PrincessArlena'sDad

This would be our 3rd sailing on the Pride (local port), but first NYE cruise ever. Not excited about ports, though: Nassau, Freeport, Princess Cay. Both our Pride sailings were great, but not recent (2016 and 2018).

I've airways wanted to sail a Dream class ship, but it hasn't worked out yet. Next one may be the Pride... NYE 2024. Shirt drive from home and we're thinking of changing up to a winter cruise. Might decide on this tonight!

Sure. Travel Insured International, and the plan is Worldwide Trip Protector. It's the most comprehensive of the 3 policies they offered.

TRAVEL INSURANCE CLAIM UPDATE! I got full reimbursement for the AA tickets (minus the amount I got from Jet Blue for the refund of the unused tickets), meal expenses for the day, and the additional day of parking at DCA. I would have gotten reimbursed for a hotel also (if I could have found one). In fact, before processing the claim, they contacted me to send them the receipt for the hotel so they could include it. Of course, I had none to send. How long before airlines start charging hotel feels to sleep on the floor of the airport? Any delay in getting the claim paid was completely on me. They responded and processed the claim very quickly. I just had a very busy month. We haven't even had a chance to decide on our cruise for next summer! For completeness, there were two minor hiccups in getting the claim processed that were the result of the doc software they use. First, their system auto-rejected and returned the claim form to me for lack of signature. The signature was there, the system just didn't auto-detect it. All it took was a quick phone call for the rep to remove the flag. Second, the system they use to import line items from the credit card statement doesn't detect highlighting. The claims adjuster couldn't figure out which line items I was claiming and couldn't get closer than $4.29 from my total. Again, a quick phone call solved it. The confusion was that I didn't claim food I would have purchased at the airport if there had been no delay. The original flights were at 6:30, and we got to FLL at 1ish. As we had planned on having a snack and then an early dinner prior to our flight, I didn't include that in the claim. Anything purchased after 6 (when we would have been boarding) I claimed. The total of the claim was just shy of $3k. Once we finally book our next trip, I won't have to compare travel insurance policies. I'm definitely going back to them! Until next time!

https://www.curacao.com/en/activity/architectural-walking-guide-historic-willemstad

We didn't go. The theater is right across from the entrance to Circle C. I asked my 14 year old, and he said he never saw anyone ever go in there. The thrill theater is also in there, but that didn't have a single show the entire cruise. I don't think that reopened after COVID. There's a reason they didn't put the IMAX on the Panarama.

We were there in July, so the movies probably will be different. But, they were not new movies, and the price was expensive. They did have a few of the science short movies, and they were less expensive (comparable to what you would pay at the museum or Kennedy space center). However, the times were always when we would rather be doing something else. Only a couple of showings per day, at most.

Aruba we went to De Palm island. We loved it there, and the lunch buffet was great. Would definitely go there again. Curacao: we did the walking tour. If you're interested, I can get the link for the self guided tour we did. It includes several museums you could go into, or skip. Horizon: Make sure you do the skyride first chance you get. Depending on weather, it may not be open all that much. It is amazing. The shows are top notch. Unfortunately, the Liquid Lounge is not. Best seats are probably the first row of the balcony (just not side view), and you need to get there early for them. Anything not first row will be hard to see from, unless you are really tall. Check out the flavor of the day everyday at the gelato station.

They have nice pictures and videos on their site so you can get a good picture of the stairs. Home | Fury Cozumel | The best sail, snorkel and beach tour in Cozumel Island

Update on the Garment Bag! To recap: the replacement garment bag came... the day after leaving for our Glory cruise. The cat sitter brought it in for us, and our kitty had a nice high place to sit for a week. Today we finally got around to opening it up to see what they sent us. This is it: Amazon.com | DELSEY Paris Sky Max 2.0 Two Wheel Garment Bag, Black | Garment Bags It's a bit smaller than the one we had. It was more like 28" high, and this is 23" I'm not sure it is worth fighting over. It's more expensive than the one we had by quite a bit, actually. Now to start on the travel insurance claim. Fun times ahead! (I'd rather work on planning our next trip. We're considering a land-sea vacation; an 8 day cruise out of PC followed by Universal Studios).

It was convenient not to close and open the check in window. Also the cabins were all mixed together. For instance, Sheff I clicked arrival time, the 4 cabins were are there to select, one after the other. When I clicked passenger details, I had all 8 of us one under the other, not broken down by cabin.

I have not read of anyone else being able to work on more than 1 cabin without closing and clicking the link for the next cabin. Are they just listed as cruise companions or can you also manage their booking? (Do you see the inactive link to check in like for yours) you definitely would need that. In order to check then in you definitely have to be able to manage their booking. You can manage their booking even if they have the booking in their own account also. It can exist in both accounts. To copy what I did, open the check in window for the platinum cabin from the booking and order details page. Maybe it'll pull the other cabins with it? I don't know. If you try it, please report back!

You can click right on arrival time without doing anything before. It's very simple.

3 gold and one cabin blue. When you checked them in we're you able to go from one cabin to the other without closing the window out? I had read on here that you had to close out one cabin then click to open the next. This wasn't the case for me. I opened it from the booking and order details page, not the checklist.

