LincolnLog

We were on this cruise in March. Same ship, same itinerary, same cabin class. But we definitely did not get any free bags of laundry! I’m thinking it might be because of your latitudes level? I don’t think it’s because of your cabin category.

Governors beach at Grand Turk and sailaway from San Juan

Pig and Anchor dinner. The pulled pork was great, the brisket just ok.

Pig and Anchor Bloody Mary. The best!

A few more random photos... Guys burger and Big Chicken

The last thing I wanted to mention was our cruise director, Jacky Tang. He was the assistant cruise director when we sailed on the Norwegian Bliss a few years ago so we were familiar with him and I gotta say, we love this guy. His dry, sarcastic, sense of humor just hits me in that spot where everything he says makes me laugh. It was a little strange at first to see him doing the typical cruise director duties, like dancing during the parties and things like that, but he's actually pretty good at it. But his best strength by far is improvising and being funny. I've never seen anyone do a better Love and Marriage show than his and even the silly things like the cruise director Q&A were so much fun with him. I think he's pretty new to Carnival so if you get a cruise with him you're in for a treat!

Our ports on this trip were San Juan, Amber Cove, and Grand Turk. We went on a cruise that sailed out of San Juan years ago and we stayed a week afterwards so we love it there. This time we walked around and went to our favorite spots for coffee and pina coladas and mofongo. In Amber Cove my wife and daughter were supposed to go horseback riding on the beach but their excursion got canceled so they just hung out while my son and I did an ATV/beach excursion through the ship. My son is 17 and an adrenaline junky so he loves this kind of stuff. We had a blast. In Grand Turk we rented a golf cart and drove around the island. This was a lot of fun too. It's a tiny island so you can see everything in a day. We stopped at a couple different beaches and they were all beautiful. We also got jerked chicken and beans and rice from a food truck in the downtown area that was amazing. I have to tell you east coast people, you are so lucky to be so close to the Caribbean! We love it there so much. Yeah we have Hawaii and Mexico over here but the beaches and water just don't come close to the Caribbean. Well the east coast of Mexico does (Cancun, Cozumel) but not the ones over here on the Mexican Riviera cruises (Cabo, Puerto Vallarta). We had a lot of fun in all these ports.

One thing that we were slightly worried about was the sheer amount of people on this ship. And on the second night at the Chef's Table the chef told us that the exact number of guests was 5,900! But the capacity is 6,100 so I guess we got a break? Honestly though it felt the same as every other ship we've been on. Was the pool deck crowded on sea days? Of course! Was the buffet crowded at breakfast time? Of course! (Not that we ate in there, but we did pass through 😆) Was the theater packed for the shows? You know the answer. But like I said it's never been any different on any other ship we've been on so it didn't bother us one bit. When it comes to the entertainment on Carnival it's been hit or miss for us. I hate to keep comparing it to Norwegian but that's where we've cruised the most and we love the stage shows they put on. With Carnival we love the comedy shows. And we saw some cool stuff in the Center Stage area, especially some of the acrobatics in the Las Vegas show. But we weren't big fans of Celestial Strings on Panorama so we skipped that and we were disappointed by the magic show this time. It had a lot of great production with very little substance. In fact we were much more impressed with the other magician who randomly came around to the tables during dinner throughout the week. But the highlight for us were the live musicians who perform nightly throughout the ship. The band in Pig and Anchor was great and so were the ones in Brass Magnolia and Fortune Teller. Speaking of bars....those three and Alchemy were our favorite spots all week. Alchemy is always fun but this week was my favorite experience there because of a bartender named Drazen. He was one of those guys who immediately knows your name even after you've only been there once, even briefly. That always blows my mind! Then he started recommending drinks based on what I like and don't like. At home I only drink beer and wine but on a cruise with the drink package I like to try other stuff and he made things that I loved! As for the other places, we loved the French Quarter area in general and really liked the theme of the bars and lounges there. The Brass Magnolia in particular had great New Orleans themed drinks and a lounge area with super comfortable chairs to listen to the band in. I ended up spending a lot of time in Pig and Anchor too, that is a huge spot that's great for watching football games and live music.

