PrincessArlena'sDad

Hmmm. As you have over double the points as I do, let me know which sweepstakes you enter. I'll pick a different one.

Yes... except for the last day when everyone is trying to view their photos. Each click of a link took minutes to load, and we tried both our phone and the kiosk. They need to upgrade wherever the bottleneck is. It made us long for the hunt for the prints!

Sad to say goodbye to you all! It's been a fun five year ride. My Rewards POINTS BALANCE 361,650 MEMBER SINCE JAN 2018

Elegant night is what you make of it. Our family wore suits/cocktail dresses, had our pictures taken with various backdrops (got 5 nice prints), and had two very nice evenings. On the Horizon 8 day, I would say at least 90% of those in the MDR had suits/sports jackets/cocktail dresses. One change I noticed is that despite a relatively low number of backdrops (compared to my cruises on the Pride and Fantasy class ships) and more people, the lines for the photo ops were really short. I guess it's because of the high cost of the photos. Especially on the ships with digital photos, if they half the cost of the photos, they'll more than double the sales, and increase revenue without any additional costs.

2nd one. That's a more recent change.

https://www.carnival.com/help?topicid=1093 On certain special nights, our main dining rooms celebrate our Cruise Elegant festivities and we invite guests to enjoy a special night out in a sharp and chic way. 5 days or shorter cruises will have one Cruise Elegant evening 6 days or longer cruises will have two Cruise Elegant evenings

Kids can use the tides pool and hot tubs on Horizon. Posted hot tub rules say 8 years old, maybe. Definitely less than 11 (my youngest kid's age). It was full of kids all week. This was from the July 8 sailing.

Anyone know if the Glory has this yet?

We were on the same cruise as you! Hope you had a great trip. We did! I just wanted to add that Horizon docks at terminal D when Celebration is there also. So, there are times when it departs from D and arrives at F, or vice versa. You can check here to see where Horizon will be: Port Miami Online Services (miamidade.gov)

Here's a preview of our August cruise: First off, we are DRIVING!!!!! Thankfully. We came very close to flying. Long story short: we are traveling with my father-in-law, which, when added to the five of us, plus luggage for 10 days, equals not enough room in the car. We weren't very keen on using a car top carrier, nor renting a 12 person van, either. While debating the possibilities, my parents decided to join us, and offered to drive one of the kids in their car, leaving enough room in ours! At the time, we were thinking only about the $$$$$ we were saving on 6 round trip tickets to New Orleans. Now, I'm thinking about the night I will NOT be spending in an airport somewhere west of the Mississippi (our flight home probably would have stopped in Kansas or Utah). For now, I'll leave you with an abridged itinerary: Aug 11: Try to beat as much rush hour traffic as possible as we head to New Orleans Aug 13: Board the Glory! Aug 16: Mahoany Bay cabana rental Aug 17: Belize: Altun Ha Mayan ruins Aug 18: Fury snorkel and beach Aug 20: start home, and arrive back before those who chose to fly I'll start a new LIVE thread for this cruise closer to departure, and continue from there, but I'll post back here updates on "Tales of a Garment Bag" and our travel insurance claim.

I meant to get back to you all last week, but after the vacation I needed to take in order to recover from our vacation, I was days behind in work. How is it that missing one day results in being 2 days behind, and missing 2 days results in being 6 days behind? I don't quite understand the math there, but it seems to be true. Update on "Tales of a Garment Bag" (I hope you don't mind me stealing this title): We made it back to Regan airport last Friday. One nice thing about Regan is that terminal parking is free for the first hour. My wife came with me, so that if there was a long line, she could run back to the car, drive it around the airport, and then back into the lot. There were only a handful of people in front of us, so we got back to the car in plenty of time. While waiting on the line, two people came in because their flight was canceled, and wanted their bags back so that they could drive instead. The wait for them to get their bags back was over two hours! Talk about adding salt to the wound. The AA employee who I got clearly had no idea what he was doing. He not only had a look of complete confusion, he also mumbled to himself incomprehensible phrases that included words such as, "uh oh," "ummm, where is it," and, my favorite, "what's that mean." I was seriously worried. Luckily, the other person at the desk saw what was happening, came over, and stopped him. Believe it or not, he was trying to create a tag to send my garment bag on a flight somewhere. Not sure where he was trying to send it. Hopefully her competence matches her confidence. She keyed in a few things, printed a receipt for me, and sent us on our way. The receipt has an online tracking number for Rynn's Luggage. As of today, there is no update on whether they will repair or replace it, or any timeframe. The FAQ of their website states a turnaround of about 2 weeks, so we'll see (their date of receipt on the tracking was Monday). I finally received the letters from AA and Jet Blue that I need for our travel insurance claim. So, I could start filling it out today. But, I'm thinking I might want to wait a week or so to see what happens with the garment bag, in case I need to add that to my travel insurance claim. I have 15 months on the travel insurance, so a week won't make a difference there.

https://www.carnival.com/internet-plans?icid=icp_ccl_internet_0708_footer

If it is a journeys cruise then it will almost certainly not be offered. If it was offered but sold out it'll say sold out (but keep checking as of might become available at some point).

We were there in 2015, so not recently. But, we had a great time, and would go back again.

We just got back, and had a kid in Camp Ocean. On embarkation day, it was only open for Night Owls, starting at 10pm. On port days, the open hours were not consistent. I guess it depended on the port hours. I know that many excursions leave before camp opens. You can leave the kids in camp and get off the ship in port.

