5 Days in Paradise - February 7, 2015 - a review

Hi all!

I always try to do a review when we return from a trip because I always get so much information on here from all of you before we go.

I'm going to do a short review of our cruise on the Paradise. Sorry no pictures this time - just really didn't take that many and the ones I did you probably wouldn't care about seeing!

I'm Angela (49) and my husband is Glen (51). Traveling with us were our great friends, Ronnie and Lisa (both 46) and Michael and Donna (38) and (36).

This was our 2nd adults only cruise - left all the kids at home. First trip was last February on the Fascination - we found we enjoyed traveling without the kids for a change and did it again!

We left North Georgia Friday afternoon about 2:00 and drove straight into Tampa. We had reservations at the Hyatt Place Westshore/Airport. This was our 2nd time staying at this hotel and we weren't disappointed. We decided we would all stay in 1 room to save some money since we were really only there to sleep and get ready to head to port on Saturday morning. I priced several different options such as park and cruise and it was cheaper for us to stay at the Hyatt and park at one of the parking areas near the port.

The hotel is very nice and I would recommend it to anyone. They have a wonderful breakfast and it's only about 10 - 15 minutes to the port from the hotel.

Saturday morning we headed to the port area and got to our parking about 10:20 or so. We chose to park with The Parking Doctors and I believe it was about $41.00 for the 5 days per car. We had told them that we wanted to go to the port early and they told us that wouldn't be a problem. We waited for a shuttle driver to come back from picking up passengers that were disembarking and he then took us to the port. We arrived there about 10:45 or 11.

We purchased FTTF this trip because we had cruised out of Tampa before and it wasn't the best experience for us. We decided we would try it out this time since we had a tender port in Grand Cayman and Glen is having some mobility issues since suffering a heart attack in 2013 and this way we could go straight to our cabin and put all our stuff away before heading to the lido deck for lunch.

It was well worth it to us! There were no lines when we got to the port and we had our sail and sign cards in no time and just sat and waited for embarkation to begin. We were on the ship in no time and headed to our cabin to put our things away and head to lunch.

We booked back in August and actually booked cabins on the Upper Deck but sometime around Halloween Carnival was doing some type of sale and we decided to give up our rooms on the Upper Deck and go the guarantee route and let Carnival assign our cabins for us. In doing this we ended up saving about $300 per couple plus had a $20 OBC for each cabin. We were all assigned OV cabins on the Riviera deck and they were mid-ship to aft which is what we like and also port side which we prefer. It was well worth the $300 savings we got by letting Carnival pick for us we thought.

Lunch on Lido was good - standard first day fare. Missed not having a Guy's burgers on this ship - loved them when we were on the Sunshine in October. After lunch we headed back to see if our luggage had arrived and it had so we got unpacked and went to explore.

That's all for tonight - will post more tomorrow.

...We arrived there about 10:45 or 11...

I hoped you enjoyed the boarding announcements? :D

I hoped you enjoyed the boarding announcements? :D

Absolutely loved them - I was going to speak to you but you were busy doing your thing!

You bring embarkation announcements to a whole new level! Keep up the good work.

Thank you for taking the time to do this review..... there are so few on the Paradise.

I am planning a girlfriend's cruise next year on the Paradise so looking forward to reading the rest.

.

Absolutely loved them - I was going to speak to you but you were busy doing your thing!

 

You bring embarkation announcements to a whole new level! Keep up the good work.

Thanks So Much (delivered in a radio announcer inflection) and I'm never too busy to talk to our fellow Carnival Cruise Critic's!

Thank you for taking the time to do this review..... there are so few on the Paradise.

 

I am planning a girlfriend's cruise next year on the Paradise so looking forward to reading the rest.

 

 

 

 

 

.

Thanks for reading! I may even decide to try and sneak in a few pictures - I love reviews with pictures.

I'll try and post more this evening.

Thanks So Much (delivered in a radio announcer inflection) and I'm never too busy to talk to our fellow Carnival Cruise Critic's!

I'll definitely keep that in mind our next trip out of Tampa.

Thanks so much for taking time to post a review! Really looking forward to reading more about your trip.

Thanks for your review! We sail on the 21st. Can't wait!

Thanks for your review! We sail on the 21st. Can't wait!

