Dream Eastern 9/24/11-10/1/11- LONG REPORT w/ PICS and MICKEY'S HALLOWEEN PARTY

[sunnidayz]

Dinner was really good. I was not very hungry, but that doesn’t stop a fat person from eating, so here is the low down:

 

 

OMG, I am still laughing...

[vermonter16]

This is a great review! Keep it going! Loving it!

[gelo7]

Loving your review.

[2tall]

... and I was sweating like Whitney Houston performing for a DEA convention...

This has to be the funniest line I've read in a review. Ever. Had to wipe my coffee off of the screen after this one...

[PirateGal]

Amazing review! Just love the photos and the write up!

 

Did you do a review for your Victory cruise???

[singley5]

Loving this review we also are in a deluxe ocean view room I am glad you posted pictures. We are a family of 5 so we will have the bunkies pulled down but either way I got the feel of the room. Thank you. My only question for you is did you feel a lot of motion on this floor. I have only sailed in the middle of the ship a little nervous about being on the first floor. Again love your review can not wait to hear more..

[BenjiRodney]

Loving the review cant wait to read more.

[Purplesaurus]

This is one of the best reviews in a loooong time. Keep it coming, really enjoying this review. I also like your personality!

[crewsweeper]

Great start! I was sorta hoping you snuck Alistair on board so he could give you updates on the WC and tell you where the ship was heading.:rolleyes:

 

Just asking now, as this ? usually gets ignored or ,huh? But you're a culture guy so you may get the clue: did you by chance get your pics with Cage the Elephant, the crew member dress up as a towel animal? I call it, and it's real towel animal counterpart, Cage the Elephant (actually a rock group out of Louisville) because on a cruise, I'm usually humming their theme "Ain't No Rest For the Wicked".

[amethyst08]

Jaybird77,

I am just starting to read your review, but I had to stop and say thanks for this thread. I am excited because I will be on the Dream next month. :p

 

I live in Montgomery and just read that MegaBus will be making runs between Montgomery and Atlanta starting next month. :D You may want to keep that in mind when making plans to see your sweetie.

 

...ok, now I am going back to finish reading. :)

[lifeisgoodPat]

LOVING your review. Can't wait for more. We will be on the Dream over Thanksgiving! Food pictures are really welcome, so we know what to expect…..Thanks again.

[jaybird77]

Amazing review! Just love the photos and the write up!

 

Did you do a review for your Victory cruise???

 

Hey- thanks for reading! I did not do a review of my Victory cruise. Actually this is my first review ever. Victory was my first cruise and I read CC back then, but never even considered that little ol me could actually put together a review. Then when we went on Freedom, I thought i might do one and then just never got my s together. So I was determined to do one for this cruise! Victory was a great ship, of course as my first time, it will always be special. I really liked the size of that ship. It offers a lot, but is still small enough to navigate easily...

[jaybird77]

Loving this review we also are in a deluxe ocean view room I am glad you posted pictures. We are a family of 5 so we will have the bunkies pulled down but either way I got the feel of the room. Thank you. My only question for you is did you feel a lot of motion on this floor. I have only sailed in the middle of the ship a little nervous about being on the first floor. Again love your review can not wait to hear more..

 

Hey, thanks for taking the time to read my review! We really liked the deluxe ocean view room and I think you will be pleased with 5 people! And if any of them are little kiddies you have that option of giving them a bath, so that is nice. You know, I have actually never cruised anywhere but the first floor, so I dont have much to compare it to! But judging from the motion that I feel when I am in the dining rooms and stuff, I would say that there is actually maybe a little less movement on the first floor! I just know that I had the best night's sleep while on the ship, so I wouldnt worry about it too much. I think you will love this ship :)

[jaybird77]

Great start! I was sorta hoping you snuck Alistair on board so he could give you updates on the WC and tell you where the ship was heading.:rolleyes:

 

Just asking now, as this ? usually gets ignored or ,huh? But you're a culture guy so you may get the clue: did you by chance get your pics with Cage the Elephant, the crew member dress up as a towel animal? I call it, and it's real towel animal counterpart, Cage the Elephant (actually a rock group out of Louisville) because on a cruise, I'm usually humming their theme "Ain't No Rest For the Wicked".

