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Attn LIBERTY & VALOR cruisers: Detailed Review of Valors Last Cruise from Puerto Rico


deladane
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Attention LIBERTY & VALOR cruisers: Detailed Photo Review of Valor's Last Southern Caribbean Cruise from Puerto Rico

 

I think I am setting a new record! Somehow this is my 3rd Carnival cruise in the last 3 years, as well as the 3rd time my ship has changed itineraries shortly after my sailing! I sailed on the Victory in 2012 on the Southern Caribbean route from San Juan, but then it switched homeports with the Valor a few weeks later. Then I sailed on the Sunshine in September 2013 on a 12-night Mediterranean cruise which only had a few more sailings in Europe before she came over to the Caribbean. And now, once again, I sailed on the Valor on her very last sailing out of Puerto Rico before she switches homeports with the Liberty! I'm starting to think that Carnival looks at my cruise bookings to decide which ships should change home ports haha

 

Anyway, I always write a detailed photo-filled review after my cruise (see the links in my signature below if you would like to read them!), but I sometimes wonder if anyone benefits from it since most people only think to search for reviews of their ship, but when the ship changes itineraries and home ports, the old reviews become obsolete. I hope that some of you may find this review helpful, be it because you are sailing on the Valor and want to hear about the ship itself and see some current photos, or because you are sailing on the Liberty and want some ideas for planning what to do in each port on this very port-intensive itinerary. Worst case scenario: no one finds this review of any use, but I get to re-live my amazing vacation as I write it, and will end up with a travel log that I can look back on when I miss having sand between my toes. It's a win win! As I always do, I will make all of my posts in a larger purple font so it is easier to find the review posts in case you want to skip over the comments.

 

So let's start at the very beginning (It's a very good place to start...) Back in July, my boyfriend (he doesn't want me to use his name on Cruise Critic, so I'll just call him J) and I were drinking margaritas on my patio, and talking about how much fun we had on our July 4th weekend trip to Vegas. We agreed that we wanted to travel somewhere together again, maybe in March for my birthday, and I suggested that we should take a cruise. I loved every port on the Southern Caribbean itinerary I took on the Victory a few years ago, so I suggested that we take the Valor cruise. We live in the San Francisco Bay Area, so we are quite far from Puerto Rico. I was scared to think of what the flights would cost us, but it was worth a shot. If the flights were too pricey, we could always look into taking a different cruise from Florida or California. I checked the JetBlue website and was totally shocked! They had roundtrip flights from San Jose (our closest airport) to Puerto Rico for $464 each!! The flights were not direct (which I knew, because we can only fly directly to NYC or Boston from San Jose), so we would have to connect at JFK airport in NY. So basically that meant that we were paying $116 for each leg of our flight (CA to NY, NY to PR, and back)! Holy cow!! I usually pay close to $500 just to fly from CA to NY! This was such an amazing deal on flights that we knew we had to book them ASAP. Fingers crossed that there won't be a late-winter blizzard in NY to mess up our plans!

 

I haven't uploaded any photos yet, so I will come back and write more once I have some photos to share...

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Where did you go ?

 

 

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

 

Sorry I wasn't more specific in that first post... we were on the last sailing for the Valor that went to the southern caribbean:

 

Sunday: Puerto Rico

Monday: St. Thomas

Tuesday: Sea Day

Wednesday: Barbados

Thursday: St. Lucia

Friday: St. Kitts

Saturday: St. Maarten

Sunday: Puerto Rico

 

This is the same itinerary that the Liberty will be doing starting this coming Sunday (March 29).

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Sorry I meant I was looking for the review of the Valor. I sail her next week.

 

 

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

I am also looking forward to your post as we are on the 4/04 Valor cruise also.

 

Thanks for reading along! I need to sort through my 500+ photos and get them uploaded and then I will continue with the review. I hope to get to the info about the ship before you guys leave for your cruise! :)

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I am on the liberty cruise of 4/12 so I am interested in the ports you went on as they are the same.

 

Thank you for taking the time write an extensive review.

 

You're welcome! I have lots of photos and info to share about what we did each day in port :) This itinerary is all about the ports!!

 

We will be on the Liberty out of San Juan in May. Looking forward to your review of the ports. Never been to St Kitts or Barbados. :)

 

You are in for a treat! Barbados and St Kitts are beautiful islands with lots to offer :)

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After the flights were booked, we called Carnival to book the cruise. I went back and forth a lot on what type of cabin we should book. On my last two Carnival cruises, I was very happy in my inside cabin mid-ship on deck 7. We were two floors up from the bars and nightlife, and two floors down from the buffet and pools on Lido deck. The problem was that on both of those cruises, I had the 'two twin beds' set up (the first cruise was with one of my best friends, and the second was with my mom). We arranged the beds to be perpendicular to each other, and had a ton of open floor space in the middle of the cabin so it never felt cramped. I also really liked the value of booking an inside cabin since I spend very little time in my room and prefer to invest most of my budget into activities in port.

 

This time around, I would be cruising with my boyfriend so we would have the 'one king bed' set up. Based on photos I have seen in other reviews, I knew that the one big bed in the middle of the inside cabin would leave nearly no floor space, and I was afraid we would be tripping over each other all week. That lead me to consider an oceanview cabin. It would be nice to have a couch to sit down on, and the extra square feet would be great for having more space to walk around. I ruled out a balcony cabin because they were twice the price, and there's plenty of public outside space if we want to be outside so no reason to spend the extra money on that.

