Ok the Cliff notes version of the cruise is, we had a lot of fun and enjoyed it very much. If you want the detailed recap and my observations of cruise culture, read on.
The drive over to Miami was uneventful, this was our second time coming to Miami. We drove by Pro Players stadium on the way in. We got to see downtown Miami as opposed to hispanic, ghetto Miami where we inadvertently wound up the first time. My mapquest directions were accurate and we pulled up to the dock a good hour before the supposed 2 pm boarding time. The first thing to strike me was the size of this ship, it is huge, the largest man made transportation device I have ever seen first hand. Ahead of time we read about the guys that try to take your bags from the car to load them up. The Carnival web site points out these are not Carnival employees. Ali saw that as a security red flag and since we would rather walk the bags a hundred yards, save the tip (yea I guess that is cheap) and know our bags are ok, we decided to park in the garage (48 dollars to park for four days) and walk the bags down to the terminal ourselves. Our bags were heavy so the journey was not an easy one, we go in the door where everyone else is going but notice they have only small bags. The nice person inside said, “Oh you need to take those big bags down there where those people are unloading their cars” ARGH! So we lug them down there, give the bags to the non-carnival employee and tip them. 🙁 We completed the check in procedure with minimum fuss. They give you a SIGN and SAIL card when you board which becomes your sole way of paying for stuff onboard the ship as well as your ID. Our cabin was small in comparison to a hotel room but adequate to hang out in for the duration. We went on deck for the exit from Miami, the views were pretty fantastic. Evidently, many of the people got on the ship quite early and started the party. Many, many drunk people stumbling around the ship. The rest of the evening was spent trying to familiarize ourselves of where everything was. Ali is very much the planner and not knowing where everything was, was causing her anxiety. I tried to calm her down. She took all of our info along with us to the one eating area to sort it all out. Before long we had our plan written down for that day. We had a nice dinner in the formal dining room and met our other couple at the table. A nice couple who I would guess where in their late 40’s. We didn’t have a ton in common but were able to keep the conversation going. You eat with the same people every night so it was important to be able get along with the people you sit with because you are stuck with them. Our waiter and the girl that supported him were great. They were both ultra friendly and entertaining even though they were a bit tough to understand with their thick accents. After dinner I am embarrased to admit we went back to the room to catch Survivor. 🙂 Afterwards we walked the ship a bit to see more of the “stuff”. I scoped out the casino and was thrilled to see they had a craps table. We went to bed late. A good start.
We woke up Friday morning as we pulled into Key West. We slept surprisingly well considering the beds were not exactly comfortable. We had decided to do an excursion from a large list that Carnival supplies. They aren’t cheap but since we never had been there before we figured this was the smart way to go rather than just wing it. We elected to do a guided trolly tour. We knew others that had done the tour and said it was good. As we got off the boat they took our picture TWICE. Once on the walkway and then a second time with some guy dressed up in a pirate costume. We soon discovered that this would occur frequently during the cruise, people taking your picture in the hopes that you will cough up 7 or 8 bucks a pop for a 5×7 print. We hopped on the trolley/train thing and waited a bit to pull out. It was quite warm and humid so it didn’t take long to start working up a sweat. The tour started out ok, the guide pointed out a lot of interesting sights and provided good information. However as we moved into the busier parts of Key West the noise made it next to impossible to hear the guide. Shortly afterwards, baking in the sun and having my knees jammed into the metal wall in front of me was getting old. By the end of the hour tour we were both more than ready to get off. Key West itself was quite unique to see. Tons of old wood houses that look every bit as old as the island itself. Chickens run free everywhere, a Key West thing that is the result of old cock fighting rings that were later outlawed. After the tour we had very little time left to walk around. We had lunch at Jimmy Buffets Margaritaville and got to shop a little bit. I picked up a hand made bowl made out of woven palm fronds from a guy on the street. He said he made it in about half an hour. I thought it was cool and unique so I bought it as a souveneir for my mom. Time to reboard the ship was drawing near so we returned to the pick up point to be transported back to the ship. There was a crush of people all trying to get back. There is nothing like a crowd mentality to set me off. People pushing, cutting others off all in the hope to jam themselves onto the next shuttle back. Ali was cut off by a family of three for one seat so she got to sit next to them while I had to find a seat further back with a group of drunk, loud younger people. As we approached the ship we had to stop at the guard shack. The dock is part of a military base so all traffic back in has to be stopped and ID provided. There was a long line waiting since the ID’s of every single person on every shuttle had to be presented and verified. We sat for a good 20 minutes until we were allowed to pass. Our Key West experience was OK, not great and if we did it again we would skip the trolley tour and walk around on our own. Ali was frustrated with the compressed time line for staying at Key West but again I tried to be the reassuring one and chalked it up as a good experience that would better prepare us for our next visit there.
