Before I get into the Carnival cruise, let me tell you how we’ve been doing here. We’re a little more than half way through the summer and it’s been a busy one. And no, I don’t mean with the kids driving us to the point of madness, that’s a different post. I’m talking about the things we’re doing for fun, both spontaneous and planned. We try to stay busy and try to keep schedules packed, as you do with kids. Especially at the age they are because heaven forbid if they have 2 minutes in the day that they’re not doing something fun or unforgivingly tiring. Coincidentally, this is also the age where they enjoy such things as vacations and spending time, and you know in the back of your mind they won’t always want to do things with you. Ugh, that’s another post, isn’t it? Anywho.
We’ve been doing plenty to keep on the move. The past few summers we’ve tried to do two vacations to bookend the time off from school. Something bigger at the beginning and then a smaller staycation at the end. I don’t know if you remember or not, but when we lived in North Carolina, we were coming back to Florida every chance we got. We love this city and the kids love to stay in hotels so doing a few days in one of the cheaper Disney hotels is usually a treat we all look forward to. But that’s another post! Like that? I’m feeding you breadcrumbs here for future stuff.
So! What am I talkin’ about here? Let’s figure that out together, eh? I… wha-how dare you! Of course, I know what I’m typing about! I have a plan, I’m focused. I don’t just start writing something and not have an end goal with it. I’m hurt!
Ok, so what, it’s been a while, I’m trying to get my writing juices flowing again, sue me. Look, see, I figured it out. Since it’s summer and I already talked about it, I’ll tell you what we did last year. I KNOW, old news, it’s like I don’t even care about you. But it’s stuff that was never documented here. And it’ll be like a warm up to start writing again. Plus, I already edited the pics so you’re kinda stuck with this. It’s ok though, it’ll be fun!
What did we do? Well like I mentioned, we are trying to do a bigger vacation in the beginning of summer and a smaller staycation at the end of summer. Like everything we do, it’s all for the kids. I remember summer vacations were always a big deal growing up for me and we always were on adventures everywhere. Well, mostly Florida because that’s what you did when you lived in New York. But we want to try and create traditions. So far, what we’re trying to stick to is the staycation at a Disney hotel I mentioned. It’s awesome living where everyone else in the country usually always vacations, but that doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy it like that either!
Before I get into that though, last year’s bigger trip was a doozy. We took the kids on their first cruise! Oh man, it was soooooooooooooooo exciting… Till we got on the ship and they turned into little maniacs who apparently injected caffeine directly into their brains and couldn’t control themselves. I think it was around 6 minutes in that the wife and I were threatening to take our chances and swim to a deserted island and leave the kids with Miguel, the room steward. But what we weren’t seeing amongst the chaos, was that the kids were being kids. It was their first time experiencing all the epic grandeur that is cruising. We really should not have expected anything different.
Maybe that’s what this will be! Don’t worry, I don’t charge by the post, you’ll be fine. Ok, details: You can probably tell from the pictures we went Carnival. Carnival Victory, to be specific. A 4 day cruise going to Key West and Cozumel. I remember our honeymoon (our last cruise before this one) and cruises I’ve taken with my parents when I was younger, they were always 7 days. We didn’t want to overdo it with the kids though, especially with them being so new to everything, so we decided to just do a 4 day to….. test the waters…… GET IT?! Because it’s a SHIP and we’re TESTING THE—OK, never mind.
Let me say this about Carnival: They’re consistent with what they do. Not to sound like an entitled pompous jerk, but I went on a decent number of cruises as a kid. Well, teen, I think. And we almost always went on Carnival ships with only one time going on Royal Caribbean. The thing with Carnival is – at least with me – that every ship is almost identical. The layout, the bars, the restaurants, buffets, stores. It’s as if someone copy and pasted the same ship and just changed the themes and decorations for each one. I get it, they’re all under one flag, consistency, branding, blah blah. But there has got to be better ways to do that. And to see after 8 years of not being on one of these ships how much things haven’t changed – similarities going back to when I was a teenager – it shows how archaic their ways are. I guess if it ain’t broke… Anyway, I guess my overall thoughts are starting to show through, huh? Let me switch gears before I give it all away.
Despite the trail of destruction left in their wake, the kids had a blast! Sometimes at the expense of the wife and I’s sanity, but hey, kids, right? At the ages 7 and 4 at the time of sailing, they quickly found things they liked to do and routines to get into. For instance, breakfast was the little boxes of cereal that you can take as many as you’d like. And boy, did they, haha. We had boxes of cereal coming out of everywhere. Snack time? Which cereal do you want? The oldest was fine trying new things and branching out. But if they didn’t have cereal or bread on the ship, my youngest would have starved.
