deladane

Continuing on our tour of the deck 5 lanai, we found the Guy’s Pig and Anchor BBQ Smokehouse. There was an indoor and outdoor part to this specialty dining venue. The outdoor area was open from noon until 2:30pm on sea days, including embarkation day. The food is free and served buffet style with staff behind the counter dishing out whatever you ask for. Many people think this is a great place to go right after boarding the ship because it is less crowded than Lido, but as you already saw, our embarkation day was far from ordinary and we opted to hold off on eating here until the final sea day. More about that later, but for now, here are some photos of the outdoor section when it was closed this morning.

Just beyond the display case is a set of doors leading outside to the Lanai. This was one of my favorite parts of the ship. Nearly the whole length of the ship on both the port and starboard sides, there is an open deck with nice padded loungers, dining tables, big round sunbeds, access to some of the specialty dining restaurants, and more. The far forward section is blocked off for the crew members’ outdoor access, and the far aft section is reserved for passengers staying in the Havana cabins. There is also a smoking section on the forward starboard side. I love that deck 5 is always peaceful and relaxing, with no loud music or activities like on the Lido deck. I also love that it is closer to the water level so we had a beautiful view of the ocean. Sometimes it is so easy to forget that we are on a ship and not just a land-based resort, so it’s nice to spend some time with direct ocean views. And the best part of the lanai? It was never crowded! I think a lot of people forget about this outdoor space and gravitate towards the Lido pool area, or maybe go up to Serenity. Whenever we came down here, we had no trouble finding a lounger, and it was always quiet and fairly empty. Since the deck extends out further than the balconies, you get a good view of the balcony cabins from here. Of course, that means that when you are on your own balcony, it is never fully private as someone can possibly see you if they are looking up from deck 5. Buyer beware! Something to keep in mind when selecting your cabin on this ship: I personally would never want a cabin on deck 9 midship where you are directly below the Lido pool, but there is one very slight advantage (at least for me). If you look closely, you can see in the photo below that part of the upper deck extends out further than the balconies. That bump out is from Lido deck, so the cabins below it on deck 9 have an extended roof above them, likely providing more shade than a standard balcony. For me, that is a plus since I usually hide from the sun (as much as I love sunshine and sunny days, the sun does not love me and my fair skin!) If you prefer more sun on your balcony and you pick a deck 9 cabin, make sure you are further forward than where this bump out begins, somewhere midway between the forward and midship elevators).

I pressed the elevator button 3 times so Ian, his stroller, and myself could get down to deck 5 to continue our ship tour. We exited into the atrium and spotted a beautiful floral design on the funnel. Next, we saw the library. I didn’t realize that newer ships still had libraries. I would have thought a ship built in 2019 would make different use of that space in a world of Kindles and digital books. I really liked the decor in here, and the ceiling was so pretty! Apparently there is also a bar inside, but I never went by when it was opened to check it out. There was a cute gingerbread display in the hallway. I assume it was there for the whole Christmas week cruise, and it was also there for all of our cruise, so I was impressed that it was durable enough to still look good after 2 cruises. I also assume that it was taken down (along with the other Christmas decorations) on our disembarkation day. We went down to deck 4 for a quick view of the casino. In general, I avoided walking through the casino as much as possible because it was always very smoky, but I thought we’d be safe to take a peek now as it was only 8am and it was mostly empty. We took the forward elevators back up to deck 5 to sneak a peek at the Liquid Lounge. It was set up for a presentation or a show, but I think they also clear out all the chairs from downstairs at night to set it up like a nightclub. I have never personally seen it set up like a night club because that is waaaay past my bedtime. Outside the deck 5 entrance to the theater, there is a display case showing all of the Panorama’s awards and accolades. I love that every cruise ship has something like this and I always find it fun to check it out as it shows some of the history of the ship.