We just did this. If you add the other booking to your account, you can check in one after the other, literally seconds apart. I had to check 4 cabins in, and I got 10am for all 4, and was done while the clock still read 12:00. Also I didn't have to close out the check in window. It had all bookings own at once. It is a little confusing how it is organized, though, when there is more than 1 booking.

The last mile. More than a mile. More than 450 miles. We left the hotel at 9am. We really wanted to stop at Edelweiss for lunch, but they're closed on Mondays. Instead, we chose Three Little Pigs BBQ, in Daleville, VA. I have never even been tempted to buy a restaurant's t-shirt, until then. For all you pig lovers out there, this is the place for you (whether it be eating the BBQ or looking at the cute pig t-shirts - or both!) We had dinner at our local pizza place before dropping my father-in-law off and arrived home to a very loud cat. We open the door and he comes running down the stairs, into the hallway, screaming at us at the top of his little kitty cat lungs. We all got lots of cuddles and licks. Also in the doorway greeting us was our new garment bag.

Movies driving home (just because I listed the ones we watched/listened to on the way down): Joseph Cats Beauty and the Beast Singin in the Rain Guardians of the Galaxy I Guardians of the Galaxy II On Sunday, we stopped for lunch at Huddle House in Brookwood, AL. The food was freshly and quickly prepared. We were in and out in no time, and very happy. We had never been to a Huddle House before and would definitely stop at one again for a road trip. I originally had us stopping for the night a half hour before Knoxville, but I was afraid of hitting Monday morning traffic through Knoxville. We stopped for dinner at Aubrey's in Strawberry Plains, just past Knoxville. This was wonderful! Great service, great food, and also very prompt service. This made up for the 45 minutes we lost due to having to take a detour through the hills of southern TN because of a bad accident. We spent the night at the Holiday Inn Express across the street from Aubrey's. This, too, was a very pleasant stay with a satisfying breakfast.

The drive home. There really isn't much to write about. Thankfully nothing like the trip home last month! I spent most of it trying to catch up here or taking a shift driving. Or dozing when the battery died. My wife did a great job avoiding an accident, though. This was at a time when my IPad battery was dead, so I didn't write about it at the time it happened. We were in the left lane and in the right lane was a pickup truck pulling a trailer. The truck had a tire blowout and veered all the way into our lane. My wife went into the left shoulder to avoid him and floored it to get away. The truck then veered into the right shoulder. Going into the shoulder caused him to completely lose control, and he did a 270 (clockwise), and then went straight across both lanes of traffic and into the extremely wide median between north and southbound. Luckily for him there was no one coming up behind us, and there was no barrier after the shoulder. If there was, he would have hit it, and gotten stuck sideways on the road, blocking both lanes!

Postscript The walk down the ramp into the terminal had a longer line than I would have liked. It was hot and humid in there, with little air flow. My father-in-law was having a little difficulty with the ramp, and two pixels crew members came up behind him and yelled, "Move over, we need to get through now!" Before we could react or say anything, another Carnival crew member ran over to them, and said, right into their faces, "You can't talk to a guest like that! You wait for the guests! They go first. Apologize!" They listened to her. When you get to the end of the ramp, you have the option of going straight to go to the escalator or turn right to go down the elevator. I took all of the carry-on bags and went to the elevator, so everyone else could go down the escalator. The line for the elevator was quite long, it was small, and very slow moving. Not as slow moving as the elevator going from Deck 11 to Deck 12, though! In hindsight, we would have divided up the bags to all go down the escalator. We're only talking about five minutes, so not a big deal. We met up in the baggage claim area. My father-in-law was collapsed on the floor, catching his breath. That ramp was harder on him than walking around Altan Ha for an hour. (Having a Dr. in the family can be very helpful - my wife was able to evaluate him and knew he was just winded). We asked someone to get a wheelchair for him, which they were happy to do. We needed a porter to help with the luggage. Instead of trying to chase one down, they have a porter stand with a line. By this point, there was only one person in line, and we got a porter in just a few moments. I can imagine when there are tons of people in there that the porter taxi stand works really well. The wheelchair arrived just as the porter was finishing stacking our bags on the truck. We followed him through customs (passport facial recognition made this quick and easy) and to the elevator up to the garage. We took that up to the third floor and walked around the corner where our car was waiting for us. Everyone and everything got packed into the car, we drove down the ramp, and out we went. We pulled out of the garage at 10:02. I was surprised how long it took to go from the MDR to the streets of New Orleans. Now, here is the weird part. A week earlier, we arrived at 9:46 to a huge line of cars, and didn't get into the garage until we switched into the left lane around 10:15. But, as we drove off, there was no one waiting to get in. Cars were coming, and they drove down past Mardi Gras World to the garage, without even having to slow down. I have no explanation for this. Anyone have any ideas?

Funny you should ask! It won't be until next summer, but we were just tossing around some ideas today.

