit nervous to book a cabin on deck 1 during spring break, fearing that college kids would pick the cheapest deck on the ship and pile 4 people into all the inside cabins, and then be really loud and annoying at night.  In the end, I decided to ignore my fears and we went with cabin 1301: a mid-ship oceanview cabin on deck 1 (hoping that spring breakers would stick with cruises leaving from Florida instead of flying to Puerto Rico).

Now that our cruise was officially booked, it was time to start the countdown!!

image

This dry erase board hung on my fridge and I updated the countdown daily.  I also picked up these 2 jars and filled them with one piece of candy for every day until we left for the cruise (I had candy corn in my jar, and J got peanut butter M&Ms- he was very happy with the candy choice I got for him haha).  It was so fun to eat one piece of candy together each day as we looked forward to our upcoming vacation.

I spent the next few months researching on Cruise Critic and getting back into cruise-planning-mode (I really missed all the planning I had to do for the Mediterranean cruise in 2013!)  I became obsessed with reading reviews and checking the ports of call boards for more information.  J spent a lot of time teasing me for all the time I spent on Cruise Critic haha  He claims that he likes to plan things and be involved, but I don’t think he knew how much of a planner I am until we started planning this cruise.  We booked the cruise 8 months in advance and we had a lot of other things going on through the fall, so J didn’t want to worry about the cruise until after New Years.  Well that just wouldn’t work for me!  Half the fun of taking a cruise is all the anticipation and time spent planning for it!  To me, the planning makes me feel like I am already partly on vacation, so there was no way I would wait until January to start my research.  I continued to secretly research on Cruise Critic, and took lots of notes that I could share with J when he was ready to talk about it.

A few months after we booked, there was a big shake up on Cruise Critic: the Valor and the Liberty were going to switch home ports in March!  After a brief freak-out session, I checked my booking and was happy to see that I was not affected (although I would have been thrilled if the swap happened in early March and I’d get to sail on the Liberty, I was just very thankful that we booked the 3/15 sailing and not the 3/22 sailing which was now essentially cancelled and turned into a repositioning cruise to Miami). As it turned out, we were taking the last sailing for the Valor on the Southern Caribbean route.  I was a bit nervous that this would somehow affect the quality of my cruise.  Would the staff be slacking off because it’s their last cruise on this itinerary?  Would the ship stop re-stocking and run out of supplies?  I was hopeful that the staff would step up and give us a fabulous vacation experience, but it did make me a little worried.

Then, in mid-November, I got a call that JetBlue cancelled the 10am flight we were scheduled to take from JFK to SJU, and they put us on a 6:59am flight instead. The slight problem with that is we were taking a redeye from California the night before, and we weren’t landing until 7:24am!  It might be kinda hard to catch that connecting flight if we are still hovering somewhere over Pennsylvania!! 

After some time on the phone with customer service, they were able to put us on a 2:15pm flight that afternoon. It was definitely annoying that they just took away our Friday afternoon of touring Puerto Rico, and that we would have to check into the hotel and grab dinner fairly late considering we wouldn’t get much sleep on the redeye the night before. At least on the bright side, my parents live 10 minutes from JFK airport, so we would get to have brunch with them during our layover!  This is why you should never book flights on the day of the cruise! Luckily we were flying in on Friday so there was no chance of missing the ship as a result of this change.  We crossed our fingers that this was the only hassle we’ll have to deal with for our vacation!!

Cruise

Carnival Sunshine 12-Night Mediterranean Cruise ~ Introduction

Leave a comment

I just returned home from 17 fabulous days in Europe, and I wanted to take the time to share my experiences with all of you. Every night of the trip, I jotted down a few notes of what we did each day, so I plan to write that up as a journal style review, and I will include tons of photos along the way! But first, a little background info…

I am 31 and have cruised 3 times before (twice on Carnival, once on Celebrity- see my prior blog postings for details on those sailings) I started planning this cruise in December after returning home from my last cruise. I have always wanted to go to Italy, and I love cruising, so I decided to combine the two and take a Mediterranean cruise. I looked at the itineraries on several cruise lines, but found there was no deal as great as this itinerary. It was a 12-night cruise (which I liked because I wanted to make it worth spending over $1000 on airfare), and it started and ended in different ports (which was great because I could have a few extra days to explore those 2 cities). I also liked that it would be on a newly renovated ship, but several months after the inaugural cruise so all the kinks should be worked out. Here is the itinerary for the cruise: Venice, Dubrovnik, Athens, Izmir, Sicily, Naples, Rome, Florence, Marseille, and Barcelona.