We went back inside to the forward elevators, so I’ll take a moment now to talk about the elevators on the Panorama. I’m not sure how many ships use this system, but this was the first time I cruised with “smart” elevators. It really wasn’t that big a deal for me because, thanks to numerous posts about it on Cruise Critic, I was prepared and knew how the system worked. Unfortunately, as I assume happens on every cruise, most passengers did not understand the rules and that’s what led to complications. There are no buttons inside the elevator. There are touch screens in the lobby of every set of elevators. Each elevator is labeled with a letter (so you don’t get confused between the elevator name and the deck of the ship). On the touch screen, you press the deck you want to go to, and the system assigns you to a specific elevator. In case someone doesn’t know how to operate the elevator, they had a huge screen with the instructions: The problem was that people didn’t always bother to repeat the process for every member of their party. In a way, I get it. If you have a family of 6, it is really tedious to type in “deck 9” 6 times. It was even annoying for us and we only had a party of 3. That meant that sometimes the elevator doors would open to my assigned elevator, but it was crammed full of other people and no space for me, so I had to repeat the process and wait for another elevator to come. Similarly, people in motorized scooters really need to tell the system that they are a group of 2 or even 3 people because their scooter has a much bigger footprint than 1 single person. The same goes for people with suitcases (ie: everyone on the first and last day of the cruise!) and strollers (we always pressed the buttons 4 or 5 times when Ian was in his stroller to make sure there was enough space for us). Another issue we encountered was that I would repeat the destination request 3 times, and it would assign 2 of us to one elevator and the third person was assigned to a different elevator. Of course, we don’t want to split up. That’s ridiculous! So we just all went in whichever elevator came first (and yes, I know that made us as bad as the people who only press the button once for a larger group, but I blame the system on that one!) It didn’t take us long to realize a very simple way they could fix all of these problems. Lord of the elevator, I hope you are reading this! Listen carefully to my genius plan!! Why can’t the touch screen first ask you to enter how many people are in your party, and then prompt you to select your destination deck? Yes, that means when someone is taking the elevator alone, they have 1 extra button press to say they are a party of 1, but the vast majority of people using the elevators have at least 2 people in their party, if not more, so this would save button presses for all of those people. It would also eliminate the issue of groups being split up between multiple elevators because it would know to assign you to an elevator with enough space for your group (unless you had a group of 18+ people which exceeds the elevator capacity… but does that ever really happen?!) And obviously, it would eliminate the issue of people only pressing the button once for a group of 6 (or however many people) because you have to tell them the number of people in your group first, before selecting your destination deck. But hey, what do I know?! **end elevator rant**

I'm finally caught up on all these posts! Fun live review so far!! Jalen Bishop was on our Panorama NYE cruise and we thought she was great! We saw her in the showcase in the main theater and also for her 18+ show and both had us laughing the whole time. Looking forward to seeing whatever other mischief you get up to with the Tribe on your cruise!

Agreed! I actually met him while waiting for boarding to start on Saturday. He was standing like 5 feet from where we were waiting and I said to Jason, OMG, I think that's Jim! I went over to say hi and he was very friendly. We chatted for a few minutes, but I never ran into him again during the cruise.

Hi there! Feel free to add your experiences as I get to each part of the cruise!

For someone coming from Northern California, you sure do like your cruises cruises from New Orleans LOL I'll miss you following along the daily posts, but I hope you have a wonderful cruise and look forward to you checking in again when you return! Safe travels!

Oh no! I'm so sorry you were supposed to take one of the cancelled cruises. And yes, the other nights didn't have nearly the same drama at dinner as night 1. More details and stories to come!

OMG! I think the same guy approached us to ask if we wanted a ride. By then, we had already accepted a ride through the app (but it took 24 minutes for that driver to arrive, so we had a long wait in limbo). We were probably standing very close to you in the Uber waiting area and didn't even know it!

Walking forward along the starboard side of the ship, we came to another section of work out equipment. I’m pretty sure these are supposed to be like the Gazelle Glider machines, but there were 2 teenagers each standing on one of the footplates and swinging back and forth on it (on the far right side of the photo). I don’t think that is the intended purpose, but there wasn’t any staff around to tell them otherwise. Up next, we had a view of a few more holes of the mini golf course, with billiards tables in the background, and the ropes course above us. We then continued forward on deck 12 to the Water Works area. I was surprised at how active and busy the water slides were on this cruise. Maybe people flying in from Northern states with colder weather at home thought the temperatures on this cruise were appropriate for swimming, but coming from Phoenix, I thought it was too cold!

