DREAM BELIZER May 6th – May 13th

Background

Stats: Herbert (H) 48, first time cruiser and me (B) 51, 4th Carnival cruise.

Around this time last year, we were trying to figure out what our next “big” vacation would be. We were looking at San Francisco plus a visit to Sonoma Valley. Then somehow we took a left turn and the next thing you know we’re looking at cruises.

We knew we wanted to leave out of New Orleans ( H loves NOLA), so we could spend some extra time there either on the front or backend of the cruise. During the dates we wanted to cruise, Carnival was the only choice. I started to look if I could get anything for being a past guest – past as in the last time I cruised was in 1999. I was shocked when I found my VIFP number on Carnival’s web site. Which in turn meant within 24 hours I had a PVP calling me.

We picked the Dream’s Western Caribbean itinerary with stops in Costa Maya, Mahogany Bay, Belize and Cozumel. I had been to Cozumel on cruise #2 but the rest were new to me. Unfortunately, our cruise start date coincided with the New Orleans Jazz Festival, so we almost decided not to book the cruise because of the high hotel prices. Eventually we found two nights at the Hilton Riverside with a price we could live with, so we booked and then called our PVP back and booked the cruise. We then found ourselves some travel insurance and then sat back and waited to book our flights.

About this same time, I joined CC and began reading and re-learning about cruising.

A few months passed and I was able to re-book our hotel for a lower price – woo hoo - one small win. We then selected our arrival appointment in November and finally booked airfare at the end of December. We wanted to be in NOLA early on Friday but again prices were really high, so we settled on an early evening Southwest flight. Two days later rebooked the flight because the price went down – gotta love Southwest. But the flights home were another struggle, we settled for a United flight at 5:30pm. Now all the big things were done, we just needed a few excursions and to wait 125+ days.

I’ve broken the rest down into sections and have most of it written (my copy editor is reviewing it :)) so I should be able to get it all posted today.

Embarkation

Since part of our vacation was to spend time in New Orleans, we didn’t even think about purchasing FTTF. We picked an arrival time of 12:30 and choose to carry on our bags.

We had a noon checkout time at the Hilton, I called down and asked for a late checkout and they gave us to 1:00pm. I figured we wouldn’t need it but I wanted the buffer. We took a Lyft to Willa Jean for breakfast around 9:30. We had a nice breakfast and then walked across the street to Rouses Supermarket to get our two bottles of wine for the cruise. Rouses had decent amount of choices for wine and we found a red and a white that we knew we’d like. We then Lyfted back to the hotel, packed our bags and then went to explore the outlet shops and onto the dock to look at the ship (it was a little too far down for us to see out of our hotel room window).

A little after noon, we checked out and summoned another Lyft. It was probably about 12:20 when the Lyft driver dropped us off at the terminal. There was a long line of people snaking out the building and on the sidewalk. We joined the line and waited and waited. I could see the people in front of me had an arrival time of 2pm and the people in front of them had a 1pm arrival time. I think it’s important to point out that it was a beautiful day, not too hot, not too humid. So standing in the long line outside was really no big deal. However, H has been in NOLA when it has been blazing hot and very humid and standing in the line would have been a lot more uncomfortable.

As the line snaked its way slowly forward, no one looked at anyone’s paperwork until we got into the building, which was a little after 1pm. And as far as I could tell, no one was told they were too early. As we reached the door, H remarked that he believed once inside the building the long line would continue to wind its way around the building and he was right. Once inside we were sent up the escalators to another line where we eventually had to present our documents (they did not ask for the health questionnaire) and passports then had our luggage scanned. We both had our 26” spinners and H had a backpack with the wine and some electronics in it. Our luggage went straight through with no questions. And we almost walked past the table for the wine inspection. If I wouldn’t have read about it here, we would have kept going and I don’t think they would have stopped us.

We then were directed to another agent where we got our Sail and Sign cards and we were finally on our way onto the ship. By this time it’s close to 1:30. My first stop was at the Excursions desk to sign up for the Behind the Fun tour. I figured there’d be another long line but no. No line, I walked straight up and got us signed up for the tour.

I was also concerned that elevators would be a problem but after a short wait we were able to get on and up to the Lido deck. We went straight to our room, it was probably about 1:50 by then. Our room was ready and our 2 – 12-packs of water were waiting for us. We unpacked and did a quick walk around the ship. We had our first cocktail in hand by a little after 3pm.

Food/Dining

Breakfast:

Sea Day Brunch – We tried the sea day brunch our first morning. It was ok. I had the funnest French toast with Frosted Flakes, bacon and hash-browned potatoes. I wrongly assumed the Frosted Flakes would be crushed. Nope, whole flakes. H had the pork link sausage and the huevos rancheros which he throught were good.