We've had delays and such before, but nothing like this. Only previous cancellation was in 2009, when that blizzard shutdown DC area airports for days. We were in Disney World at the time, so we had to spend an extra 3 days there. No blaming the airlines on that one, though.

Absolutely! I'll go into details later, when I do my preview. I'm both excited for this cruise and feel too tired to even think about it at the same time - though I'm sure the latter will pass in a couple of days, then I'll just be excited!

I've just read that there were over 1700 flights cancelled on Sunday, nationwide. It was one of those days. We came across people stuck in FLL and Charlotte since Saturday. I'll let you all know about the garment bag. We need a new one for next month! I'll also update on the travel insurance. It's a $3500 claim (minus the refund we get from Jet Blue).

Did you by any chance make enough dinner for 5 more? We're too tired to cook. Just remembered I need to go food shopping tonight. I really miss the Family Harbor Lounge right now. I can use a cappuccino. Could have used a lot of them the past few days!

Thanks. I enjoyed doing this and look forward to doing it in August. Honestly, the cruise was so great. I'll take this horrible end in exchange for how great it was until then. I guess things balance out?

Thanks. I'm still wiped.

Kids missed their first day of camp, but were able to go today (though they were a bit tired). In fact, I was picking them up while leaving you with that cliff hanger earlier. My wife didn't have an issue with the emergency leave she had to take. I'll come back later to post a few pictures. Also, we are taking another cruise in August. I'll give a preview of that cruise as I would like to do a live review of that also. Stay tuned!

Ok. Sorry to leave you all on a cliffhanger, but... well I'll tell you in a bit. No luggage. We ask where the AA luggage office is and walk down to it. The office is surrounded by rows and rows of bags. Like a cruise just disembarked at Regan airport. Was it just the day before we got off the ship? Even now, it feels like the journey home was longer than the entire cruise. We were met by a rather abrasive AA employee. She asked for our tags. She said point out the bags that you think are yours, and she'll check them against the tags and give them to us. So we did. It actually didn't take that long to find 9 of them (they were mostly all together). I have no clue what flight our luggage came in on. I hope our clothes enjoyed their separate vacation. Did I say we found 9 of them? Didn't we have 10? Yes, we had 10. Our nice garment bag was missing. The one that had our suits and dresses. You know, the more expensive items of clothing. We search all around, can't find it. The abrasive AA employee says there's no garment bags, it must be lost, go file a claim. I go into the office, and our garment bag is sitting against the desk. I tell the desk agent that the bag sitting there is ours. The abrasive lady comes running into the office, grabs a hold of the bag, and says she needs to see the AA tag. But there's no AA tag on it. She doesn't want to give it to us because there is no AA tag. I pointed out the name tag that we have on it, and she said that she needs to match it with one of the tag receipts. But the tag must have gotten ripped off! Finally the desk agent intervened and said to give us the bag, it has our name on it. The abrasive lady relented, and I picked up the bag... and immediately realized it was broken. The bottom platform is cracked, and the two legs won't stay straight. I pointed this out to the desk agent, and she nodded, as if to say, "so what?" I asked about filing a claim. She said, "OK, I need your luggage tag." But the one on the bag was missing, and the other lady took the receipts and never gave them back! Luckily, another passenger who was in there pointed out a small sticker they put on the luggage that had the list of flights and an ID number. The desk agent said that would suffice. She fills out something on the computer, hands me a receipt, and says I need to bring the garment bag back to the office in the next 30 days (so that I can bring it home and empty it first) and they'll either fix it or replace it. We'll see. We made our return to our car. We had a terrific spot when we arrived at the airport. Right by the baggage claim area. For Jet Blue. It was a bit of a walk from the American baggage claim, the entire length of Terminal 2. Regan airport is pretty small though, so it wasn't too bad. We loaded our car, drove home (narrowly avoiding 3 accidents, which is the norm for the DC area). Stopped at McDonalds near our house to get a quick dinner, and finally arrived home.

The flight arrives in DC without a hitch. We go down to baggage claim. We have no idea what flights (if any) our baggage went on. The carousel starts. Bags start to come. Bags get taken. Bags stop coming. The carousel stops. We don't have bags.

I don't even know what time we arrived in Raleigh. We got off the plane, and went to Burger Fi for breakfast. They had both breakfast sandwiches and burgers available. I really don't remember whether it was good or not. We had about 6 hours until our final flight home. We looked at a terminal map to decide where to wait, and found that this airport had a USO! Yay! For those that don't know, the USO has lounges in many major airports, where active duty and their families can relax. You need your military ID to get in. It was outside security, unfortunately, so we'd have to leave the USO with time to get back through security. We go in. It's a very nice USO. They have free soda, bottles of water, coffee, a variety of teas, ham sandwiches, turkey wraps, cookies, chips, crackers, granola bars, whole fruit, and fruit cups. They have video game stations. Board games. And VERY COMFORTABLE recliners. I sat down in one and fell instantly asleep. When I woke up, the kids were playing a board game. I had a snack and a bottle of water. We still had about an hour until we had to get going, so I sat back down in the recliner and read for a bit. It felt like I was on vacation. Imagine that! Sadly, 2pm came, and we started back towards security. Boarding started at 3, but I didn't know how long the line for security was going to be. There was a long line. Good thing we left when we did. The TSA agent didn't even look at boarding passes, just IDs. My shorts zipper made the metal detector go off again. Another pat down. 15 minutes later we are boarding our plane. Are we finally going home? Anything else going to go wrong?