 

Once I decided on the oceanview cabin, I had to choose a deck. I definitely wanted to be mid-ship. The kitchen galley for the Valor takes up most of deck 3 mid-ship, and I have read many comments on these boards about the risks of having a cabin below the galley because they start preparing breakfast very early in the morning, and I did not want my beauty sleep to be interrupted by the banging or cleaning or whatever it is that they do up there! Our cruise was in March to coincide with my birthday, but I know that also is when colleges have spring break. It made me a bit nervous to book a cabin on deck 1 during spring break, fearing that college kids would pick the cheapest deck on the ship and pile 4 people into all the inside cabins, and then be really loud and annoying at night. In the end, I decided to ignore my fears and we went with cabin 1301: a mid-ship oceanview cabin on deck 1 (hoping that spring breakers would stick with cruises leaving from Florida instead of flying to Puerto Rico).

 

Now that our cruise was officially booked, it was time to start the countdown!!

 

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This dry erase board hung on my fridge and I updated the countdown daily. I also picked up these 2 jars and filled them with one piece of candy for every day until we left for the cruise (I had candy corn in my jar, and J got peanut butter M&Ms- he was very happy with the candy choice I got for him haha). It was so fun to eat one piece of candy together each day as we looked forward to our upcoming vacation.

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Thanks for doing a review. I will be doing a Back to Back cruise on the Valor in 19 days!

 

Wow, a back to back sounds incredible! Especially now that it will involve 2 different itineraries for the 2 cruises! Have a great time :)

 

Im following want more lol

 

haha, don't worry, there's a lot more coming once I finish uploading all my photos! :)

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Thanks for doing a review. I will be doing a Back to Back cruise on the Valor in 19 days!

 

HA! I'll be doing the second half of your B-2-B, and the next cruise. 4-17 and 4/25 for my B-2-B. See you aboard!

Can't wait to read the rest of your review of the Valor Deladine! How was the entertainment?

 

"SKY"

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I'm so glad you're doing another review...of my favorite itinerary!!! :) I really enjoyed reading both of your other reviews and am looking forward to reading this one. We don't have another cruise planned, yet, but I do enjoy reading reviews so I'll definitely be following. Thank you for taking the time to do another one.

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Thank you for all of your replies! I will write back to all of you later today, but first I wanted to post the next installment of the review. Sorry for so much text and so few photos, but I promise that will change once I get past the pre-planning info :)...

 

I spent the next few months researching on Cruise Critic and getting back into cruise-planning-mode (I really missed all the planning I had to do for the Mediterranean cruise in 2013!) I became obsessed with reading reviews and checking the ports of call boards for more information. J spent a lot of time teasing me for all the time I spent on Cruise Critic haha He claims that he likes to plan things and be involved, but I don't think he knew how much of a planner I am until we started planning this cruise. We booked the cruise 8 months in advance and we had a lot of other things going on through the fall, so J didn't want to worry about the cruise until after New Years. Well that just wouldn't work for me! Half the fun of taking a cruise is all the anticipation and time spent planning for it! To me, the planning makes me feel like I am already partly on vacation, so there was no way I would wait until January to start my research. I continued to secretly research on Cruise Critic, and took lots of notes that I could share with J when he was ready to talk about it.

 

A few months after we booked, there was a big shake up on Cruise Critic: the Valor and the Liberty were going to switch home ports in March! After a brief freak-out session, I checked my booking and was happy to see that I was not affected (although I would have been thrilled if the swap happened in early March and I'd get to sail on the Liberty, I was just very thankful that we booked the 3/15 sailing and not the 3/22 sailing which was now essentially cancelled and turned into a repositioning cruise to Miami). As it turned out, we were taking the last sailing for the Valor on the Southern Caribbean route. I was a bit nervous that this would somehow affect the quality of my cruise. Would the staff be slacking off because it's their last cruise on this itinerary? Would the ship stop re-stocking and run out of supplies? I was hopeful that the staff would step up and give us a fabulous vacation experience, but it did make me a little worried.

 

Then, in mid-November, I got a call that JetBlue cancelled the 10am flight we were scheduled to take from JFK to SJU, and they put us on a 6:59am flight instead. The slight problem with that is we were taking a redeye from California the night before, and we weren't landing until 7:24am! It might be kinda hard to catch that connecting flight if we are still hovering somewhere over Pennsylvania!!

 

After some time on the phone with customer service, they were able to put us on a 2:15pm flight that afternoon. It was definitely annoying that they just took away our Friday afternoon of touring Puerto Rico, and that we would have to check into the hotel and grab dinner fairly late considering we wouldn't get much sleep on the redeye the night before. At least on the bright side, my parents live 10 minutes from JFK airport, so we would get to have brunch with them during our layover! This is why you should never book flights on the day of the cruise! Luckily we were flying in on Friday so there was no chance of missing the ship as a result of this change. We crossed our fingers that this was the only hassle we'll have to deal with for our vacation!!

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Our little group of five will be on the April 5th sailing of the Liberty. I really appreciate you taking the time to do another one of your awesome reviews!

 

We leave in 9 days to fly to San Juan and cruise in 11 days. When we booked (over a year ago) we had no idea we would be boarding the ship on Easter Sunday. Our flights were close to $650 per person and we will have to pay for luggage, so I think you got a really good deal!

 

Looking forward to reading more, and thanks again!

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