Some final thoughts on the cruise. I loved it, would love to do another cruise! I think it is a great vacation to do with young kids. And it was perfect that we didn't have to deal with flying anywhere, yet we got to see some new places.
Kids club: Camp Carnival is the official name as Judah likes to remind me! I think that this made the cruise for us. On the days that we were out at sea I can't imagine not having the kids club to take the kids to. There is only so much you can do in a little cruise ship room and the swimming and mini golf are awesome but with the little ones it only holds their attention for so long. They gave us a schedule on the first day for the whole cruise. Here's a picture of part of one days schedule:
So they had tons of fun activities planned for the kids and the boys loved it and often asked to go there.
We had an assigned dinner time of 6:00. Every night we were able to walk right into the dinning room and to our assigned table. The people that didn't have an assigned time had to wait in line to be seated. I can see the ease of not having to be to dinner at a certain time, but in our case it worked out great for us to have a schedule and we also had the same waiters every night. And they were AWESOME!
They were so great with our kids! If our boys ordered meat or something that needed to be cut, they would cut our kids food for them, Iputu (the bottom one) often fed our boys bites to get them to eat more dinner, and he made them animals out of their napkins and had origami animals waiting for them at their seat a few nights. I can not say enough positive things about these guys. They made dinner so much more enjoyable for us! Our kids really liked them and talked about them a lot. I still hear the boys mention their names while they're playing "cruise ship" sometimes.
A few quick details for anyone interested:
~We were on the Carnival Spirit.
~We were on the Riviera deck, which is the bottom passenger deck, and we were in rooms 1191 and 1195. I was worried about feeling claustrophobic on the bottom deck, but we were well above water level and the way the ship is set up I definitely didn't feel like I was in the dungeon or anything!
~We had oceanview rooms and the inside of our rooms looked just like this. Justin's mom had a room and the big boys slept with her. One on the couch that turned into a twin sized bed and one in bed with her. There was a bunk type bed that came down from the ceiling but I didn't feel like the boys were old enough to be safe on that. Jax was in with us and his crib did take up a lot of the free space in our room. This was definitely a vacation where you put your clothes away and stashed your suitcases under the bed because there was no place to put your suitcases if you wanted to just live out of the suitcase instead of unpacking.
~ I wish I could remember how much we (well, actually Justin's mom very generously paid for the cruise. Thank you Grandma Cindy!)paid for the cruise. I think it was in the high $500's, and I think Jax was free because he was under 2 and then the first 2 people per room were full price and the third (in Justin's moms room) was 1/2 price. Or the kids were half price. Not sure how that went. Well, I started the trip writing down everything I ate because I was curious if we would get our moneys worth. But I stopped by about the second day. Because seriously, let's just take me and Justin for example: A hotel for 7 nights would be at least $100 a night, so right there we're up to $700. Then add in a 3 course meal every night (appetizer, main course, and dessert), and we're talking good food. Lobster, steak, etc. I think at a regular restaurant our bill would have been at least $100 a night for our dinners, so that's another $700 right there. And then I can stop adding because for room and dinner we've already surpassed the cost of the cruise. And that's not even counting other meals or other activities like mini golf and the night shows. I think cruises are a great deal! We did book this cruise a year in advance so we got their early saver discount, but they run deals all the time. I've been keeping an eye out for our next cruise destination!
And I'll leave you with a few picture Cohen took with my camera on the cruise. Not bad for a 2 year old huh?
Thanks for reading every little detail about our cruise!
1 comment:
oh my gosh those pictures are great.
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