After nine days away, Susan and I have returned home from vacation. We spent five days cruising on the Carnival Paradise, and four days driving to and from Tampa.
This time our cruise ports were the Cayman Islands and Cozumel. We’ve been to Cozumel multiple times, but this was was our first time to the Grand Cayman Island. In Cozumel we returned to our favorite resort (Mr. Sancho’s) and on Grand Cayman Island we went on an excursion that involved interacting with stingrays. I’ll be writing more about both of those excursions later this week.
The Carnival Princess is the smallest ship we’ve sailed on since we began cruising. Many of the areas we were used to had been scaled down, and others were completely missing. There were no specialty restaurants like the steakhouse and Italian restaurant our last ship had, and the sushi restaurant had been condensed to a small kiosk. Our last cruise ship had two hot tubs in the Serenity area and this ship only had one. The middle atrium area was missing a large seating area, and many of the retail shops we enjoy were missing. These are observations more than complaints; there was plenty to do and places to explore, but the difference in size was very apparent.
One thing that was better on this ship was the internet access. On our last cruise the internet was so bad as to be essentially useless. This time it was quite functional. In our room I was able to stream Netflix, which is pretty impressive for being in the middle of the ocean with a couple thousand people. We don’t spend a lot of time online while on our cruises, but it is nice during downtimes to be able to share pictures or videos online. The televisions in our room only have a couple of channels worth watching, so being able to connect my laptop to thge room’s television and watch movies that way made the evenings more enjoyable.
When you board a cruise, they take your luggage from you and deliver it to your room several hours later. That means for several hours, all you have access to are the things you carry on. There are hot tubs and swimming pools on the ship, but because everyone’s swimming suits are in their luggage, no one is ever using them. Susan came up with the brilliant idea of wearing our swim suits underneath our regular clothes. After boarding the ship, we walked straight to the rear of the boat to where the hot tub was and for nearly an hour, had the entire thing to ourselves. We could have had it for another hour or two, but it started getting hot and it got awkward with dozens of people looking over the deck at us. But man, did we beat the system.
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