My Cruise Adventures

Elation - The Ship

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).

I've been surprised by a few things that go counter to what I've read on other reviews on the net. One is the room size. One is the fact that the bathrooms _do_ come with shampoo, razors, and Tylenol - all the other reviews that mentioned it said only soap was provided. Another thing that I wouldn't have expected is the number of things that don't work. Of the two glass elevators in the atrium, one seems to be out of commission most of the time. I've seen water fountains marked Out Of Order, and the water slide is only open for a few hours a day. There didn't seem to be anyone running up as we moved away from the dock in Puerto Vallarta. We finally had a deck party after leaving the dock, and it was still underway at 12:30 am when we crashed.

By the time I arose on the last at-sea day, I had missed the sunrise, but I didn't mind the extra sleep. For some reason today the seas are very rough, not so much roll as pitch (the bow goes up and down). Judging from the view out the side of the ship looking forward, the bow was up and down as much as 20 feet. There were more than a few seasick people that day. The waiters said the seas were always bad on the northbound leg.

In the morning was a 60's trivia contest, which my wife and I won along with another guy. We got a trophy and a medallion. In the afternoon, the kids had a talent show. Our 4-year old stole the show (and the hearts of the audience) with her rendition of "Me and my Teddy". We overheard numerous people praise her even after we disembarked. Just before dinner, they had a Christmas show with the singers, dancers, and most of the kids, and all the kids got a present from Santa.

Disembarkation sucked. Our color didn't get called until after 11:00 and our luggage was scattered all over the place - it took us about 15 minutes to find it all. Once we got out (Customs was no problem at all), the passenger pickup area was total chaos. There were people directing traffic but traffic ignored them and stopped wherever they darned well pleased. The shuttles to the Best Western never seemed to stop for us, and we waited over an hour to find one with room for us. Once we got to the hotel, the phone kept giving us busy signals for both the local CompuServe node and the MCI 800 number. Finally, I told the front desk how to reset the phone for our room, and that worked. We didn't sleep well Christmas eve (at least my wife and I didn't), perhaps due to the fact that we were used to the motion of the ship and not an unmoving bed.