Day 3: At Sea

I made a bee-line for the thermal suite as soon as we were awake this morning. G headed back to what we simply call “Chick”, which, in the real world, can mean alternatively Chick Fil A, Popeyes or Bojangles; in the case of the Carnival Jubilee, it’s Shaq’s Big Chick. My southern boy loves a chicken biscuit for breakfast. 

I spent some extra time this morning in the red light sauna in the thermal suite. I am just becoming familiar with red light therapy and, in fact, found a place very close to our home that offers unlimited monthly passes for red light sauna visits. I’ll continue to use it daily here for at least 20 minutes a day to see if I notice any difference by the end of the week and will probably join for a couple of months once I get home.  If we stay home, that is. 

It was after 11am when I booked a table for brunch in the Pacific Dining Room and G met me there. This time we were seated at the very back of the dining room, with floor to ceiling windows across the back of the ship. Quite a difference from the HoJo Atlantic  Dining Room where we have dinner. I think I’ve figured out what’s going on there. 

We were assigned 8:15pm fixed dining when we booked last minute, and you know us enough to know that that we just don’t dine that late. G also wanted an assigned table with the same waiters every night, a la what we had on the Regal Princess transatlantic. Well, on the Carnival Jubilee, those guests with that request are assigned to the Atlantic Dining Room. It’s largely intergenerational groups, families with young kids and the geriatric set, so, yeah, we fit right in, whether we like it or not. 

Kadek is our dinner waiter and he was also our waiter this morning for brunch and he really is the nicest guy. G had breakfast #2 of the day, a huge steak, eggs and bacon breakfast (he has blood work scheduled, and I had a bagel with smoked salmon and it really was a nice brunch. 

It was then time for me to check out G’s favorite place in the back of the ship in Decks 16 and 17. I saw Shaq’s Big Chicken for myself, saw Guy’s Burgers (can’t go there…I had my annual hamburger on the Regal) and even found the buffet. I’ve decided I am useless at buffets. I am not a forager or gatherer when it comes to food. I am a sit down and order person. I always end up doing the same thing:  wandering around the seating area until a I see someone eating what I want and then asking where they got it. My quest today was for watermelon, and I finally found it by doing that, and then asking three crew members, one of whom led me right to it. No, I’m rotten at buffets. 

There is wonderfully  comfortable and shaded seating on the back of all the upper decks, so we stayed there all afternoon and, when I fell asleep, G found more people to talk to and, well, I guess we’re joining more new friends at Teppanyaki the last night of this cruise. Honestly, this ship is full of the nicest people. I had imagined political hats and belligerent attitudes and it’s nothing like that. Just (mostly) southern manners and friendliness, everyone talks to everyone. It’s been wonderful.

Water park

There’s even a roller coaster on board. 

Seriously. 

Spring break on this ship is a terrifying thought. 

We bravely returned to our table the Atlantic Dining Room (HoJo circa 1972) for dinner. This time we knew what to expect (and what not to expect), and G said the beef he ordered was excellent but I’m still struggling a bit to find things that appeal, or, if they appeal, that taste good. But I did have my first chocolate lava melting cake, and now totally get the hype. G’s found his favorite dessert too:  banana cream pie. 

We had been told that tonight’s Family Feud in the Jubilee Theater was some of the best fun of the cruise. Yeah, no. We’re not big game show people, on Carnival or Princess, which probably didn’t help, but we found it mildly entertaining at best. However, the seating in the Jubilee Theater bears mentioning. Comfortable, with plenty of leg room and cup holders at each seat. It appears that shows are offered three times, and though the theater was packed for the early show last night, that’s the first time we’ve seen where seats are not available right up to show tune. 

And, once again, we enjoyed the two minute walk back to our little room.  I’m really happy that our cabin is not at the opposite end of this ship. We’d nearly have to pack a lunch to get home at night. 

Another great day on the Carnival Jubilee. 