MDR Breakfast – We did the MDR breakfast the morning we were docked at Mahogany Bay. We both had the short stack of pancakes and scrambled eggs, I had bacon and he had toast. The pancakes were ok, I thought the scrambled eggs were fairly decent considering some of the really bad scrambled eggs I’ve had at other restaurants, but H is a scrambled eggs snob and wasn’t impressed. The bacon was good, but the toast wasn’t toasty enough. Service was slow and refills on coffee and juice were not timely.

Lido Restaurant – We did this the day we were in Belize. It was pretty much the same food as the MDR Breakfast. We had scrambled eggs again. I did the bacon, fried potatoes and a bagel. H had sausage, fried potatoes and waffles - which he liked. The fried potatoes left something to be desired.

BlueIguana Cantina – The other 4 mornings we had breakfast burritos. We really liked them. I did set my mouth and lips on fire one morning when I tried some habanero sauce on it. The nice thing about the burritos is there were a lot of choices and all of them seemed to work, so it’s easy to get something you really like.

Coffee – most mornings I got up early and filled our Yetis with coffee from the Lido café. They had milk and half & half plus sugar etc. to doctor it up. I may have used vanilla ice cream a time or two as a substitute for vanilla creamer. ;) Lots of people had their trusty Yetis, we had almost not brought ours, but I’m glad we did.

Lunch:

Guy’s Burger Joint – There was no line so we grabbed burgers and fries before debarking at Costa Maya. The fries were limp and the burgers were edible but nothing we needed to rush back for. This was sad because H does like a good burger and fries, he had high hopes. One maybe good thing about this place is they were lightning fast to get you your food. We had barely told them what we wanted before they were handing it to us.

BlueIguana Cantina – I had a shrimp taco salad. It was good except the bowl was too big for how much ‘stuff’ was in it.

Tandoor – We both had the Tandoor on Monday and H had it again the day I had the taco salad. It seemed to be pretty close to what we can get at the Indian restaurants at home H really likes Indian food and we both liked what we had.

Pasta Bella – We tried this on our last sea day. Both of us had the pasta with Alfredo sauce. I added shrimp and H had sausage and eggplant. They were both fairly bland. H also ordered the lasagna, which was really weird. It had some type of shredded beef in it. I’m not sure how it tasted but he didn’t eat it. This was probably our least favorite meal on the ship.

Dinner:

MDR – We had anytime dining and ate in the MDR every night except for the second elegant night (Thursday). I ate mostly seafood and H had mostly beef. None of the entréesreally stood out. We tried the chocolate melting cake with peanut butter and ice cream. H thought it was really good, but maybe just a bit too much of an indulgence and said he’s probably never order it again. One night I had the bitter and blanc, it reminded me of bread pudding. The one real winner to me was the mac and cheese with bacon. I think I had that 4 nights.

Pizzaria Del Capatano – We were tired from the full day in Belize so instead of dressing up for elegant night we opted for pizza and cracked open a bottle of our wine. There was no line when we got there. We got a whole pepperoni pizza, which both of us liked and ate in about 3 minutes and then shamefully we also got a prosciutto and arugula pizza that wasn’t as good, but we still ate in about 3 minutes. :o:o

Snacks:

I think we had ice cream almost every day (my scale confirms that) sometimes with cake or cookies. And we did get a couple of desserts from the chocolate extravaganza, an event that was totally crazy. That was really the only wait we had for any of the Lido restaurants. People were piling their plates sky high full of the desserts, which in my opinion weren’t really that good.

We had planned on going to the afternoon tea. It was on the first sea day at 3pm but we didn’t make it that day. The rest of the week they had something they were calling Veterans Table.

Drinks/Bars

While I like to think we’re drinkers, I knew there was no way with 4 port days and carrying on 2 bottles of wine we’d ever drink enough to make purchasing Cheers worth it. We had drinks 3 times at Alchemy Bar, a couple of drinks and a pitcher of margaritas from the Rum Bar, cocktails at the comedy club one night, drinks with dinner another evening and H had a couple of fancy alcoholic coffee drinks. Prior to the cruise, I had figured we’d hit around the $400 mark. We came in a few dollars below $200.

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Ports/Excursions

Costa Maya – We had planned on going to Blue Kay but with all the changes in pricing we decided to go to Tropicante. We made reservations via FB about two weeks before we left. We took a cab from outside the gates ($8 each way). Tropicante was nothing fancy but they had chairs, tables, umbrellas and were very friendly. We had a few drinks, some food, and lounged around for about 3 hours before returning to the ship. One interesting thing about this place was there were many locals selling souvenirs and other items right on the beach. There were maybe a dozen of them walking back and forth carrying boards packed with refrigerator magnets, or they had hats, handbags, beach bags or cigars. We told all of these people “No gracias”, but now that were home H thinks he should have bought something just for fun.