The rest of Friday was spent at sea on our way to Cozamel. We had another fine dinner in the dining room and went to see some of the entertainment on board. They have vegas style shows that were indeed impressive for being onship entetainment. The show was very cool. I got my first shot to hit the casino. I am very conscious of not dropping a fortune there so I only took 25 dollars with me. I played craps. After a half an hour I had turned my 25 bucks into 87 dollars! I cashed out and triumphantly returned to my room and told Ali of my gambling prowness. She was happy to hear of my good fortune. Craps by far is the most exciting game in a casino. It is filled with tons of strategy, superstitions, hunches, momentum and action. One poor soul was not paying attention and had his hand down in the playing area as the shooter was rolling. The dice hit his hand and wound being a 7 that meant everyone lost their bets. Boy did he hear it. Don’t EVER do anything to affect the roll of the dice in CRAPS. Again we didn’ get to sleep until very close to midnight, they were playing the American Idol Justin / Kelly movie thing continuously throughout the day. I saw about 2 thirds of it, it may be the dumbest movie I ever saw. Terrible, so terrible I had to watch it.
Saturday we sailed until we pulled into Cozamel at 1pm. That morning I relented and agreed to go to an onboard Art Auction with Ali. I had zero interest in it but Ali did so I compromised and agreed to go. We agreed we weren’t going to buy anything, just there to look and take it all in. If you registered as a bidder you got some free handouts and were registered to win a drawing so Ali registered us. No big deal. We watch a few of the pictures go through auction 2k for this one, 3k for that one, quite a few got no bids and went back on the pile. All of a sudden some small little thing came up, starting bid 70 bucks. Ali flashes up her bidding card. Going once, twice, SOLD. What the heck? She said it was an impulse thing and she felt bad. I didn’t even see what it was that she was bidding on. She felt guilty and asked if she could cancel the bid. Nope. Oh well, we now have a little 8 x 10 print that cost us 70 bucks PLUS a mandatory 35 dollars to ship it to us AND the mandatory 15% commision fee. I consoled Ali and told her it was ok, another souvenier. A waste of money but I guess a vacation is full of examples of wasting money.
Cozamel was very beautiful, the ocean is bright blue and clear. It’s hard to believe it is the same body of water that is off the coast of Naples. Our excursion for this day was an Eco-Kayak adventure. We never kayaked together before, we like nature so it sounded like a winner. We met the guide on shore, there was only one other couple from the entire cruise (2000 people) that signed up for this. Hmmmm. Our guide was a funny and personable guy named Hugo. He spoke broken English but enough that we could understand him most of the time. Ali talked a lot of Spanish to him and I chimed in with my minimal knowledge of the language as well. Mexico is very different. We hopped on our tour bus to take us to the dock. It was a long ride through streets with no markings. I had a hard time telling if it was a 2 lane or single lane road as in various spots we passed cars and then 50 yards further there would be cars parked on the side of the road. We just sort of wove back and forth. The difference in standard of living was immediately apparent. The last 20 minutes of the bus ride was over a gulley filled, unpaved road that required the bus to move at a slower than walking pace most of the time. We got to the dock and split into our little 4 person group, all the others on the bus were hopping on the ferry to be transported to the island we would wind up at on our kayak trip. The 4 of us hopped on a little outboard powered boat and were taken out to a little dock in the middle of the bay where the kayaks were tied off to. We hopped in to our 2 person kayak and got some quick lessons. We picked up steering pretty quick. The other couple had a lot more trouble with it and frequently wound up going the opposite direction they intended. The trip took us through narrow paths cut through the mangroves. It was dead quiet in most areas. Unfortunately the mosquitos were quite agressive in that area as well and Ali wound up with probably a dozen bites. They didn’t mention anything about wearing bug spray for this trip. 🙁 Kayaking was a pretty good workout. For the last leg, the guide told us to line up side by side as he went ahead of us. He then said that we should race to get to the island and the winner would get 2 free beers. Ah, a competition, that is all I need to hear. I paddled like a madman. The other couple was older than us, 40 something but surprisingly they hung for a little while. It was a good haul to the island so they soon tired and fell behind. By the end of it, Ali was just paddling for effect only as I continued to paddle with fury to ensure our victory. In the end I would up giving my one beer to the guy since Ali doesn’t like beer and the girls got free mixed drinks anyway. 🙂 The island was called Passion Island, a privately owned island that is used pretty much exclusively by cruise goers. It was beautiful, it literally looked like it was right out of the Corona commercials, it was that nice. They had free food and drinks there but we ate nothing and only had a couple drinks as we ate on the boat before we left. We spent time there swinging in hammocks, playing some water ballon contest with a bunch of people and then finished with some ugly jungle ball volleyball played with a rubber ball on a 7 foot net. I had brought limited money with me. I noticed that most of the guests were pounding drink after drink and not tipping the mexican hosts at all. The tip cans were practically empty. I went up to the stand and asked the guy for “cambio” change. I threw 5 bucks in his can, 5 bucks at the other stand and gave our guide 20 bucks. I wish I had more to tip them. Every person we dealt with on that excursion was super nice to us and knowing the conditions in Mexico, I really wanted to help them out at least in a small way. On the trip back from the island we got to take the power boat all the way back to the bus. By the time we got back to the ship and showered it was after 8pm. Originaly Ali had wanted to walk around the town a bit but we hadn’t eaten dinner yet and there were some shows on the ship that night we had wanted to see so we wound up just staying onboard. Cozamel is a beautiful place. I hit the casino again, I turned 50 bucks into 96. However later I could not sleep, went back to the craps table and lost 60 bucks. 🙁