The day before I planned to book the cruise, I called my mom to tell her about my plans. She has never been on a cruise before because my dad gets sea sick, so she invited herself to join me. The next day, we called Carnival and booked an inside cabin midship on deck 7. I was happy with that location, knowing the benefits of a centrally-located cabin 2 decks below Lido, 2-3 decks above the nightlife entertainment, and sandwiched between 2 cabin decks, but mom really wanted a window. We agreed to watch the prices and if an oceanview cabin became the same price as our inside cabin, we would switch. We booked early saver, and I checked for price drops nearly every day. That was in the last week of January.

Then the Triumph incident happened! While that was an unfortunate situation, and I felt badly for the passengers involved and all of the people who had to change their vacation plans during the repairs, I was thrilled at what it did for our cruise fare! By the end of March, we got $800 back off the original cruise price! Thank goodness we booked early saver!!

Around the same time, Carnival decided to extend the original 7-week dry dock transformation of the Destiny into the Sunshine in order to make more thorough upgrades to the ship’s mechanics. This meant canceling Sunshine’s first 2 sailings. I had originally joined the roll call for my sailing back in January, and up until this point, it was fairly quiet and had very few participants. We were still over a half a year away from our cruise, and were just starting to plan excursions. When the Sunshine cruises were cancelled, many of them decided to change to our sailing. All of a sudden, we had an extremely active roll call! These “Sunshine Castaways” as they called themselves were at a very different phase of their planning as they had already booked all of their excursions, and were ready to fly to Europe in 3 weeks. When they rebooked onto the September sailing, they needed to find new groups for their tours, so this was when I was able to set up my own tours.

I never take ship tours as I think they cost more money, see fewer sites, and are more crowded then the private tours. Instead, I prefer to research each port and find a private excursion company. I used Cruise Critic to find people to join me on each tour. I will go into the details of each tour when I get to the daily trip journal part of this review, but I will just briefly mention that I organized 3 tours with Rome in Limo for Naples, Rome, and Florence, and we joined tours organized by other roll call members for Athens, Izmir, and Messina. We decided to do Venice, Dubrovnik, Marseilles, and Barcelona on our own without formal tours.

We booked direct flights on Delta from JFK to Venice and home from Barcelona, and we upgraded to the economy comfort seats because we wanted a little more leg room and a power outlet. I guess that’s it for the planning phase.  Before I get in to the day-to-day trip journal part of this review, I wanted to mention a few things about the cruise…

Itinerary– We definitely booked this cruise because of all the amazing ports it visits. Yes, it was a hectic, tiring 12 days, but it was an incredible experience to spend a few hours in each of these ports. The cruise started in Venice on a Sunday morning, but we didn’t sail away until Monday afternoon, so that gave us a chance to enjoy a dinner and evening in Venice (plus, we flew in a day early so we ended up with 3 half days to explore this port!) Then, after 12 days in Croatia, Greece, Turkey, Italy, and France, we ended the cruise in Barcelona, where we stayed for 3 nights in a hotel, giving us tons of time to enjoy this fabulous city. I guess the only slight flaw in the itinerary is that our 2 sea days were both within the first week of the cruise, leaving us with 5 very hectic port days in a row at the end of the cruise (followed by 3 days of touring in Barcelona), so I would have appreciated it if one of those two sea days was later in the second half of the cruise, but that’s really just a tiny flaw in an overall amazing itinerary!

Embarkation process in Venice– This went very smoothly. We arrived at the cruise terminal by 10:15am, checked in by 10:45am, and were on the ship by 11am! We did have to put our carry on bags through the x-ray machine (they actually made us do that every time we got back on the ship in Venice- Sunday morning during embarkation, Sunday night when we returned from exploring the city all day, and Monday afternoon before sail away), but no one seemed to care what we brought with us. We did not have a chance to stop at a grocery store for wine or liquor, but I doubt it would have been a problem if we did try to carry that on with us 😉

Cabin– We were in cabin 7192, which was midway between the forward and mid-ship elevators. The halls were generally quiet, and the location was very convenient to get to the other areas of the ship. The cabin had more than enough storage space, with 3 small dresser drawers, a cabinet with 2 shelves, and 3 closets to hang clothes. We also took advantage of the 2 shelves on either side of the mirror in the bathroom to store all our toiletries. There were two single plug American outlets (one below the vanity mirror and one behind the TV set) and 1 European outlet (which is where they plugged in our mini-fridge so we didn’t have access to it). Since we were one of the first people to board the ship, we went straight to Guest Services and requested a mini-fridge for my mom’s medicines. It was waiting for us when we got back to the cabin that night, and it was cold enough to safely store a few extra cups of yogurt and some drinks. 