Just to clarify, those were very minor complaints, really just things to make a note of. Along those same lines I'll say this. There were some odd temperature issues in certain areas of the ship. It was pretty hot outside the whole week so maybe with an enormous ship like this and all the people on it, the air conditioning systems can only do so much. But there were many times where it was hot indoors and I feel like that's very rare on a cruise ship. Mostly this was in the center stage area, especially in the upper sections, and in the stairwells. I'm a guy who always wants it as cold as possible so I'll say I would have liked our room to get colder too but that wasn't a problem. Obviously food is subjective, blah blah blah, but I'll say that on my previous two Carnival cruises I felt the casual food spots were outstanding and the dining room was average to good, and the buffet was....just bad. 😬 Well on this ship those things were pretty consistent with the exception of the buffet, which we just decided to skip altogether this time. Side note.... if I were to compare the cruise lines I've been on I'm just gonna crown Norwegian as the buffet champion and crown Carnival as the casual dining champion. But why can't these two do a better job of copying what the other one does best? Norwegian has terrible (free) casual options and Carnival has great ones. Why doesn't Norwegian steal some of their ideas? And why doesn't Carnival do something to improve the quality of their buffet? Copy Norwegian! Their buffet is like a nice place you'd go for Mother's Day brunch. The Carnival buffet is like the place in the mall that serves all you can eat for $9.99! Ok sorry for the rant.... This was our first time trying Big Chicken and it was as good as advertised! We all loved it. Same goes for Guys burgers, Blue Iguana and the panini place. My son went for late night pizza almost every night and my daughter wanted to try every sandwich on the panini menu but she loved the turkey one so much she got that over and over. I really thought we would have gone to Street Eats more often but there were just too many options. One thing I really liked is that some of the specialty restaurants that are an extra charge on the Panorama were included on this one. I had seen conflicting info on this so I can tell you at least as of this week, Chibang and Cucina were included the first time you had dinner there and if you wanted to go again it would be $8. And surprisingly Guy's Pig and Anchor was always included with no extra charge. We had great meals at all three places. But the highlight of the week was that we went to Chef's Table for our anniversary dinner. What a great experience that was. Definitely not for everybody, maybe you have to be kind of a "foodie" (ugh I hate that word) but we really enjoyed it. Bottom line on the food, we knew what to expect and the results ranged from good to great.

Got home after midnight last night after a long cross country flight but it gave me some time to reflect on our 7 night eastern Mardi Gras cruise. Overall it was a great trip! Here at some thoughts in case I can help anyone who has one coming up. This was our third Carnival cruise, all in the last couple of years. We have been on the Panorama twice because it’s one of the few newer ships based here on the west coast. So all of our Carnival experience is pretty recent and on newer ships. First off, embarkation/debarkation out of Port Canaveral was amazing!! Hands down it was the fastest and easiest out of all the cruises we’ve been on. Our check in was 10:30-11:00 so we left the nearby Homewood Suites at 10:15 and got to the port at 10:30, got checked in and breezed through security and were on the ship just after 11:00. Coming back we did self embarkation so we had breakfast a little before 8:00, went back up and grabbed our suitcases from the room at 8:15, and were off the ship at 8:30! 😳 We were shocked. Had I known it would be so fast and easy I would have booked us an earlier flight home. We had two adjoining balcony cabins on deck 10 forward. Once our kids got too big for the bunk beds in our room we started getting them an inside room across the hall from us so this time it was fun all being somewhat together with the connecting doors. It was also nice to have one big balcony after our steward opened the partition between our balconies. The only complaint I had about the rooms was something I brought up on a recent post about the lack of blackout curtains. In every previous balcony room we’ve had you couldn’t tell whether it was day or night when the curtains were closed. But this is what it looked like at 7am all this week: People suggested that I ask my room steward for help with it and I eventually did, but he wasn't able to do anything. He actually seemed surprised, maybe most of the rooms don't have this problem. The only other problem I had with the rooms was this. Here's the view looking out over our balconies: So we had an extended balcony, which I never saw anything about when I booked it. So it was weird having the people above looking down at ours. Plus ours did the same to the people below us, and then below them was the Havana area. So I would suggest that if you're like me and you like to look down straight to the ocean, don't book a room in this section where we were: More coming...

Yeah I've been meaning to ask our steward for help with it but we haven't seen him since day one. And that's not a complaint, he's just been that good!

It's day 4 and everything has been great except....it would be nice to sleep in past 7am while on vacation but this is what it looks like in my room: Whatever happened to blackout curtains?! I've tried magnetic clips and it's helped a little bit on the sides but the top is the bad part.

Well this was helpful because now I’m thinking ahead for this. I’ll stash some barbecue sauce from Pig & Anchor and some ranch from the buffet and keep them in my room for later 😆

Ok no judgement here but just to clarify…you didn’t mean ketchup for your chicken nuggets did you? 🤢

My guess was going to be Alchemy, but then I realized you meant for dinner…but I’m still gonna guess Alchemy anyway! 😆