Continuing aft on the sports deck, we came to the basketball court. And then the body weight work out machines: Does anyone know what this is for??: Rounding the aft of the ship, we had a beautiful view over the aft pool and the wake. I just realized the wake had a zig zag pattern to it. I’ve never seen that happen before!

Walking around the Sports Square on Deck 12, starting on the port side walking from midship to aft, first we found the foosball table: Across from that are the stairs leading up to the ropes course and Sky Ride: Next, we got a great view of the newly-reattached whale tail, right behind the mini golf course: Out in the distance, we could see the Discovery Princess. We were both due to be in Cabo tomorrow, and we could see them off to our port side for pretty much the whole day. Ian got a kick out of it and kept asking “Where’s the crew sip?” (I don’t think he fully grasped that he was actually ON a CRUISE SHIP lol), so we’d run outside and look for it!

When we finished eating, I took Ian for a walk in his stroller and took some photos around the ship when it was mostly empty as everyone else was still asleep. Since we were sitting by the aft pool, let’s start with a view of the wake! The sunrises and sunsets on this cruise were so pretty! Midship pool looking forward: Midship pool looking aft: Towel hut and life jackets:

Ok, back to our sea day morning… I walked around the Lido buffet in search of something to snack on that wouldn’t be too filling and ruin our appetites for brunch. Pastries: Melon: Omelette Station: Hot food: Cereal dispensers (I miss the days of individual cereal cartons you could take back to your cabin to snack on later!) Juice dispenser. The options changed to lemonade and iced tea at 11am, and they removed the breakfast options from the machine (I have seen comments that people thought they might leave the drinks in the dispenser and just remove the labels. That's not how they did it on Panorama) We settled on one pancake for each of us, and I brought it to the outside section back near the Seafood Shack at the aft pool. It was a glorious morning, with temperatures around 60 degrees and sunny with a light breeze. It was the perfect morning to sit outside in the fresh air and watch the ocean go by.

Sunday, December 31, 2023 ~ Sea Day ~ New Year’s Eve! Ian woke up at 4:15am and cried “I want mommy” for 10 min because he was scared. We calmed him down and he eventually went back to sleep, but I never did. He woke up again at 6:15am, and I knew he was up for good at that point, so I got up, got both of us dressed, and we went up to Lido for a snack to hold us over until brunch while Jason went back to sleep. Random side note: In order to operate the lights in the cabin, you need to insert some kind of card or piece of paper into a slot above the light switch. That seems like a great way to guarantee you leave your sign and sail card in the cabin when you leave because the habit would be to just turn off the lights and leave. I’m sure I would only realize I left my card in that holder the second after the door closed and locked me out. When we got to the cabin yesterday, there was a plain white plastic card in the slot, so we just left it there all week. I’m not sure if Nino put it there, or if it was left behind from the people in our cabin last week, but either way, it was convenient and meant we didn’t need to find something else to operate the lights. I have had this system on prior cruises and I always wonder why they installed it. I understand that they want the lights turned off to conserve energy on the ship, but I would hope most people would turn off their lights the normal way, using a switch, and the number of people on line at guest services for a new key card because they locked themselves out of the cabin has more of a negative effect than any energy saved, but what do I know?

We changed from ATD for a few reasons. I have read a lot of complaints about it taking upwards of one hour to get a table for dinner. When we cruised as just the two of us, we could go to a bar or something to fill the time. Now that we have Ian, things are a lot more complicated. We would end up getting him dressed and ready for dinner, cut off his snacks beforehand so he would be hungry to eat dinner, only to find that we had an unknown amount of time before we would actually be seated. That just makes things too complicated. Ian wants to eat when he is hungry and I didn't want him to end up eating Goldfish and pretzels for dinner every night. Also, it was nice to have the waiters know him and to have the same wait staff every night. His high chair was always there waiting for us. With ATD, they bring you to the table and THEN get the high chair, and whenever that happens at brunch on the ship or really in any restaurant on land, Ian wants to sit in the adult chairs and puts up a fight when the high chair finally comes. With it already at the table when we arrive, there is no debate. He knows the high chair is for him and he goes right in. There are just too many changing variables with ATD, so it was a lot easier to have a fixed dinner time and know that we had to be ready by that time each night.