When we first arrived in the room, our beds were set up as 2 twin beds (as requested), but they were parallel to each other and took up nearly the entire floor space of the cabin. We asked our stewardess to move them so they were perpendicular to each other, which freed up a ton of floor space in the middle of the room. I highly recommend people to do this if they are sharing an inside cabin and don’t want to sleep in one big bed. It was nice having the space to walk around and not trip over each other for 12 days!! Here are some pics of the cabin (I have two bathroom photos too, but have not uploaded them to my computer yet, so I’ll post those later): 

image
image
image
image

Steward– Our head stewardess was Yelena and she was great. She gave us extra towels and whatever else we asked for, and she even challenged me to a towel folding competition when she found out I went to the class on my previous cruise. She had a team of two or three girls working with her, and they were all fairly thorough. We did come back to the cabin a few times while they were cleaning, but other than that, we rarely saw any of them.

Food– I thought the food was very good on this cruise. I ate breakfast every morning up on Lido deck, and became a quick fan of the breakfast burritos. We ate dinner every night in the MDR, and the food was always hot and served as we ordered it. My mom has some major food allergies, and she was very concerned about eating on the ship. One of the things that impressed us most during the cruise was how Carnival handled this situation. There is a lady named Irena (I think she was an assistant maitre’d or something like that) who went over my mom’s allergies with her on the second night of the cruise. We ate dinner in Venice on the first night of the cruise, and when we arrived in the MDR on the second night, Irena said she has been looking for us last night and couldn’t find us! Then, every night after that, she brought over a copy of the following night’s menu so my mom could pick out what she wanted to eat and the chef could prepare it without any of the unsafe ingredients. We found out that there is actually a separate chef who handles all special needs meals to make sure there is no cross-contamination. There were some nights that she and I ordered the same dish, but they looked totally different because hers was cooked without the things she is allergic to so it was safe for her to eat. Irena really went above and beyond to make sure my mom enjoyed every meal in the dining room (including brunch on the 2 sea days!).

Room Service– My mom doesn’t function in the mornings without coffee, so she ordered room service every day. She put out the menu on the door each night with a 15 minute delivery window request, and the food arrived on time every day except the last morning (one day it even arrived 20 minutes early, so we weren’t awake yet! oops!) 

Lido Buffet-.When they renovated the ship, they designed the buffet in stations, so the same 6 or 7 dishes are available at a few different stations around the buffet. This was good and bad- It definitely helped limit the length of the lines, but I also thought that it limited the options available. Maybe it’s just because I was eating breakfast there and there aren’t as many options for breakfast foods, but I thought the selection was somewhat limited. There were bread stations with muffins, danishes, bagels, and things like that, there were hot food stations with powdered eggs, potatoes, sausage, and bacon (no bacon police!), and other stations for cereal and fruit. I never ate lunch of dinner up here, so I have no comment about the food selection or lines during those meals. One big disappointment was that they only have 2 omelette stations on the entire ship! They are both located all the way aft on Lido deck in the Havan Bar/JiJi/Cucina del Capitano section, but they always had long lines when I arrived there. On my last Carnival cruise, they set up many more omelette stations, so the ones in the aft were never crowded, but that was not the case on this cruise. Luckily, I developed an obsession with the breakfast burritos from Blue Iguana, so I ate there most mornings instead (and I also loved that I could get watermelon from their salsa bar!) 

Weather– We got fairly lucky with our weather during this cruise. We had a few cloudy days in Venice, and short periods of rain in Dubrovnik and Pompeii, but it was dry and sunny the rest of the cruise. The temperatures ranged from the mid-90’s in Athens and Izmir, to the mid-70’s through all of Italy. Unfortunately, there were very high winds and rough seas the entire second week of the cruise, which left us stumbling around the ship like drunken fools (they even had to cancel the evening show on the last 2 nights because it was not safe for the dancers and prop control people to perform with the rough seas). The rough seas also forced the Captain to slow down the ship when sailing between Livorno and Marseilles, so we arrived in port 2 hours late. Luckily, we were not sea sick at all during the cruise, but I am sure there were others who were not as lucky. 

Entertainment staff– The cruise director Noonan was great. He was funny and entertaining when he hosted the love and marriage show and other events. Lexi and Ben were also great as members of the entertainment staff, and they were also in charge of crowd control when we were getting off the ship each morning so we got to chat a lot with them. We went to the shows nearly every night, and generally enjoyed what we were watching (although there was one magician who was not very good, but I’ll get to that later). 