We had to get from Deck 3 aft to the lobby, which is also on Deck 3. Our choices were down to deck 2 and across, or up to deck 6 and across (we didn't want to chance the casino still smelling of smoke). We choose Deck 6 to make the trip longer. Well, the elevator ride at least. Once in the lobby, we made one last stop at guest services - we couldn't find our 11 year old's hat, but it wasn't in the lost and found. Then, with no more ways we could think of procrastinating, we left the ship.

My hero!

I should have mentioned previously that we entered the Mississippi around 8pm. Ironically, this made the ship rock more than it had the entire cruise, from the constant steering they needed to do to sail up the river. We had the calmest waters of any cruise we had been on - by far (we had done Bahamas, S. Car, E. Car, and W. Car previously). We got ourselves up, finished packing what we needed for the last night, and did the final room check. Well, three room checks. That was chaotic. You would think that we'd systematically go through each room, back to front. We thought we would, also. It didn't turn out that way. Instead, we would check in this drawer, go to a different room to look in the same drawer, back to the first room to look in a closet, find a belt hidden behind the life vests in the 2nd room, go back to the first room to check behind the life vests there but get distracted by a random sock on the floor, back to the 2nd room to because I forgot what I was doing, then back to the first room to really check behind the life vests, and then to the 2nd room to look behind the curtain (no wizard there!) Despite all of that, we checked in for our last meal in the MDR at 7:30 (8am is the latest). A nice perk of the MDR breakfast is that you can leave your bags in the front of the restaurant, so it isn't crowded around your table. The MDR was mostly empty; I really don't get why more people don't choose this option. Those without allergies placed their orders (those with allergies ordered during dinner the night before), and as we were waiting for our food to arrive I realized we left something in the cabin. It was just before 8 at this point, and we had until 8:30 to be out of the cabins, so it wasn't a problem to go back and get it. While there I did a last search through everything, but it was just the one item. The food came, fresh and hot. The cheese on my omelet was still melted from being fresh off the grill. Unfortunately, banana cream pie is not on the port day breakfast menu (which is what the disembarkation breakfast menu is). You cannot hear the disembarkation announcements from inside the MDR, so we had no idea what was going on. However, we had purposely took the very last number (28); we were in no rush to start driving home, so this wasn't a concern for us. We finished up around 8:30. We went into the lobby of the Platinum restaurant (which is the aft restaurant) to use the restrooms there. Another MDR breakfast benefit is that these restrooms were completely empty. Just as we finished up using the restrooms, they called the final set of numbers (21-28 were all called together). We collected our carry-ons from the front of the restaurant and started the sad walk towards the lobby.

After the show we went back to finish picking out our photos. There were well over 20 that we liked. We picked out the five 8x10s for our package and also got 5 of the smaller photos, as well. Included in this was a Circle C group picture with a towel animal elephant in a life vest and snorkel. We then, sadly, sent the rest into recycling. This was the first time we were really sad they didn’t have an “all your photos” package. On all previous cruises, narrowing it down to a few that we really wanted wasn’t too difficult. Either the Glory photo team is that much better than the other ships we had been on, or the fact that there were no lines for photos allowed the photographers to take a lot more time setting up the pictures. While picking out photos we were able to watch our two older kids dancing at the 80s rock and glow party in the lobby (why it was in the lobby, and not on the Lido deck, I have no idea). It was then time to start packing. We did take a break to have our free gold drink in the lobby. My last Mocha Chocolate Getaway. I’d really appreciate it if one of you could bring me back one of those the next time you go on a cruise. Or at least instructions how to make it! We finished packing just before 11 (the deadline to get our bags into the hallway), and relaxed until the kids came back from their camp/Circle C parties. Then that was it. When we woke up it would be time to get off the ship.

The family scavenger hunt was a lot of fun. They give you a list of about 20 things to get a picture of. Including: -Getting 5 other people to join your family in a conga line - eating pizza - eating ice cream - playing mini golf - with a towel animal - working out - dancing - jumping (video is easier for this than a photo) - ocean in the background - the whale tail - various places on the ship Our 14 year old had already done 3 scavenger hunts with Circle C - and had won all of them. The list for this one was different, but he knew where everything was. We also lucked out while going past Guys. There was a huge group of his Circle C friends hanging out. It took just a few seconds to get them in a Conga line with us, and we took a picture with the ice cream one of them was eating. We then accosted a woman walking by with a pizza to get a photo with her. They give you a half hour to get back. (If you had to get your own pizza, no one would ever make it). We got back in just under 20 minutes, and won first place! The prize was a stuffed octopus in a Camp Ocean tote. We had just enough time to freshen up for dinner. The last dinner in the MDR is always sad. Baked Alaska, though, is a highlight. They had the “we are the world” show at 7:30, and the kids and teens in the show were supposed to be there at 7:15. We had to rush through dinner in order to make it. We told our server about the need for speed, and they accommodated nicely. We had the Baked Alaska in our tummy’s before the Baked Alaska parade. After the good bye song, and hugs from the serving team, we ran out of there. The We Are the World show is nice. The kids are the highlight. Instead of having the Playlist cast join the kids in someway, the Playlist cast comes on stage after them, and does a concert sitting on stools. That’s fine for the four lead singers, but gave the four lead dancers with little to do beside backup vocals. The singing was great, but you can tell the cast was bored, as were we.