Oh, I don't know if I will finish before you leave because I just have to sneak in a few minutes here and there after work. There usually isn't much time left after dinner, dishes and getting 6 kids situated for the night (well 2 of them are practically grown and can do for themselves) but if you have any questions I'll be happy to try and answer them!

Thanks for reading!

Sunday - Sea day

We woke up Sunday morning to a very overcast day and the winds were howling, seas were rough and the ship was rocking. It made for a fun day trying to walk.

We headed up to Lido for our first omelet of the cruise and it was very good! Had a leisurely breakfast and then us girls headed to lay out in the sun.

We stayed out on Lido for several hours and enjoyed the Mixologist contest and the hairy chest contest but then decided it was time to go in because we were freezing to death! The wind hadn't died down and the sun was sporatic at best.

We called it a day and went in to nap and get ready for elegant evening.

Went down to promenade deck before dinner and had a few pictures made and then headed to dinner.

Dinner was excellent - probably the best lobster I've ever had on a Carnival ship and service was excellent again too.

We had a few more pictures made and then went to the 8 More Seconds show which was a country based show. It was the better one of the ones we saw, but still wasn't up to par with some of the other shows we have seen on other ships.

All of us got together after the show and went for a slice of pizza. I usually don't eat very much pizza but it was so good on this ship.

Headed to bed to get ready for our day in Cozumel.

More on Cozumel tomorrow!

Really enjoying your review, looking forward to Cozumel.

Enjoying your review. We got on the Paradise for Valentine's Weekend when you got back. Really enjoyed the quick get away.

Enjoying your review. We got on the Paradise for Valentine's Weekend when you got back. Really enjoyed the quick get away.

Thanks for reading - I wish I was still cruising - anything to get away from these 9 degree temperatures!

Enjoying your review. I'll check tomorrow for more, would love to read all of it before Saturday...when we will be on the Paradise ourselves! :)

Enjoying your review. I'll check tomorrow for more, would love to read all of it before Saturday...when we will be on the Paradise ourselves! :)

I will really try even if I have to post without pictures. I almost have Cozumel day finished but we had a webinar to do tonight for our foster parenting and it's put me behind.

Check back tomorrow!

I have to agree I wish the paradise had the 2.0 upgrades, but still an awesome cheap cruise. We went in Feb 2014, and are going again in late Nov of this year. Both times are the 5 day.

Thanks for the review. We will be on the Paradise later on in the year. There isn't a lot of reviews out there for that ship. I can't wait for the port of calls reviews. Thanks again

I hope we can get a conclusion to this. Interested in hearing about the other entertainment.

I hope we can get a conclusion to this. Interested in hearing about the other entertainment.

Yes, I'm hoping to finish. I haven't forgotten about you guys.

I'll do my best to get back to this sometime this week.

Interested in your review. Thinking of booking this for April.

So sorry for the delay in getting back to my review. It's been a hectic few weeks.

Hopefully I can finish up sometime this week and maybe I'll have a chance to post some pictures.

Cozumel -

We woke up Monday morning to a bright and glorious sunny day. The temperature was in the 60's and there wasn't a cloud in the sky.

While planning for our cruise we decided that we would hire a driver for the day in Cozumel. My family had done this in 2012 when we cruised on the Legend and had a wonderful experience. We used Crescencio Lopez and absolutely loved him so we decided to use him again.

Crescencio and I had been in touch by email and facebook and we had our planned meeting place and time all set. But, during dinner on Sunday night our waiter told us that Cozumel’s time had changed and it was actually on the same time as the ship was on. I made a call to my daughter and had her get with Crescencio on facebook and figure out what we needed to do.

We had a nice breakfast on lido –omelets again and got ready and headed on into Cozumel. Got off the ship without any lines whatsoever which was wonderful. We met Crescencio at the taxi area and off we went.

Since Glen and I had already done the tour with him before but Ronnie, Lisa, Michael and Donna had not, he took us back through downtown and showed us some of the sites before we headed to the “wild side” of Cozumel.

On the way we decided we would take a tequila tour and it was fun (although we aren’t drinkers and tasting tequila at 9 in the morning certainly wasn’t something we were used to) but it took up too much of our time I thought. Now that I’ve done it, I won’t be doing it again. Crescencio headed on around the island and we stopped at some great sites to make pictures. It was absolutely beautiful.

We made our way on around and stopped at Playa Palancar where Crescencio had taken us in 2012 for some beach time.

