Part 2
So after I re-read what I wrote last night, I realized that I made a mistake - Thursday was NOT Aruba day, that was our first "Fun Day at Sea". So since we weren't in a port somewhere, I wanted to talk about the ship itself and some stories of what we did in our free time. Aruba will be the 'harrowing climax' of the story (tee hee hee).
Ok, so first of all, this SOB is fuckin huge!!! It's 893 feet long (3 football fields!!), weighs a gazillion tons, has 12 decks and can carry 1050 staff and 2642 passengers. WOW. Of course, she cruises the high seas at a light breaking speed of 21 knots.
This ship has the following: jogging track, children's pool, aerobic room, a full service hair salon and spa (complete with kick ass sauna overlooking the front of the ship), a New York Deli (reubens and stuff), a disco, a teen disco, photo studio, library, a piano bar, a casino, a casino bar, a karoke bar, a jazz and cigar bar, 2 pool bars, a golf simulator room, an internet cafe, a chinese food place, a 24 hour pizzeria, a hamburger/hot dog/french fry kinda place (ate here more than once - it was very good!), a children's "camp" kinda thing (they babysit for free all day long!!!), 2 huge dining rooms, a topless beach area for the women (I didn't make it up there, but there's a sign that says "Topless area - No cameras or video devices), a sports bar, a little cafe type place (cappachinos and yummy strawberry cheescake sold here!), a formal wear shop, a jewlery shop (good prices) and several other little shops selling misc items. I could go on forever.
After we had gotten to our rooms, we had to book our excursions for the week (they fill up fast), unpack and EXPLORE this huge ship! Lemme tell you - to explore, get some good walking shoes on cuz this was a helluva haul!!! And it's a damn good thing we didn't try to go to dinner the first night because it was hell trying to find out how to get from Point A to Point B. The theory of "shortest distance between two points is a straight line" just didn't work here.
Sunday night before we left San Juan, we all had to go thru the "muster" drill that includes putting on your lifejacket, listening for the special horn blows and trying to figure out what lifeboat you're supposed to be on if this thing should go Titanic on us. Well, I told you we'd already been drinking all day, so we were all drunk for this drill and made a complete mockery of it. Someone asked an honest question and one of our drunkards answered with "Place your head between your legs and kiss your ass goodbye!!!" Yeah, they were a little pissed.... It's a good thing that we didn't have to do that for real cuz we would have never been able to get back to the correct deck!!!
As far as food goes, their breakfast absolutely sucked. You could go to one of 2 places for breakfast. Either the formal dining room or the breakfast-buffet-style out on the Lido Deck. We usually ate thru the buffet for breakfast. Powdered scrambled eggs, (good) bacon, rubber sausages, dry-as-hell potato cake/hash brown thingys, not toasted toast, danishes and cold cereal. I only ate breakfast once in the formal dining room and wondered why they served the same crappy food that was on the Lido deck in an atmosphere with such ambiance.
You did have one more option for breakfast, and that was room service. Now there's was only a continental breakfast, but they would deliver precious COFFEE in the morning so we didn't have to walk all the way to the other end of the boat to get it! The way it worked was that there was a card in your stateroom that listed all items available and you would put your quantities down of what you wanted, the time that you wanted it delivered, then hang it on your door handle and room service would pick it up and deliver your items at the time that you specified. All wonderful and good - right? There were some ornery ones in our group! Jeanie and I placed our card outside our door one night only asking for a pot of coffee and two danishes. Well a few in our group must have stumbled back late from the bars and thought they would be funny and get us a few extra items on our breakfast request!!! The next morning, room service knocks at 6:30 and when he brings the tray in, you can see his muscles bulging from carrying all this food!!! They ordered us 5 tomato juices, 5 boxes of cereal, CHOCOLATE milk (no white), 8 apple juices, 15 pieces of not toasted toast, 8 danishes and a pot of coffee and 2 thingys of cream. I'm sitting here thinking about this and am laughing so hard I have tears running down my face. Here's the pic:
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So in return to those that were to think so kindly of us, we went and banged on everybody else's door, and told them to come to Kathleen & Jeanie's buffet to eat some food!!
The Lido buffet was also an option for lunch and dinner too, but the food at the buffet was none too impressive. I usually grabbed a burger from the Grille and took it back to the room for lunch. Then dinner was always a FEAST. It was pure gluttony. If you wanted surf-n-turf, then they brought you a huge lobster and a huge piece of Prime Rib, complete with baked potato. If you wanted to also just try the salmon entree, they brought you the whole thing! So we did alot of food sharing! The food was really good and the desserts always looked so pretty that you were almost afraid to eat it and mess it up. I said ALMOST.
I did get a full body massage in the spa and it was wonderful. It cost me $130 and I did not care.
I didn't play the casino as the odds are alot heavier than what they are in Vegas and of course, the boat is heavily favored.
We all dressed up for the Captain's cocktail party on Tuesday night and had our picture taken - I'll post that whenever I get it scanned. The only thing that I didn't like was that Carnival was camera happy. No matter what you're doing, there's a camera in your face. If you're at the Lido bar, there's one of their video cameras there to catch someone in a "laughing" moment. At the end of the day, they compile all these "bits" from around the ship and create a video that you can watch on your stateroom TV the next day. They took pictures EVERY night at dinner and it didn't matter that you just have a mouthful of food - they were like "SMILE!"....as the lettuce peeks out between my two front teeth...If you're getting off the ship there are at least 3 different camera guys with different settings wanting to take your picture as you get off the ship. No thank you buddy - I'm tired of fake-smiling.
The TV was kinda OK - you get the International CNN, the Cartoon Network, all the major networks, and like USA, TBS and a first run movie that loops continuosly all day. What I found interesting is that there wasn't a choice for a weather channel - hmmmm....wonder why that is?? (Sarcasm)
Your rooms were cleaned twice a day - once in mid-morning (usually while you were at breakfast) and again at night (while you were at dinner). At night, the room stewards would straighten your bed (had you messed it up), turn down your covers, placed a chocolate on each bed and the daily "Carnival Capers" news flyer thingy that detailed all the activities that you could do the following day. They also placed a "towel animal" on one of the beds - these were cute - take a looksee:
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There was a different one every night.
It was really neat how the 18 of us that kinda knew each other, but not really, got to be so close over the course of 7 days. I was the only one from Columbus as the rest were from the Cinci area, but by the end of the cruise, we were all family. All the guys had seen most of the girls in just towels or bra & underwear stuff and no one cared. I know I would go out there in just a Tshirt & undies and didn't care at all. We ran in and out of each other's rooms as if they were our own. We do have a "post-cruise" party that Tony and Amy are going to have where we can swap all our pics. I think I'm going to have a video made when we can get everybody's pics together.
Next post: Aruba and disembarking for home.