If you were someone who wanted to hear about our cruise experience, you're in luck! Over the course of the next few blogs, I will outline our experience cruising on Carnival Fascination.
Cruising is A LOT of fun! Some people enjoy staying on the cruise and enjoying the entertainment, but I love cruises for the adventure. One of the top things on my bucket list in life is to visit every main Caribbean Island. Cruising allows you to see a number of different islands in a short amount of time! I had been on a couple of cruises when I was little, but I really didn't remember what they were truly like.
At the time that we traveled, Carnival Fascination was the oldest ship cruising with Carnival (I believe it has been updated since our journey). The ship was older, and at the time, we felt like it needed a little updating, but even so, we had a wonderful experience! Cruises are fun because there is always something to do. If you like to relax, you can hangout by the pool or if you want to hit the casino, thats always an option too. There's not one moment of the day where you cannot find some type of entertainment, they even have bingo!
The one great thing about Carnival Fascination is that it cruises a GREAT itinerary! Here was our Itinerary for the week:
Day 1: Depart San Juan, Puerto Rico
Day 2: St. Thomas
Day 3: Cruising at Sea
Day 4: Barbados
Day 5: St. Lucia
Day 6: St. Kitts
Day 7: St. Maarten
Day 8: Arrive in San Juan, Puerto Rico
So, as you can see, this is a wonderful itinerary and we were able to see 7 different islands on this trip (we took a day trip to St. John, USVI that I will talk about in a later blog). WOW, HOW AWESOME! I found that now, this ship goes to Dominica, which means that now you don't even have to spend one day at sea. I really like that!
I want to save each island for a separate blog to let you all know what we did, but each day looked a little like this....
We would get up, normally around 7amish and the first thing I'd do is look out of the port hole! If you ever get the opportunity to cruise, I'd recommend at least having a port hole so that you can see outside. I thought this was worth the extra money. It's very cool to look out and see that you are at another port, to see what the port looks like, and just to have a view of the sunshine. Once we got up and around we would go down and get breakfast before we got off the ship. Everyday we had an excursion planned or we had already mapped out what we were going to do that day. If you don't know me, I'm a huge researcher/planner (sometimes it's annoying...) and I loooooove finding the cool things to do wherever we are traveling. All of the ports we stopped had a dock so we did not have to be tendered to land. We would get off the boat, and yes, it does feel like you are being herded like sheep. If this is not your style, don't stress because it doesn't last long; if you just relax and think about what the day is going to bring, you can overcome the crowds.
We spent as much time experiencing the island as we were allowed. Depending on how far we had traveled over the course of the day, we tried to be back at the port at least an hour before we were scheduled to set sail. This gave us time to get out our rooms, clean up a little bit, use the restroom, etc. and then make it to the top of the ship to see the ship set sail again. This is a cool experience, it is so relaxing yet fun and exciting at the same time! We loved it. We found a perfect spot on the stern where we could sit and watch take-off. It was also beautiful to watch the sunset!
At the stern was also one of the 24 hour buffets, so if we needed a snack before dinner, we would grab a little something to eat at this time. Gosh, I haven't even gotten to the food part...HA! You can basically eat whatever and whenever you want, so if you want to gain 10 lbs, definitely book a cruise! We weren't super thrilled about the food on the ship, as I'm not really a buffet person or a chicken finger and fry kind of girl, but we definitely didn't go hungry!
Once we were done watching the ship take off, we would head to our rooms and get ready for dinner. Dinner is fun! You are assigned to a dining room and you then get assigned to a table with others on the ship. This is cool to discuss your days with each of your dinner mates each evening. Your table doesn't change, so unless someone foregoes attending dinner in the dining room, you will sit with the same people every evening. I don't remember all of the food we had, but we had a different menu every night. Appetizers, entrees, desserts, and don't worry, if you want two things on the menu, that's perfectly fine. Try as much as you want!
Immediately following dinner we made our way to some sort of show. We normally tried to hit up the comedy club, we really enjoyed this. There was also a nightly show in the theatre. Both were very entertaining and something to do. By 10-11pm we were pretty exhausted from the day, so we normally went to bed, but we did spend a couple of evenings out late checking out the upper deck at night and the other activities on the ship.
Overall, we loved our cruise experience! Stay tuned to see what we got to experience each day in port!!! :)
Thanks for reading!
The Leeisure Traveler
1 Corinthians 13:13 ~ And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.
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