Comedians/Comedy lounge– The lounge they use for the comedy shows is fairly small for the number of guests on the ship. We arrived 15 minutes before the show one night, and had to sit on the tiny ledge of the windowsill because there were no other seats available. As a result, we never tried to go to another show because we didn’t feel like dealing with the crowds, but friends told us that one show they went to only had about 5 people in the audience, so I guess it varies! The comedian we saw was just okay- he had a few funny jokes, and a few misses, but I guess that could be said of most comedians because it’s a very subjective form of entertainment.

Stuff to do on the ship– Because this was such a port-intensive itinerary, we did not have many opportunities to explore the ship. The Fun Times offered limited daytime activities on port days (for obvious reasons), but did offer more options on the 2 sea days. We played several games of trivia (and even won a ship on a stick at one of the games!) As I just mentioned, we went to the show nearly every night, so that took up most of our evenings. My mom spent some time donating money to the casino, and I spent about 2 hours laying out on Serenity deck on the first sea day, and I also went to the piano bar one night, but other than that, we didn’t really have a chance to explore much of what the ship offered. We woke up around 6:15am every morning, so we were ready for bed by 10-11pm every night, so I guess that also limited our time to explore the ship at night. I never made it to the disco, and we did not eat in any of the specialty restaurants so I cannot comment on that.

General condition of the ship– There was a lot of talk about problems on the Sunshine after her rapid renovation earlier this year. Our cabin was on deck 7, and we saw a bucket in our hallway to collect water from a dripping sprinkler nearly every day of the cruise (although I will note that the bucket was not always lined up to where the water dripped, so there was a bit of a water stain on the carpet sometimes). We also noticed some drips from the ceiling while waiting on deck 1 near the forward elevators/stairs to get off the ship. This by no means ruined our experience, but it is what it is. We also noticed that some of the exterior railings looked a bit rusty, as if they forgot to re-paint those areas during the drydock. Other than that, the ship looked beautiful! Although we only had an inside cabin, it definitely had new carpet, linens, cabinets, flat screen TV, and a renovated bathroom (with a HUGE shower compared to what I have had on previous cruise ships! haha) The public spaces on the ship all looked shiny and new, and I really enjoyed the more subdued color scheme and vibe of the ship. Even though I only spent a few hours actually laying out on Serenity deck, I loved that I could always see the pretty waterfall feature when walking around outside (like in the mornings during breakfast, or when I took photos of the port area after getting back on the ship in the afternoons). Overall, I really didn’t have much to complain about with the ship, and I think Carnival did a great job with all the renovations. 

I think that covers everything I wanted to mention about the ship. Up next, I will review what we did each day (but first, I have to finish sorting through my 3000 photos and upload everything onto my computer!!) 

Cruise

Carnival Victory Cruise ~ Introduction

Leave a comment

December 6, 2012

This is my review of my Southern Caribbean vacation and cruise on the Carnival Victory from the December 9th sailing. This review is split into 2 sections. The first section is specific to the Victory as a cruise ship and about sailing on Carnival in general. The second section will be a play-by-play journal style review of what we did each day, with tons of details and photos about our excursions. So here we go…

Cabin- We were in cabin 7335, which is the first inside cabin immediately forward of the mid-ship elevators. I was nervous about possibly hearing a lot of noise from the elevators (either because of the dings as the elevator arrived on our floor, or from people congregating outside our room and talking while they wait for the elevator). Fortunately, we didn’t hear any noise at all from the elevators, and it was very convenient to be in a cabin so close to the stairs/elevator. The cabin had more than enough storage space, with 3 small dresser drawers, a cabinet with 2 shelves, and 3 closets to hang clothes. We also took advantage of the medicine cabinet in the bathroom to store all our toiletries. There were two single plus outlets, and my Belkin multi-outlet plug worked perfectly.

Steward- I think is name was Gerard, but I’m honestly not sure. He did his job but we rarely saw him. I used a dry erase board to leave him notes for extra ice or towels and he always got us whatever we asked for. He didn’t confiscate the vodka we snuck on the ship or my Belkin multiplug outlet, he made good towel animals, and he opened my bottle of wine for me and left us the corkscrew in the room.

Food- Most of the food was edible but not very good, and it was often overcooked. There were many nights when Beth couldn’t find anything good to eat in the MDR at dinner (or what they brought her was so overlooked that it was inedible) so we had to go to the Lido buffet for her to find something to eat. 