 

Ha! I did not know the band but I youtubed them. Sounds great! We actually did get our pic with the towel animal elephant, but we didnt buy them. I think that was so clever of them to get that towel animal suit made. It's cute. Cage the Elephant, I'll have to remember that......

[jaybird77]

Jaybird77,

I am just starting to read your review, but I had to stop and say thanks for this thread. I am excited because I will be on the Dream next month. :p

 

I live in Montgomery and just read that MegaBus will be making runs between Montgomery and Atlanta starting next month. :D You may want to keep that in mind when making plans to see your sweetie.

 

...ok, now I am going back to finish reading. :)

 

 

Wow! I had never heard of Megabus, but $1 rides?? Wow, we may have to consider this option!!

[jaybird77]

LOVING your review. Can't wait for more. We will be on the Dream over Thanksgiving! Food pictures are really welcome, so we know what to expect…..Thanks again.

 

 

I'm jealous! You will have a great time on the Dream. There is a lot to like about it!

[rksmom]

Thank you so much for writing this review. You are a very talented writer and I can't wait to read more.

 

Keep it coming... :)

 

Sandi

[jaybird77]

Thank you everyone for reading my review. It's a little more time consuming than I thought it would be, but seeing your nice comments gives me the motivation to continue!

 

Day 3- Nassau

We awoke at 8am. I am not normally a huge sleeper, but I needed that night’s rest. I only woke up a few times during the night because there was some really awesome thunder and lightning storm. We dressed and went to breakfast on the Lido deck. This would become the same routine each morning. Notice, we did not start out going to the gym. Well, we had to get done so we could get off the boat and get our Nassau on, right??

I had some sort of cheese omelet roll up, bacon, ham and potatoes. Bryon has some grits, which he said had not seen a grain of salt. I tasted them and I can concur. These grits were not salted. Now if you eat grits you know that if not salted properly during the cooking process, grits will never taste exactly right. But this didn’t stop Bryon because he ended up getting a bowl of grits almost every morning, so they must not have been too bad.

 

 

 

 

Also let me here say something about the salt on the ship. How can you operate in the most humid of environments and not know to put some rice in the salt shaker?? We know they have rice. We had it at dinner. And all the salt shakers were clogged with salt clumps. I mean I don’t want to go all Martha Stewart, but this is a simple household tip. And here sits Bryon every morning, knocking and scratching at the salt shaker… Maybe I should write John Heald and let him know…

 

We got off the ship around 9:30am. Bryon does not like the port of Nassau and the reasons why were evident pretty much right after we got off the ship. There were literally throngs of people clamoring to get you to buy things from them. They wanted you to buy their necklaces, or buy their bags. They wanted you to go on their tour, or rent their scooters. And these were people who would continue to follow you trying to solicit even after you had said ‘no thank you’. Now this does not bother me. I am from a big city and I guarantee if I don’t want to talk to you, I can ignore you All. Day. Long. But Bryon is a little bit nicer to strangers than me, so I think he finds it hard to just get people to knock it off and move on. After we got out of the initial wave of that, we went on into town. I knew I wanted to get some rum cakes from the Tortuga store and we both wanted to find a Christmas ornament.

 

 

 

We ended up at this Linen store which has Christmas ornaments in the back. This is where we found our ornaments on the last cruise. We found some we liked but decided to move on and come back if we didn’t find anything we liked better. We ended up at that Bamboo clothing/ Del Sol color changing stuff store. They have some nice stuff in here, and they think very highly of it (high prices). I did find these little flower shaped hair clips that change color and I thought they were really cool. I got some for my mom. Sidebar: I found the same clips later in the ship’s gift store for the same price, so FYI. Bryon wanted a T-shirt but didn’t get one. We did some more shopping then went up a street and saw a church, a government building, and a statue of Christopher Columbus.