Mahogany Bay – We just stuck around port that day. Spent some time in the sun, had a few cocktails and did a little shopping. We had some slushy drinks from Fat Tuesdays that were really kind of bad, but later as we were walking along a woman mentioned to us the best drink she had that day was called a Monkey Lala. We stopped in at one of the bars behind the beach and sure enough they had Monkey Lalas. We ordered 2 and they were good, real good.

Belize – We did the Carnival Lamanai Mayan Ruins and riverboat safari tour. I had done a price match on it and received almost $50 credit on each ticket. It was a full day tour, we had to meet in the Encore Theater at 7:30 am for an 8:00am departure that turned into more like an 8:15am or so departure to tender to shore. Then there was a bus ride and a riverboat ride before even getting to the ruins. We got back to port a little after the last tender was supposed to have left so there was no time to shop or anything. There were a couple of other excursions just getting back and I think there were 2 or more other tenders even after ours. It was very interesting but did make for a very long day. Our tour guides were really good they’re names were Nori, Elmer and Alisa. They were very nice and kept us entertained on the long bus ride with details about Belize and personal stories about living in Belize. They also knew a lot about the ruins and did a good job answering questions. The ruins themselves were pretty epic.

Cozumel - We booked the Cozumel Chef food tour via Viator. It was a 3-hour tour that included food and transportation. We went to 3 restaurants, a grocery store and a tequila “factory”. It was fun to consume the “authentic” foods and drink. The grocery store was especially interesting and very different than what we’re used to. For example, the eggs were not refrigerated. In fact, I don’t think much of anything was refrigerated. Our tour guide Jerry explained that this was okay because things are much fresher and are used the same day. Everything we ate that day was very good and overall it was a great and easy to do excursion.

Behind the Fun – As I said earlier, as soon as we got on the ship we went to the Shore Excursion desk and booked this tour. There were 15 of us and the tour was 3-hours from 9am to noon on our last sea day. I believe they actually did 3 tours that day. We got to go into the galley, the laundry, engineering, cold storage areas, some of the employee areas, back stage at the Encore Theater, the bridge where we had pictures taken with the captain and our final stop was at the steakhouse were the chef talked to us and we got refreshments (mimosas, champagne, orange juice or water). We also got swag bags with a baseball cap and a wristband, plus a lanyard and a soap carving. And each got 3 - 8x10 pictures (2 of the group and 1 with the captain). The tour was really eye opening. There is a massive operation going on behind the scenes on a cruise ship to make our vacations possible. Unfortunately, our tour guide was in her first 30-days of employment with Carnival so while she knew the information on the tour she really couldn’t answer many of the other questions.

On Board Fun

While there was a ton of stuff to do on the ship, we only touched a few of the things. We did trivia 3-times, it was only 20 questions each time so it was a quick distraction to remind us how much information we no longer can remember. We went to the Piano Bar one night and the Comedy Club two nights. We would have liked to gone to more of the evening activities but we are old and tired. We watched the dive-in movies a couple of times and played a round of mini-golf one morning.

And last but not least, we did play some slots in the casino. I was concerned that the casino would be too smoky but it wasn’t. I’m guessing later in the evening it probably got worse. Both of us did well in the casino, winning more than our sail and sign bill. Woo hoo!:D

thank you so much for taking the time to write a review. We will be on the Dream this summer.

Debarkation

We also carried off our luggage at debarkation. This time I was also carrying a backpack since we’d use it for flying home. We got up at 6:30am, showered and finished packing before going to breakfast (burrito #4). They started to call self-assist by 7:30am. They were jumping from low to high floors so we figured we’d be off fairly early. We went back to the room to get our bags and had just started back down the hall when our deck was called. We had a brief wait for the elevators and we were on our way. Straight off the ship, we showed our passports once to the immigration person and that was it. No questions were asked by Customs. We were out of the building and calling a car by 8:12am.

We Lyfted to Harrah’s Hotel, where we gave our bags to the bellhop and then grabbed a couple more coffees at their coffee stand. Enjoyed our coffees sitting outside on Fulton Street. Then went to the casino for a little while before moving on to lunch at Napoleon House so we could finally get our Pimm’s Cups. Killed a few more hours in the French Quarter before going back to Harrah’s to pick up our luggage and head to the airport.

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Thanks for the review.

