Carnival Freedom 12-day Repo: Full review with 100+ pictures

[foundmyMcGyver]

Here's my review of the Carnival Freedom 12-day repositioning cruise which started in Ft Lauderdale and ended in Galveston. Along the way we visited St Maarten, St Lucia, Curacao, Aruba, and Cozumel.

 

I know that much of North America is dealing with snow and incredibly frigid temperatures right now. Hopefully, when you see all my pictures of the beaches and the snorkeling and the margaritas, it will warm your spirit just a little!

 

Before we dive in to this, let's start off with a little introduction...

 

 

I'm Jim Zimmerlin (everyone calls me Jim Zim) and I always cruise with my wife, Kellyn. (Pronunciation tip: it rhymes with Helen.) We're from Grover Beach, California... a little beach town on the California coast about halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco. We've been cruising since 1996, and this was our 28th cruise overall... our 23rd with Carnival.

 

After 20+ cruises with Carnival, we decided to do a little experiment in 2014 and cruise with some other cruise lines to see what they had to offer. It wasn't that we were unhappy with Carnival... quite the opposite, actually... we just wanted to see if we were missing out on anything good that the other lines had to offer. So, in 2014 we did two cruises with Princess... and also sailed on the newest ships from Royal Caribbean and Norwegian. We enjoyed those cruises a lot, and even concluded that the Norwegian Getaway is the best cruise ship in the entire world right now, but came back to Carnival in 2015 when we heard about the 12-day repositioning cruise. Caribbean cruises longer than 8 days are very rare on Carnival, so we jumped at the chance.

 

I'm a pretty good photographer and enjoy all the fantastic photo opportunities that a cruise presents. I think you'll enjoy all of the photos and videos that I took during our cruise... most of them shot using my Canon EOS 70D digital SLR camera.

 

With that bit of introduction out of the way, let's get to it...

 

DH and I were on this cruise, I recognize you both. Looking forward to the pics and your review.

Edited March 2, 2015 by foundmyMcGyver

[foundmyMcGyver]

In case you're wondering about the Lawry's seasoned salt,

I bring that from home to enhance the taste of eggs and potatoes at breakfast

[/center]

 

I was wondering about the Lawreys as soon as I saw it lol. What a great idea. Love the review, you have great photos and review is very well written and entertaining. Thank you

[LCTXcruiser]

Tips and thoughts are always appreciated!! And it helps to be reminded about things!! This was a very helpful and thoughtful post!!!

 

Thank you!

 

This shot is absolutely beautiful. Have you ever thought about sending it to the Today show? Being how awful the weather has been, I'm sure you'd get some airtime with it.

[gizmo911]

No, not really. First off, most of the planes are fairly small. You tend to only see pictures and videos posted of the big planes... because those are the most impressive. But the big planes are rare. Most of the traffic is much smaller planes.

 

Second, you can easily go 30 minutes or more between planes... especially before noon. It gets a little busier in the afternoon. So, imagine a nice quiet beach and then about twice an hour a small plane flies overhead. It's not a big disturbance to the peace and quiet.

 

I think it's just a fantastic little beach, and lots of fun!

 

Thanks you so much for your feedback. We do want to stay together so we will take your suggestion and try this beach.

[Spaniel Lover]

This shot is absolutely beautiful. Have you ever thought about sending it to the Today show? Being how awful the weather has been, I'm sure you'd get some airtime with it.

 

I posted it to the Today show's Facebook page. Whether or not they ever did anything with it, I don't know. I never had any feedback from anyone at NBC on the photo. A few fans of their Facebook page commented on it, and that was it.

[Meyer2]

Wonderful review & pictures! Thanks so much for sharing!

[jigger]

Wonderful review !!

[rich75904]

Love your review and pics. We are going on a cruise on Freedom in November and look forward to seeing this in person. I have to ask, was that bottle of Malibu glass or plastic bottle? And did you bring it with you on the boat or have it in your luggage packed away? This will be our first cruise and we went ahead and got a room with balcony also. Thanks again for all the tips and pictures.

[nemini]

It would be interesting to just do a standard 7-day eastern Caribbean cruise and see if the service worked well most of the time. Was it that we were in a dead zone in the Southern Caribbean during the second half of our cruise... or was it that more passengers were all trying to use the system at the same time during those sea days?

 

I was on Freedom a few months ago in December, doing a more typical 7-day eastern Caribbean cruise. I felt the Internet connection was immensely improved over the previous year (different itinerary, before the Internet upgrade), and was generally better than I'd previously gotten at sea. Certainly it was a much better price. I haven't tried RCCL's new system, which wasn't in place when I was aboard Liberty of the Seas last summer, but the system on Freedom was mostly solid and peppy. A friend of mine was doing his daily quests in World of Warcraft, even.

 

That said, they advertised no streaming, and I noticed that the network tended to fairly quickly quash music or video streaming. (Yet not WoW!)

[aggiejade]

I got a kick out of seeing that John Heald used one of my photos from my Carnival Freedom review today as his Facebook cover photo.

 

He used this shot, which I'd have to say is the best shot I got during the entire cruise:

 

 

We had a brief chat via Facebook today and he told me that someone sent him the photo and he didn't actually realize that it was one of mine. He's used quite a few of my cruise photos as his Facebook cover photos before... one day he changed his cover photo 3 or 4 times and they were all my cruise photos!

 

It's always fun when my photos get some fame on John's page!

 

John really should acknowledge that the photo was taken by you. You deserve to be recognized as the photographer of such a great shot. Whom ever is sending the photo's to John needs to supply him with this info. By the way, today he used another photo of yours.

[jpm1973]

I became overwhelmed by it all as this unusual experience unfolded in front of me... not overwhelmed by jet blast or sand or anything like that... I was way out of the line of fire. I was emotionally overwhelmed by it all. I had wanted to come to this place for so many years. It was so much more spectacular in person than it was on YouTube. I literally just started to cry. Really! It was so overwhelming. Who cries at the sight of a plane taking off?!?! So, it's confirmed... I'm officially weird!

 

I've been fascinated by airplanes since I was a kid and I actually cried my first time watching the planes at Maho Beach. So you may be weird but you're not the only one!

[Mrs.C05]

This was a great review and fabulous photos! Thanks for taking the time to do this!

[Buffettfan 225]

By the way, if you've ever tried to take photos of your cruise ship cabin and have had problems fitting the whole cabin in to your shot... take a close look at those last few photos, especially the bathroom shot, and notice how much of the room you can see in each photo.

 

I used a special wide-angle Canon lens in order to show as much as possible in each photo. That lens really comes in handy in small places like a cruise ship cabin or bathroom!

 

The lens I used was the new Canon EFS 10-18mm image stabilized STM lens.

are you using the pop up camera flash? Looking fwd to more photos. Thanks for lens info, very helpful.

[officerswife]

 

Awesome review and beautiful photos!! Never saw such clear, crisp, colorful photos!