 

 

 

[TriciaEMTB]

Loving your review. My phone is my GPS and her name is LuLu. No cool backstory. You and your boyfriend are aaaadorable. You have such beautiful eyes!

[jaybird77]

Then it was time for drink.

We headed down to Senor Frogs. Once again I was sweating like a pork chop next to Kirstie Alley, so I tried to find a table near a fan. I found one, but the fan was off. I asked the waitress to turn it on. By the time it was turned on, I had already cooled off, we were actually almost finished with our drinks, and the air from the fan didn’t even hit out table anyway, so lesson learned- find a fan already operating the first time.

 

 

At Senor Frogs I ordered a yard of the dam good house margarita. Bryon ordered a strawberry daiquiri or something like that. I thought to myself as I gulped down the margarita and dealt with brain freeze over and over ‘I don’t think there is any alcohol in this’. Well I am pretty sure I was drunk at the Rum cake store a little later, so I guess I was wrong.

 

 

Regardless Senor Frogs was just starting to hop when we were leaving and I would have loved to stay but we had more shopping to do!

 

We headed over to the rum cake store and I bought a large pineapple flavored and small chocolate flavored cake. These things are not cheap, but they taste really good. We headed back over to the linen shop and picked up those Christmas ornaments and we were ready to get back on the ship. It was raining/drizzling pretty well the whole time after we left Senor Frogs so we were ready to get back on the ship.

 

When we got out to the pier there were really long lines to get back on the ship. I’m not sure if this was again just because of the time we were getting on, or because it was starting to rain, or because the ship has so many dang people. But I can say that getting back on the ship at the other ports was not really an issue.

 

 

We were just in time for lunch. We really wanted to hit the Lanai BBQ the first day since we thought there would end up being a crowd later in the week. The Lanai BBQ is on deck 5, right outside Oceans Plaza. We got sliders and quesadillas (chicken and beef). There were also chips and coleslaw and maybe some other side dishes. Now we thought that in other pics of the Lanai BBQ we saw ribs on the grill. Maybe we just made that up, but there were no ribs on this day and we did not go back to check any of the other days.

 

No Ribs. Boooooo...

 

 

 

 

Bryon was really looking forward to ribs, so he was a little disappointed. He also did not care for the sliders (he said they had lawn clippings on top of them- also known as lettuce). I liked them and I liked the quesadillas. The chips were…awful.

 

Now let me tell you about something that I did not know of and ended up being a favorite of mine. The sushi bar, called Wasabi, turns into a salad bar on sea days during lunch. There was this little lady there and she would mix you up your own salad. Ok maybe salad bars don’t get other people as excited as they do me, but I thought this was really awesome. There were a few different types of lettuce (iceberg, arugula, spinach, romaine). There were tons and tons of toppings (olives, carrots, radishes, tomatoes, chickpeas, cucumbers, shrimp, bacon, cheeses and on and on). Then she put everything into a bowl and mixed it up with your dressing choice.

 

 

 

Also I discovered another little luxury that I have not noticed before on this lunch day. They now have servers walking around with drink carts (and pastries in the morning). They come around to your tables and give you refills on the free drinks if you need one. This was a nice little touch I thought.

[kidsnurse]

Awesome review!! you are crackin me up! We are on the Dream in Feb!

 

 

nanci

[jaybird77]

After lunch, we went and changed to swim again, but once we got out up top… rain.

This continued through sailaway but we braved it enough to get some pics and Bryon found the love of his life- ice cream!

 

 

 

We decided to do some trivia in Oceans Plaza. They were having 60’s song trivia. They would play a clip of a song and you had to write the title of the song and artist. It was harder than it sounds.

Oh yeah I forgot to tell you! There was this weird lady who was sitting at the table next to us. She kept leaving before the trivia started and asked us to watch her stuff, which was just, like, a towel and her borrowed pencil and answer form. I was like ‘What are we supposed to be watching??’ Anyway, most people who were actually participating were in teams, but this lady was by herself. Well right before trivia starts, this older guy walks up to her and says ‘Hey are you playing by yourself?’, you know just being friendly looking to connect with someone else who was playing, and she was like ‘Yes! And that’s the way I want it!’ haha. He got shot down! Then of course invariably during trivia, people start to yell out answers, and when they would, this lady would shout ‘Don’t yell out the answers!!’….uhh Trivia ****!!!.