Life is good. :)

Day 2: At Sea

Maureen McGovern was right. There is going to be a morning after, and it ‘s almost always better than the night before. Ours sure was. 

Sidebar:  I have decided that I am not going to edit the posts I make. If I find out something different or change my mind about something I’ve said, or, most likely, soften my attitude about something I’ve opined on, I will simply mention it in the next post. For example, if I find out that Carnival is the only cruise line for me, I’m not going to go back and remove my less than positive thoughts from yesterday’s posts. If my perceptions appear to change, it’s because they do. As always, you’ll get me, unedited. 

Let me start with last night’s sleep. There is simply no sleep as good as inside cabin sleep and the sleep in our little standalone cabin is as good as it gets. It’s quiet as a tomb, we set the thermostat on freezing (and I kept turning it down if it somehow (😉) got turned up during the night, and we hunkered down on the best mattresses and under the softest, coziest linens imaginable and slept and slept. We needed it. During the two previous nights, we had loud Harleys driving up and down the Seawall right outside our hotel room until 3am. We were exhausted. 

We also moved clocks back an hour last night. And even though I forgot to shut off the alarm on my iPhone that I had set for 6am yesterday, my Apple Watch told me I got over ten hours of sleep. It’s hard to beat that as an attitude adjuster. 

G immediately bounced out of the room. He wanted to explore this ship without hordes of people (good luck with that) but I organized my fee unpacked items a little more until 8am when the spa and thermal suite opened for the day. My room key gets me in, and there is even a back door from our corridor right into the hall outside the thermal suite so I don’t have to cut through the main spa lobby. 

The thermal suite is amazing. The showers in the locker room are massive, the rain showers in the thermal suite work perfectly, and, in addition to the thalassotherapy pool (smaller and not as fancy as the one in The Enclave), there is an aromatherapy steam room that actually works, a regular steam room and a red light sauna. Between all those toys and the heated loungers (and my iPhone and ear buds) I spent nearly three hours in the thermal suite. It was relaxing, it was peaceful, it was quiet. 

G, meanwhile, had found Shaq’s Big Chicken for breakfast on Deck 16 aft where they were featuring chicken biscuits with bacon or sausage for breakfast and this guy was in heaven. He really could live on fast food at home, and probably would if it weren’t for me (and still he’s healthy enough to run up mountains. There is simply no justice in this world). At some point he sent me a chat that we were joining two other couples for dinner tonight at one of the, well, I guess Princess would call it a casual dining restaurant called Chabang (first visit free, additional visits $8). 

So I was spending hours in the spa with my noise cancelling ear buds screwed into my ears while he was out and about picking up dinner invites. This is us in a nutshell.  Vive la difference!

I do miss the Princess Medallion for its Find My Husband capability, but the chat feature on the Carnival Hub so works quite well, and it provides sounds, pop up and badge notifications on my iPhone and Apple Watch. As long as we are consistent about posting our whereabouts when we move from one place to another, we’re coping very well.

I got cleaned up and made it to the Pacific Dining Room for what they call the Sea Day brunch. It’s really not much more than what Princesses offers every day for breakfast, and less than what Princess offers for dining room lunch. The Pacific Dining Room, though lighter with windows overlooking the back of the ship, still lacks table cloths on the tables. Service is friendly but the ambience is basic, with dirty dish stations in full view. In fact, it reminded me exactly of a Denny’s. Exactly. 

The view from my table

G caught up with me in there. A nice thing about Carnival is electronic queueing for tables. You request a table online using the app, and when the table is ready, the app notifies you and you have ten minutes to get to the restaurant, where you’re immediately seated.. I sent G my table number once I was seated and he was directed to my table. It is far preferable to anything Princess offers, and though there are still minor lines outside restaurants, they move quickly as people get seated. 