Sunday was at sea day, nothing but sailing all day. We had a full day. I went to the ship gym for the third time on the trip. It used these weird machines that utilized air pressure for resistance. Some of them worked ok, some didn’t work for shit. It was cool working out with nothing but views of the Gulf around 3 sides of you. I saw the Eagles score come up on the TV, another piss poor performance but eh, who cares. Sunday morning we did a trivia show activity where they asked 20 questions and whomever answered the most got a cheesy little trophy. Guess who won the cheesy little trophy? Yep me, with 16 correct answers. Ali finished with 13 correct so I was glad to have bragging rights in a contest of knowledge for once. After the trivia I decided to go check out the ship ping pong tournament. Turnout was on the light side, I think in total we had 10-12 players. It was a long tournament lasting close to 2 hours. I am far from a ping pong expert but have good hand eye coordination so I usually do ok. I went through the tournament undefeated and won the finals against some girl that was very good. I think it was 21-15. Rack up cheesy trophy number 2. It’s amazing how sweaty you can get playing ping pong outdoors. I later realized that the crew member that ran the tournament was one of the dancers in the shows we have been watching, imagine that. After lunch we hung out on the top deck and saw something we never did before, flying fish! It was wild, they would pop out of the water and fly like dragonflies just above the water surface. Some of them flew as far as 50 yards! It was really neat to see. We saw a baby sea turtle swimming by as well.
I made another concession in the afternoon as I agreed to do Dance Class with Ali. I really dislike dancing. I have no rhythm, I can’t follow dance steps, I look like a dope dancing. But hey, we are on a cruise, none of these people know me so who cares? I stumble through a half hour session with another one of the ship’s dancers. She basically just tried to show us a few moves and put them all together. I could do the first 2 moves, after that I was clueless. So I basically just flailed around until the end of class and made people laugh at my lack of dancing ability. We ate and went to more shows the rest of the day. I worked in 2 more quick trips to the craps table. On the first visit I turned 40 into 62 but on the second trip I gave back 20 of it. The last show ended around 11:15. We had to get the room all packed up and ready to go. It was almost over already.
We elected to do early debarkation which meant we could leave early if we could carry of all of our bags off ourselves. Our already heavy bags were now heavier from our added souveneirs but we elected to do it anyway. I woke up on my own at 5AM even though I had not gotten to bed until after midnight trying to catch the part of DareDevil I had not yet seen. I decided to go out and watch the ship sail back into Miami. The halls were pretty much abandoned and as I walked the decks it almost felt like I was on the cruise myself. Miami looked cool all lit up in the early morning sky. After we pulled in, I went down to get Ali, we ate an early breakfast and got off the ship with minimal fuss. We got through customs without a hitch and even though we passed at least 10 agents looking us and everyone else over, we did not have to have anything searched.
We drug our bags out to the car. As I pulled out of the parking deck we realized our directions were buried deep within our luggage so we had to try to retrace our steps out of Miami to get home. We got lucky and managed to get back on Alligator Alley without a missed turn. The drive back was fine and we picked up the puppy for a happy reunion with Ali.
There are many details (believe it or not) that I am leaving out as this is way too long already. But as I said in the beginning it was a good time all in all. There were plenty of rude, annoying people as always. We were very annoyed that they allowed smoking inside the ship. Our room smelled like like smoke which drives Ali insane. They make you pay for soft drinks which seems like a cheap thing to do. They provide juice for free but if you want a no calorie drink you have to pay for bottled water or diet soda. Dumb. We wound up spending a total of 500 bucks on the ship in addition to the cost of the cruise itself. That was with us smuggling some wine on board and with me drinking a total of maybe 5 drinks during the 4 day stretch. The excessive picture taking services gets annoying. The bathroom in the rooms is VERY small. Claustrophobics would have an issue in there. Watching some of the gluttony on the ship first hand is disturbing to a health oriented person like myself. Lots of fatties waddling around the ship.
It was a good cruise all around and we learned many things that will make any subsequent cruises even more enjoyable for us. My first day back to work is somewhat depressing but my post vacation depression is MUCH less severe since I have moved to Florida. Coming BACK to sunny and 85 helps with that a bunch. 🙂
If you are still reading this, congrats, you made it to the end.