Another routine was going to the arcade, which we had to put a hard stop on because that mess ain’t free. At $1.25+ a game, it was equivalent to having a heavy drinking relative with you and on your tab. I mean, we let them go once a day, about a game or two each depending. But they could’ve stayed in there all day every day if we let them and that cost would have paid for another cruise.
We celebrated the youngest’s birthday while at sea. I remember he was so excited to turn 4. Thinking back, comparing to now, he’s come pretty far in a year’s time. It gets all blurred together sometimes and you forget. See! It’s good to have a blog, makes you recall all the sappy stuff.
Most of these pics you’ve been seeing were taken with the DSLR, but that’s about it for those. Almost the entirety of the cruise I took pictures with my phone. It’s not preferred as it is pretty terrible in certain situations. But it is always infinitely easier than carrying around a bulky camera. I was trying to think of how to place the pictures throughout the post, but a slideshow would probably be best. Have fun!
Now, I mentioned the arcade being a money pit and being able to go on another cruise with what could be spent there. Well lemme tell you about spending money.
Because this was our first cruise as a family, and really the first long vacation that wasn’t to Florida, we kinda sorta went overboard with buying pictures. (…GET IT?! OVERBOARD, because it’s a SHIP – I’m so underappreciated) That’s a huge business for cruise lines, with the photographers seemingly everywhere, asking you to pose on whatever is around to get a good picture for you. The kids had fun with it and were always smiling and looking all cute. It got to a point where we were hoping for the pictures to come out bad – a closed eye, a stain on a shirt, something – just so we didn’t feel obligated to buy it. But then… then we really messed up. Oh boy, what a doozy.
So we were getting our pictures taken and a different photographer comes up and starts talking to us, talking to the kids. He says hey, why don’t you guys follow me. So he was super friendly, chatting up with the kids, walking with them, carrying the youngest even though he was half his size. He’s taking us across floors, down stairs, all around, and then we get to a lounge we never even seen before. The hispanic in me was automatically thinking we were going to get something for free because weird stuff happens like that sometimes. No, no, no, quite the opposite.
We go in and in the back of this mysterious lounge is his photography studio where he’s the head honcho. It was a secluded, intimate, professional, studio and he asked if we wanted to take some pictures. Suddenly it hit me. I felt like I was led into a dark alley in some foreign country. I’m from New York, I’m smarter than this. I should’ve known by his amplified level of customer service that whatever he was getting at was going to cost us a lot of money. But no, we went with it. Sure! He looks bored with obviously nothing to do if he’s fishing for families to walk down to his secret hideaway. We’ll take a few pictures, see how they come out, maybe buy one, and say thank you so much for welcoming us into your Batcave and leave. No… it wasn’t that simple.
We took pictures, he said come back after dinner to see them. We did, and they were freaking. amazing. Like no wonder why they gave this dude his own Batcave hidden behind a lounge.
THEN… Then it hit me again. Like seriously, I’m so much smarter than this. I knowingly walked into a trap with this guy. TWICE! And the second time was all my fault because he wasn’t leading me with breadcrumbs this time. We went there by ourselves, willingly, like fish eating the suspicious land worm dancing around 20 feet deep. We had all of dinner to build up a tolerance to persuasion, but it did no good. He jedi mind tricked us into putting out a car payment’s worth of professionally done picture. My goodness, we’ve done some crazy stuff in the moment, but this is up there. Still… The pictures WERE amazing tho. Look at em! We were supposed to only pick a few but he gave us a little hush hush look and whispered he’d hook us up with everything he shot. So we walked away with about 15 pictures of the family that we will always look back on and remember how incredibly gullible we are.
Ok, I’m getting way more detailed than I was aiming for and this is getting rather lengthy. Let me wrap it up by saying this: Cruising… It’s not what it used to be. Well, with Carnival at least. I’m convinced that’s the common denominator here with whatever blahness we have with cruising right now. The shows were alright, I’m usually the one who really looks forward to them with my musical theatre background (stop laughing). So I watch them with a judging eye sometimes. Usually it ends with me wondering how the lead guy got that role, but I digress. Customer service in general with Carnival has taken such a nose dive over the years. And that goes hand in hand with the food which, aside from the omelettes, about 95% of the time left us feeling disappointed. At some points in the evening, if you didn’t eat dinner, the only option to grab a bite would be the 24 hour pizzeria. Which, c’mon, 24 hour pizza, that’s impossible to be mad at. But it is incredibly easy to be mad because the lines were always so long it would take an hour and a half to get one. Freaking savages.
Anyway, like I said, this was LAST year’s trip. Guess what? We went on ANOTHER Carnival cruise this year. I know, right? Fool me once. How did that one go? Well, I guess you’re going to have to wait and see.
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