We spent the afternoon exploring the ship a bit more. We have quickly learned that to move from the ship front to back or vice versa, it’s best to use a deck with passenger cabins. So we frequently walk from where our cabin is on Deck 5 forward to the mid ship or aft elevators and then go up from there. The passenger deck corridors are wide and bright, with plenty of room for passing steward carts (which are smaller than those on Princess). 

We met our new friends for dinner in Chabang at 5:30pm. Though service was friendly and efficient and our dinner companions were a lot of fun, I would put the food on par with Panda Express. In fact, I’ve yet to find any food that compares favorably with Princess. 

The app provides notifications about meal reservations and even table numbers. 

We spent the evening with our friends, going to Rui Carnival in Center Stage, and what a show that was. An hour of Latin music and a Carnival parade with gorgeous costumes and aerialists and dancing musicians. This show had it all.  It also made me long for the time I lived in Miami and being at Carnaval in Rio with Sheila.  Fabulous musical and dance entertainment in that part of the world!

But we weren’t done yet. We then went to the 9:45pm performance of production show Dear Future Husband, and it was cute. Lots of great, contemporary songs loosely strung together with a weak plot line. I can see it especially appealing to young people and newlyweds. 

And by then it was bedtime. Luckily our cabin is only a two minute walk from the Jubilee Theater, because this ship is huge. I still haven’t made it to the buffet, which is on the opposite end and high on the ship, for the same reason. That’s my goal for tomorrow. 

Day 2 in the Carnival Jubilee:  much improved. Between you and me, I doubt it changed at all. We are simply learning the Carnival way of cruising. And we got some sleep. 

Life is good :)

Day 1: Carnival Jubilee

Well. 

To my credit, I wondered only one time (out loud) today how much they would charge me to get off this ship. Of course, we were still docked in Galveston when I said it. But thinking it to myself?  Many times. Many, many times. We are definitely not in Kansas any longer. 

It didn’t help that it was a rainy day in Galveston. G, after spending Friday afternoon walking around the island and seeing the motorcycle congestion along The Strand, fretted about what traffic would be like today with several cruise ships in port. He was right to worry; it was a mess. As a result, we ordered a Lyft at 9am to take us to the ship. We then stood in line outside the terminal building until 10am, and in a series of stand up and sit down lines until we were finally on the ship just after 11:30am. We actually had to be patted down behind a screen by TSA because we were so late booking this cruise. That was a first for us on a cruise. 

Once we got on the ship, we immediately got separated in the throngs of people. That began over an hour of trying to contact each other again with no cell service inside the ship and no internet. There is a chat feature on the app, called the Carnival Hub, but to log into it we needed our folio numbers, which would be on our ship cards…which we wouldn’t be receiving until 1:30pm. (BTW, the chat feature costs $5pp per cruise, the first money we spent onboard).

Also unavailable until we had our folio number:  the ship map on the app, and there were no paper copies available (which I understand, but…). Therefore, we spent the first hour on board looking for each other and being swept along in masses of people with no idea where we were going, making me feel not unlike a fish in a school of fish at the whims of currents. 

But we both finally had the same idea, to go up on the ship until we reached an outer deck and, standing under overhangs in the pouring rain, could call each other. I was, frankly, relieved to see a familiar face in this mass of humanity. 

It was 1:30pm by then, and cabins were available, so we went to ours (like a little broom closet, but cool and ultra quiet, all by itself), and found our ship cards. Or at least we found one ship card, in a sealed envelope, with the name of the lady who must have just cancelled this cruise as G was on the phone with iCruise. We were able to open our cabin door and store our carry ons without opening the envelope, and G went to stand in a mile long line at Guest Services (he had to first ask where it was, because, again, no cards, no folio numbers, no app, no ship map, on and on) to turn in her card and get ours. I unpacked what I could and waited for him in the cabin, afraid to risk venturing out and never seeing him again. 