Waiters- We were seated at one of the big 10 person tables when you first walk in the Pacific MDR. Our wait staff had to serve 3 of these large tables, so they were overworked and had very slow service. They all seemed like nice people, but we didn’t get to know them as I have gotten to know my wait staff in prior cruises because they were so busy serving all the big tables. It was also very hard to find a bar waiter to get a soda, and this surprised me because they knew that Beth had a soda card, so they should have come to her every night! 

Lido Buffet- We never had to wait on long lines (maybe two or three people at most) because we figured out early on how the buffet area was set up. There are several stations all over the deck (including 2 out by the main pool, two along the long span in the restaurant area, one in the middle of the restaurant area, and two more near the aft pool). The stations all basically served the same food, so if there as a long line in one area, we just went to a different station. The problem was that not everyone figured this out, so the buffet had a terrible flow. People would just all wait on the first line they got to so the deli/chopsticks lines were long but there was no wait at some of the other stations with the exact same food available. By the end of the trip, people figured it out and there was no line at the deli at all.

Flow/layout of the ship- Much in the way that the Lido buffet had a terrible layout, we noticed that the entire ship just didn’t flow well. For example, you could only take the aft elevators to reach the Pacific MDR, and if you wanted to go from dinner to the lobby bar or guest services, you had to go down one floor, walk all the way forward, and then go back up to deck 3 because the galley prevents you from walking the length of the ship on deck 3.

Weather- we had mildly rough seas the entire week. I felt the ship rocking and moving every night. I am lucky that I don’t get motion sickness but I can imagine that others weren’t as lucky. The weather was warm and sunny every day, not too humid, but we had on and off rain in St. Lucia and Barbados.

Drinking water- The water from the sink and in the buffet/MDR had a weird aftertaste and it didn’t quench my thirst. I didn’t get sick from it like in Mexico, but I just didn’t care for the taste (and I am not picky at all about water taste- I’ll drink any brand of bottled water and usually have no problem with regular tap water).

entertainment staff- cruise director Hennie was great. He was funny and entertaining when he hosted the love and marriage show and other events. Amanda was also good as the host at the comedy club. Most of the other entertainment staff seemed like they were sick of doing their jobs and they were unenthusiastic. The singers in the bar/casino area were just okay, although there was one lady who was horrible. 

Comedians- I went to 3 adult comedy shows by 3 different comedians. The two earlier in the week (Johnny Millwater and Mark Simmons) were good and had a few funny jokes but I’ve definitely heard better comedy elsewhere. Dylan Mandlsohn was HORRIBLE on the last night. No one laughed at any of his “jokes” because they weren’t funny at all, and many people walked out before he finished. I sincerely hope that Carnival doesn’t rehire him!

Stuff to do on the ship- there were very few things to do on the ship at night. I understand that this was a port intensive itinerary and that there aren’t as many daytime activities while passengers are off the ship in port, but that doesn’t explain the lack of nighttime entertainment. There were many nights when we would walk up and down the 5th floor searching for things to do, only to find the bars/clubs/piano bar completely empty and no good nightlife. I went to the comedy shows 3 times, both of the big productions on the formal nights, and the juggler, but those things only lasted 30-60 minutes. 

Cheers bar package- We only had 1 sea day and are not big drinkers (we didn’t even finish the half liter of vodka that we snuck on the ship!) so we did not sign up for the bar package. We met a group of guys who did get it and they said that they were cut off after ordering 15 drinks, but the bartenders let their friends with extra drinks left use one of their drinks to give to them.

Chair Hogs- Even on the sea day, we never had any trouble finding two lounge chairs together on lido/panorama deck. It never felt crowded and we never noticed people deserting their chairs for long periods of time. The following sign was posted near the towel hut:

image

But we never saw any staff removing towels from chairs or enforcing the policy. Maybe they would have if there was a chair shortage. We actually preferred to sit on deck 10/panorama because it had a better view and was out of the walking path of other passengers. My only complaint was that there was very little shade, and I ended up pulling my lounge chair under the stairs behind where the band played just to get some shade to avoid a sunburn. Also, we didn’t spend anytime in Serenity because we wanted to stay by the lido pool where the action was, but the handful of times that I did walk passed Serenity, there were always lounge chairs available, but the hammocks and clamshells were always taken. 

Secret decks- I found the door to the secret decks on two floors on different days, but both times they were locked and had signs saying that the decks were closed due to high winds (even while the ship was docked in port). We had lots of windy days, so maybe the decks are open during better weather? I was a little disappointed because I was looking forward to seeing the views off the front of the ship, but no worries! The views off the sides and back of the ship were nice too 🙂

Uncategorized

Introduction

Leave a comment

Welcome to my blog!  

November 9, 2010

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

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