It is a very nice place with tables, chairs and loungers and some shade for those who aren’t sun worshippers. They have bar service as well as food and it is moderately priced and very good. Crescencio included in his price 1 hour of free snorkeling for each of us. The men decided they just wanted to sit in the shade so Lisa, Donna and myself were the only ones who did the snorkeling.

Donna and Lisa had never snorkeled so we got one of the guys there to be our “guide”. He took us way down the beach and we snorkeled back. He stayed right with Donna and Lisa so they wouldn’t be nervous and we saw some beautiful fish. We saw a lobster, a baby barracuda and a flounder along with lots of other fish. He didn’t charge us a set price, just ask for a tip if he did a good job which he did. Unfortunately our time with Crescencio was coming to an end so we had to head back to the port.

I can’t say enough about what a nice, Christian man Crescencio is. He will let you plan your day and will take you and do whatever it is that you want to do and stays with your things so you can enjoy your time and not worry about something being stolen. It is very reasonable for the personal attention you receive.

We shopped a little after our tour with Crescencio and then got back on the ship and ate a late lunch.

We had talked to our daughter while in Cozumel - there is free wi-fi at Pancho's so if you have an iphone you can face time and she told us we had gotten some messages at home that needed to be addressed to unfortunately we had to make some very expensive calls back home.

We are on A T & T and if I'm not mistaken while we were in port in Cozumel it was about $1.00 per minute to call back home versus the $1.99 per minute from the cabin phone.

We got all that taken care of and lounged a little while before getting ready and heading off to dinner. Once again, we had wonderful service and great food.

I may have my nights mixed up but I think tonight was the night that there wasn't a show there were just several small things they did in the theatre. I believe they had the Battle of the Genders, Liars Club and maybe a few more but since it's been a few weeks I can't recall exactly. We sat in there for a few minutes of the Battle of the Genders but wasn't too impressed so we ventured off to do something else but I honestly don't remember what.

Grand Cayman was the next day so we headed to bed to get our rest for that port day.

Grand Cayman -

We weren't supposed to be in Grand Cayman until 11:00 and sometime before that our CD came over the pa and announced that the winds were really up and it wasn't going to be safe to tender into Georgetown so we were going to the other side of the island and tender into a place called Spot Bay.

We didn't have any excursion plans for Grand Cayman but we wanted to go ahead and get off the ship and get our day started.

It was probably 11:30 or later before we even started tendering to Spot Bay. Trust me, FTTF really came in handy here because everyone was anxious to get to shore and it would have been a long wait otherwise.

I think I know why they call it Spot Bay - it's just a small little spot where the tenders dock to let you out and there is nothing else there!

We had to take a taxi over to the Georgetown area - we had decided we would go to Royal Palms and hang out for the afternoon to lie on the beach and get some sun (the guys would be looking for shade). I think it was $6 per person to get from Spot Bay to Royal Palms and $2 per person to get into Royal Palms. It was so windy that it was almost cool so we decided we would just sit at the outdoor restaurant/bar area and have a drink and not rent a lounge chair (it's $8 to rent a lounge chair on the beach). I shared a coke with Glen and we shared a cheeseburger and it was $21! The cheeseburger was really good - but not $21 good! This place was very expensive.

We had been told we could walk from Royal Palms to downtown (wanted to go to the Guy Harvey shop to get some shirts) but we decided to catch a cab because Glen just isn't able to do a lot of walking right now. It was another $4 to get to Georgetown from the Royal Palms. We window shopped some and made it to Guy Harveys and purchased some shirts. Guy was actually there signing shirts that people were purchasing but by the time I found all the ones I needed he had already left to go to an appointment. I was really disappointed because I knew my oldest daughter would love to have hers signed.

By now, everyone was tired and aggravated at all the money we had spent and hadn't really got to do anything so we decided to head back to the ship. Another $5 per person taxi ride to get back to Spot Bay but we did have a singing taxi driver this time.

I'm sure if the weather had been more cooperative and we had been able to dock in Georgetown that we would have had a better day. As it was, we spent way more money than we had planned and just didn't really have a good day. In hind sight I wish I had just gone straight to the Guy Harvey shop and bought my shirts and got back on the ship. Oh well, I guess we will know next time!

More on Grand Cayman later today or tonight!