Embarkation was fairly swift - we were all checked in by 11:30 and boarded about an hour later. The ship is fairly impressive, having a 6-story atrium and not as much glitz as I had thought. For dinner, they put us at a table for six (my party consisted of myself, my wife, and our four children). While I will miss the ability to get to know others at our table, it's probably for the best as we'd rather not inflict our kids on others.
The rooms, inside cabins on the Empress deck, were pretty large but not, it seems, the promised 185 square feet. In measuring it with my arm span, it seems the room is 9 feet by 18 feet, making a total of 162 feet. Regardless, it was larger than our inside cabin on the Sea Princess. The shower is actually large enough for two people. We knew there was no refridgerators in the rooms but the lack of hair dryers was a surprise. There was a very pronounced roll - more than I've had in the Caribbean. My youngest son was feeling a bit queasy after dinner, but one Bonine tablet cleared that up pretty quickly.
As I have a tradition of doing on cruises, I arose before daylight to watch the sunrise. Unfortunately, a thick fog bank prevented any glimpse of the sun. I've not seen fog like this in the Caribbean but am used to it from growing up on the Texas coast. As the sun crested the horizon, I could see blue skies above, implying the fog bank was fairly thin. It burned off pretty quickly once the sun shined on it.
I took my laptop up to the Lido area to work on this review, and was surprised and disappointed to find that there are no tea bags and no hot water dispenser. Not being a coffee drinker, I seem to be at a disadvantage here. Fortunately, the apple juice was pretty tasty. After asking a waiter, I managed to find the tea bags and hot water, so I was much happier.
I was surprised at the weather. I had used weather.com to look up the forecast for the ports, and it was pretty warm. However, that first day at sea it was downright chilly even after the fog burned off. The pools were too cold for all but the hardiest souls, and the hot tubs were warm but not hot. The steam room was excellent, and I went there several times.
The ship is filled to capacity, and there are crowds everywhere, but the buffet lunch line wasn't bad at all. On the first formal night, we were forced to choose between lobster and prime rib. My oldest son and I went with the lobster, the other son got the prime rib (and couldn't eat it all so we finished it for him), and my wife had the quail. The girls went to the kid's coketail party and then had dinner with the other children - it was nice to be able to eat with just the oldest two.
There was no fog the second morning, and the sunrise was glorious. The day's activities included the obligatory port talk, some shopping bargains, an art auction, and the galley tour. The galley tour included some demonstrations of napkin and towel folding, ice sculpting, and animals made with vegetables.
The "fun ship" aspect became apparent about 4 am, when the folks on the other side of the hall carried on loud drunken conversations. They stopped abruptly about 15 minutes later, no doubt because someone complained to security. Speaking of security, this is the first ship I've seen with uniformed security guards. I had heard some Carnival ships had problems with rowdy teenagers, so I guess the visible security is to prevent a recurrance.
On day one, we had to set our clocks ahead an hour. We also had to do that on day two as well. I have no idea why. In the paper for tomorrow, they now want us to set our clocks _back_ an hour. Bizarre antics, and no explanation was given. It's like daylight savings time, I guess... (I found out later that the three ports are actually in different time zones, which was not obvious from looking at maps).
Copyright © 2008 by Dana Cline
Last updated on 7/8/2008
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