We had as much fun watching her play as we had actually playing. Anyway, we did not win, but we did score a 24 out of 40 which is not bad for two people, one of which was not even alive for the 60s and the other who was only 1 when the 60s ended!

After trivia we decided to participate in Bryon’s favorite activity- depositing money into the casino. We lost $30 between the two of us and that was it for me.

 

This was the first of two formal nights. We changed into our coats and ties and went out in search of some photo ops.

 

 

We already had some good photos from other cruises, but this time I knew I wanted to do some ‘interesting poses’. We found a good backdrop on Deck 3 near the atrium. The photographer made us do formal photos first but then he indulged us in doing some funnier poses. For this one I forced Bryon to do the one where he points at me looking exasperated and I just throw up my arms like ‘I don’t know!’. The photographer seemed to like this one. Interestingly, when he would take the pictures he would say in his Romanian accent ‘Ok give me sexy smile’…I was like ‘Um, sir I don’t have a sexy smile, sorry’

 

 

 

We headed to Ocean's Plaza and found the Captain and Butch waiting to pose with us! We also met the Assistant CD, Amy- aka 6'3"- also known by me as the tallest woman ever! She looked like a cross between a Swedish stewardess and an Amazon warrior! She took the pic of us and Butch.

 

 

 

[jaybird77]

Dinner:

I had the cheese plate to start along with the Greek Farmer’s Salad, which was excellent. I had the shrimp and lobster tail which I wish I could say was excellent, but actually was just…tough. I had the WCMC for dessert. It is so good, but very rich! Bryon had the carbonara to start which he said was very good. He had the mahi mahi for main course which he said was average.

 

 

 

 

 

Napkin waving mischief at the table!

 

 

 

 

After dinner we changed clothes and went to the late showing of ‘Get Ready’….<sigh>…Ok. I totally appreciate the hard work that these dancers and singers and musicians put into these shows and let me just say that the talent was there. It’s just… all this show was, was a collection of snippets of songs that were just strung together with costume changes and set props. There was no plot I could really even pick out. I think it was supposed to be a transportation theme or something. Anyway, I just wish that maybe Carnival could pay for rights to some actual shows or something and give these deserving performers some good material to present to everyone. The good news is this was the worst of all the rest of the shows we saw all week..

 

We went to the Caliente Club, which is the disco. I thought the music was good, but they played ‘Run the World’ by Beyonce and then followed that with some rap songs and that was it for Bryon. We had to move on.

[Pennyscandy]

More, more, more. I'm hooked. Can't wait for the next installment.

Linda

[jaybird77]

Before I forget- that 6 picture limit did not permit me to post the pic of WCMC and i know you all probably know what it looks like- but for posterity:

 

 

We went to the comedy club to see Tony Brown. We had seen a snip of his clean material at the Welcome aboard show the night before. He was really funny and we enjoyed this show. This comedy club thing is yet another really good addition to a Carnival cruise. There was just one thing about this show that bothered me. It was the opening act, which is actually part of Carnival’s entertainment staff. I think he called himself the ‘Fun Guy’ or something like that. He described himself as a ‘broke down Barry Manilow’ which was a pretty good and funny description. We were trying to figure out if he was wearing a toupee or what. Anyway, he came out and, I don’t know… his main job was to warm the audience, but also I guess to let everyone know this was going to be an adult show with racy language. Well his way of doing this was to just curse, for what we thought was really no reason. Now I think a nicely placed curse word can really enhance comedy and I’m a fan, but when someone is just using a string of cuss words and thinks that’s funny…no. Maybe it was the fact that this was a guy with a Carnival badge and it’s kind of weird to see an official Carnival employee using that kind of language. I don’t know, it was just…weird.

After this, we were all tuckered out and headed to bed.

 

 

Next up: Fun Day at Sea and a Female Impersonator!