Finally we were set with cards and folio numbers and logged into the app and signed up for the chat feature. G was starving, so we walked to the back of the ship (our cabin is at the front) to a BBQ restaurant called the Pig and Anchor, except only the outside part was open then and we got some food and then had to walk through water pouring off the roof to get to a table and as we sat down, G looked at me and said, “ I have drain water in my food” and that’s when I wondered how much they would charge me to get off the ship. 

That was probably G’s low point.  He thought the food was quite good, and I got some chicken and coleslaw and we sat at the outside table and watched the rain coming down and were at least happy to be away from the throngs of people.  And the noise. The decibel level on this ship is off the charts. Everywhere. All the time. 

We went back to our cabin to find that our luggage had been delivered. I unpacked minimal things and left even my moderately dressy clothes in my suitcase. Hey, we don’t know these people. I’m not dressing up all week!  The room is really tiny, probably tied with the Norwegian Sky as the smallest inside cabin we’ve ever had, but it has good storage and a nice bathroom and a really roomy shower with a door. And it’s nearly new and pristinely clean. 

But some things are just silly. The telephone is mounted on a wall under a big shelf so you can’t read the quick dial labels because there’s no light. Ditto the safe. I have to keep my iPhone handy just for the flashlight. 

My low point was definitely dinner. We were originally assigned 8:15pm dining but G, on his trip to the front desk, got us a 5:30pm table for two in the Atlantic Dining Room. G looked at me 5 minutes after we had been seated and told me I looked shell shocked. I was. 

This dining room is dark, and looks just like a Howard Johnson’s restaurant in 1972. There are no tablecloths (no tablecloths! I still can’t take it in!). The chairs look like what my parents had at their kitchen table, also in 1972.  We were seated 3 inches away from another couple, who didn’t say a word to each other or to us the entire meal. I kind of understood. G and I had to yell to hear each other across the table. I used my iPhone to check. The decibel level never dropped below 88 the entire meal. 

We had two or three waiters. I lost count. One brought butter, another brought a breadstick, another brought water. Our menus were on the app. I had shrimp cocktail (four tiny shrimp), a Caesar salad and dry salmon from which I scraped Emeril’s BBQ sauce. G had a salad and chicken breast. This is truck stop food and atmosphere. It’s certainly not fancy and it’s not plentiful but I guess you’re supposed to fill yourself up with fried food at one of the other restaurants on board. I thought longingly of Peter and Matthew and our table for two by a window in the Concerto Dining Room. 

But the real treat was when I saw lights on the walls of the restaurant start to change colors and someone announced it was party time and people cheered and applauded and they stopped dinner service (please, can I have my entree first?) and the waiters danced around wearing flamenco jackets and the little girl at a table near us was so excited she stood on a chair and danced and people clapped and the lights flashed and changed colors and the couple next to us never stopped eating their salads or even looked up, and, Lord have mercy, this is a different kind of cruise. 

We went to one of two comedians performing last night, skipped production show Dear Future Husband (will we get a chance to see it again?  I have no idea but my head was about to explode and I was in full retreat by 9pm). 

And when we got to our room, that’s when G noticed a placard on the shadowy shelf above the shaded telephone that we are in a Cloud9 Spa Cabin and that entitles us to use the thermal suite in the spa for free. And we had seen it earlier in the day as it is right around the corner from our cabin. It’s like The Enclave on the Regal but the steam rooms, showers and sauna are much better and the locker room lockers actually lock, and there are Sanctuary-type padded loungers in addition to the heated stone loungers. This changes everything. 

I remember the agent at iCruise telling us our cabin was a Cloud9 Spa Cabin but that meant nothing to us at the time and we never thought of it again until last night. We just wanted a cabin. Apparently we also get 20% to 40% off all spa treatments on port days, not that I see us using that, but I’m going to live at the thermal suite. 

And that our first day on our first Carnival cruise. We survived, and I’ll see how things feel in the morning.  

