HappyPappy Blog

We woke up around 7:00 today, wanted to make sure we were ready to get off the boat on time. 

We had time to go and sneak breakfast on the Lido Deck (deck 9) before we finished packing and made our way out the door of our cabin for the last time.Carnival offers two services for disembarkation; one where you lug your suitcases out yourself (called self-assist or something) and another where they pick up your suitcases the night before. Since we had fairly big valises we decided to leave our suitcases outside our cabin the night before.Now call me silly or naive, but that seemed somewhat questionable to me…what’s to stop someone from tampering with suitcases while we slumber?

In any case, once the ship docks you spend the rest of the morning waiting for either your deck or luggage tag color to be called before you can disembark. Our color got called out about 10:30 and it took about another hour to get through customs.

My compliments to the US customs agents as they were courteous and professional on both our entries into the US.

By the time we got through customs our suitcases were waiting for us on the carousel.

Dad was late picking us up and between one thing and another we had a lovely one hour visit of the Carnival parking lot.

Final thoughts…

I would say that everyone should try a cruise at least once; we enjoyed the people we met and the variety of places we saw. The boat was gorgeous, the staff and crew were very friendly and attentive and lastly the food was excellent. The boat was beautiful and awe imposing. Our cabin was well appointed and just as described to us.

However everything was not perfect. Your cruise tickets and mandatory gratuity fee are only the beginning of your costs as far as the cruise is concerned. Carnival then proceeds to systematically “up-sell” absolutely everything else, and as far as I’m concerned this gets tiresome very quickly. I can understand charging for alcoholic drinks but to then also charge for pop and soft drinks and in-room water is plain cheap.

As a first time cruise guest we proceeded dutifully to all the recommended information sessions only to have to listen to at least 30 minutes of where I could spend my money that particular day before actually getting any germane information.

The embarkation and disembarkation process….ughhhhh don’t get me started.

Having said all that I’d probably do it again and probably enjoy it more as I’d understand my way around the boat and the system better.

I rate the cruise 7 happies out of a possible 10.