Random musings and Final thoughts

We choose to carry our luggage on and off the ship. I knew with the time we had chosen for arrival that our cabin would ready or almost ready by the time we got to the Lido deck so having to mind our luggage wouldn’t be an issue. The putting the luggage by the door the night before departure is one of the few things I remember from my previous cruises, I remembered it because it was such a pain and back then I didn’t have to worry about liquids in my carry-on. I knew I was going to need stuff in the morning that I would need to be in my checked luggage for flying home so if I could get it on the ship I certainly could get it off. Now looking at the size and amount of luggage I saw sitting by some of the cabins waiting to be taken off, I can certainly see where the self-assist would not work for some people. Getting off the ship with our luggage was really easy the only slowdown point was waiting for the elevator and that was only a minute or two. So we were pretty happy with our decision to handle our own luggage.

Housekeeping staff gave us a choice of morning, evening or twice a day service. We choice twice a day without issue. Towel animals were left during the first cleaning of each day. We didn’t ask for ice or anything special. Our TV remote didn’t allow us to move down channels only up so we did ask our steward for a new remote, which he promptly got for us.

I’ve seen a lot of complaints about the wifi on the ship. We purchased the Value Internet plan. While it wasn’t super-fast, it did work fairly well for general Internet browsing most of the time. However, we didn’t try to download or upload anything. We were able to check and send email and send and receive texts. It seemed the only times it got really slow was when most people were probably in their cabins--looking at their devices.

We had a balcony cabin, our neighboring cabin occupants didn’t know how to use their indoor voices and that doors didn’t need to be slammed to be closed. They also had apparently never learned that playing their music on the balcony at 7:30 am is considered poor form. And while I can’t prove this 100%, I’m pretty sure they were also the ones smoking pot on the balcony. This was really the only negative thing that happened on our cruise and there really wasn’t anything we could do about it.

One of the funniest things that happened on this trip was how the tour guides in Belize tried to work in the word Belize into as many sentences as they could: “You’ll never Belize it, Belize me when I tell you…”

So all in all, we had a good trip. We probably won’t cruise again for quite a while since there are so many other places in the world we want to visit.

But for now, keep on Belize-ing.

Thanks for reading and if you have any questions, please ask.

Thanks for this great review! I love your writing style and attention to detail.

One thing I forgot to mention, on the Friday we were in port in Cozumel our bed side lamps were switched out to ones with USB charges in the base. Each bedside lamp has 2 USB ports.

Thanks for your trip report. I enjoyed reading it.

We were on this same cruise and did the same excursion as you in Belize and had the same tour guides with Nuri and company. We were the couple that brought the twin 8 year old boys with us. Small world! :)

We were on this same cruise and did the same excursion as you in Belize and had the same tour guides with Nuri and company. We were the couple that brought the twin 8 year old boys with us. Small world! :)

I figured that was you, dressed in Husker gear.:) We were also near you at breakfast the last day, I noticed your wife's Warrior T-shirt.

Thanks for your review. I will be on the Dream in July. It will be my first cruise. We have a late flight out of NOLA because for some reason I thought it would take forever to get off the ship. I figured we could explore NOLA more before our fight. But I will be stuck with luggage. I see in your review that you left yours with a bellhop at harrahs. They were able to store your luggage without having reservations? Is this common practice for hotels? I thought you have to be staying there to be able to store your luggage? If we could drop our luggage off somewhere that day that would be amazing!

Thanks for your review. I will be on the Dream in July. It will be my first cruise. We have a late flight out of NOLA because for some reason I thought it would take forever to get off the ship. I figured we could explore NOLA more before our fight. But I will be stuck with luggage. I see in your review that you left yours with a bellhop at harrahs. They were able to store your luggage without having reservations? Is this common practice for hotels? I thought you have to be staying there to be able to store your luggage? If we could drop our luggage off somewhere that day that would be amazing!

We drop luggage at resorts in Las Vegas without reservations all the time so we figured it would work at Harrah's in NOLA too. And I had read on TA that someone else had used Harrahs for luggage hold after a cruise. We did tip up front and again on pick-up.

I'm not sure about the other bigger hotels, if you have status with one of them (such as Hilton Honors or IHG Rewards) you may want to check there too.

There is also a service called Advance Check-in (you can Google the web site) that will take your bags from the cruise terminal to the airport for you.

Their Prices:

To/ From Airport to Hotel, Airport to Cruise, Cruise to Airport

• First Bag $25
  
• Two Bags $40
  
• $15 each additional
  

Glad to see you post about the USB ports. We will bring our power strip though.

I figured that was you, dressed in Husker gear.:) We were also near you at breakfast the last day, I noticed your wife's Warrior T-shirt.

Ah, just seen you're in Urbandale, that's pretty cool! :):):)

Glad to see you post about the USB ports. We will bring our power strip though.

We didn't even end up using our extension cord. However, we did use an adaptor for the European plug-in for charge electronics prior to the new lamps.

Thanks!!!

Thanks for your review, keep them coming.