lovestocruise19

The next part of this review will be all the pictures I took around the ship while we were exploring.

For reference, our room number was 15229. Another awesome thing about our room was that Lido was just one deck up!

Once onboard, we dumped our carryon bags in the room, did e-muster, explored a bit and ate lunch on Lido. E-muster consisted of meeting at our location (casino bar) and checking in. Then they asked if we knew how to put a life jacket on. There was a chorus of "yeses" and then we were dismissed. We booked a junior balcony. The actual balcony is the same size as a regular balcony (in fact, this balcony felt larger to me than balconies on the other ships). The only difference that we could see was the clearance between the foot of the bed and the wall that holds the TV. You have to slip by sideways. But I'd do that a million times over to be able to save a bit of money on the standard balcony. The features I loved about the closet were the pull out rack for shoes and the fact that the shelves could be put up or down with a pin type thing if you had longer clothes. The bathroom itself was a little small, but the shower made up for it! The little bar to rest your foot on to shave was convenient and the best thing about it was the fact that is has a door. This prevents water from getting everywhere like on the ships where they just have a shower curtain and a small lip on the floor.

I did my cruise nails at the hotel. Hotel lobby: The day of the cruise we took a ride share to the Port of Miami. We got there around 9:45 a.m. as we had a 10 a.m. check in. We are Platinum so we waited in that lounge. Boarding began at 10:45 a.m.

Our 15th Carnival cruise was quite memorable for more reasons than one. I'll start with a quick pre-cruise synopsis and then get on with the main event. Hubby and I were delivering my parents car to them in Florida where they were wintering. We decided to take the auto train for the first time. The pros were that is cut out about 9/10 hours of driving time, but the big con was that we didn't get much sleep in coach class. Very hard to get comfy. We visited my parents overnight in their campground and then drove a rental car from Jacksonville to Miami for our cruise. Pre-cruise we stayed at JW Marriott Marquis which was amazing. The room was huge and there was even a TV screen in the mirror of the bathroom. Fancy! Quite the change from sleeping on the train!