Still here, but things change soon

I promised I’d pop back on here when we knew more, and, as of last night, we finally do. But first, to recap the week, we did not spend it as we had planned. I ended up with pneumonia (from that sick, sick ship), and really was quite ill for a few days. We started the week with the idea that I would rest for one day and then be ready do some sightseeing, but that is not the way this has gone. It is now Friday and I finally feel able to be out and about…but the motorcycle rally is in full force everywhere on this island and I’m not feeling quite that “out and about”. G, meanwhile, has finally left me to go look at bikes and the goings-ons. We’ve been in our room making big decisions and canceling and booking lots of things and he kept running to the balcony to see what was making that noise and that noise and…well, he is amongst his people now, and I have some peace.

On Wednesday afternoon, Princess canceled the next cruise on the Regal Princess. This was the second of the four 7-night, round trip cruises we were booked to do. We are getting the same refund and the same 25% FCC, but we cannot find anyone in a position to address our unique situation. We are being told that if we cancel the final two cruises and just go home, we will be charged a 100% cancellation penalty, mostly recoverable for FCCs via travel insurance, but I am resisting going that route. None of this situation is of our making. I would want a cash refund!

So we were prepared to stay here another week, thinking that I would finally be well enough to take advantage of what the island has to offer. And that is where we left it until yesterday (Thursday) when G started making noises about that not being satisfactory after all, and he really wanted to get on a different cruise ship leaving out of Galveston this weekend. 

I was not having it. In fact, the words “If I leave this hotel, I’m either going to the Regal Princess or I’m going home” may have been were definitely mentioned. So I did nothing to help with this “find another cruise” thing until it started to look inevitable and then I figured I’d better have some input, as minimal and inconsequential as it might be. 

His our first choice was to get on a Royal Caribbean ship, since we are Diamond in their loyalty program and that means free drinks every day. And the Harmony of the Seas did have one cabin left, a Junior Suite, for $5600 total (for six days!  Do people really pay that much for a Royal Caribbean cruise?). Moving on. 

There was a Carnival ship, the Carnival Jubilee, leaving Saturday on a 7-night cruise, but we couldn’t find a single website, including Carnival’s, that showed any availability at all. Finally, G found one cabin with one online cruise company (the cabin is so far inside that even the cabin across the hall is an inside cabin), but I remained skeptical it really existed until we had a booking number, and I could see the booking on their website.

We’ve never cruised on Carnival before, and I was pretty disturbed by this move on our part until I saw that this is a brand new ship, and not one of their old rust buckets. It also has 21 dining establishments, which sounds great, but at least 14 of them heavily feature fast food items such as burgers, pizzas, chicken sandwiches and tenders, BBQ brisket, other sandwiches and fries. Lots and lots of fries. In fact, I watched a YouTube video about the Jubilee’s food options and I saw a single piece of broccoli, in a stir fry covered with sauce, and that was it for veggies, but I saw buns and breads and meat and fries galore. Oh boy. 

Still, there’s bound to be healthy food somewhere on the ship. I may just be eating a lot of meals in the dining room and buffet. If I can find them. This ship is massive, about 6000 passengers and 1800 crew. I think it will be the largest ship we’ve ever been on, or it will at least be comparable to the Oasis of the Seas. 

So, to recap, I’ll be spending election week on a Carnival mega ship dripping with French fry oil and loaded with Texans. As a friend asked, “Have you completely lost your mind?”  

Yeah, I may have. But, barring any drunken brawls or political melees, I’ll survive and spill the beans when I return. I’m going radio silent for a week (not buying internet on board), but I’ll keep writing so I can easily catch up.

As for what happens after that…we still have no idea, but we will be returning to this hotel for at least one night. They’re allowing us to store luggage here for a week, which is great. We really don’t need the clothes we packed for Europe or a tuxedo on the Carnival Jubilee. In fact,  I’m not altogether certain I’ll ever get out of shorts. 

Maybe this won’t be so bad after all. 

Life is good. :)