So glad to have you following along! Hopefully my review can help with some of your planning!

Oye, that’s a rough review of the Long Beach terminal and the Panorama 😫 For better or worse, that’s our closest terminal so I’m sure we’ll be back at some point. It’s kind of a shame that it’s not a universal experience across all the terminals and ships in the fleet.

Each day, the MDR menus are posted in the Hub app. Actually, you can scroll through and see the menus for the entire cruise starting on day 1, but for simplicity, I will just post them day by day. They do have a limited number of paper menus, which is especially helpful for people who cannot read the small print on a phone, but you need to ask the waiter to get it for you. It is not given out automatically like it used to be. These menus are fairly new for Carnival. They just rolled them out last year, and while they added a bunch of new options, they also kept some of the original options from our prior cruises. I felt this was a good balance of the old and the new, and I was able to find something to order every night. I will admit there were multiple times that I only liked the sound of one appetizer or one entree, whereas I am used to having trouble narrowing down my choices because so many things looked good to me. The new menu has many more spicy dishes, and I have zero tolerance for spicy food so that eliminated a lot of options for me. For my appetizer, I ordered the roasted duck rolls. These were one of the new options and I really liked them. It caught me off guard that they were served cold, but I enjoyed it. Meanwhile, the people at the table for 5 sitting next to us (inches away) were having some crazy family drama. Grandma stormed off after eating her appetizer, and the teenaged daughter was literally sobbing and crying for half the meal. It felt like a crazy reality show or something, and while it was definitely entertaining, it was so awkward for us! At least Ian was a champ, and for once, he wasn’t drawing all the attention. For my entree, I ordered the pappardelle with braised lamb. It was very tasty and served as hot as it should be, but it was comical that there were literally only 3 small shreds of lamb in the entire dish. I was glad the duck appetizer was filled with protein because this entree was definitely not! I ordered the cheesecake with strawberry sauce for dessert. It was good, and much better than the funfetti cheesecake I had for a snack earlier in the day. We finished dinner at 7pm and I went back to unpack in the cabin. It was so annoying to first be starting that process so late in the day, but it is what it is. I told Jason to take Ian for a walk around the ship so I could have the space to open up the big suitcases and get everything stashed away without Ian being under foot. I also wanted to set up the space for Ian to sleep. I bought some small magnetic hooks and 4 panels of 8 foot long black out curtains. Each night and for afternoon naps, we hung up the curtains from the ceiling using the magnetic hooks to create a separate room for Ian. We made sure to keep the curtains away from the air vent and the sprinkler on the ceiling. The curtains were a little too long, so if I were to do it again, I would get 7 foot curtains instead. We made it work though, and it did work very well. It was very dark inside “Ian’s room” (as he called it), and we could turn on the lamps on our bedside table, or the bathroom light, and Ian wasn’t disturbed. We just had to remember not to turn on the overhead lights because one of the lights was inside Ian’s room. It’s not the best photo because it was too dark, but this will give you an idea of our set up: We skipped all of the evening activities on the ship that night, and just got ready for bed, put Ian to bed, and then we went to bed early after a long day. Up next: Sea Day #1

We had 10 minutes to kill before they opened the doors to the MDR, so we found a couch in the lobby to sit and watch the patterns on the funnel. I loved this feature of the atrium and looked forward to seeing what new designs and themes it had each time we passed through. At 5:30pm, the doors opened for dinner, and tons of people walked in, so I guess they got the memo about the earlier dinner time. We still had the shared table assigned in the Hub app, so one of the waiters greeting us as we entered the lobby escorted us to the table and we met our assigned table mates. It was an older couple and their middle-aged daughter, and they said they thought they were sitting with the rest of their family. I’m guessing they didn’t know to link their dinner reservations because obviously they were assigned to different tables. I went back to the Maitre’D, and this time there was a different man there. I explained our situation and he looked at his screen for a minute and found us a new table. I’m not sure why no one did that for us earlier in the afternoon to avoid the awkwardness of going to our original table, but oh well. One of the waiters escorted us to our new table, all the way at the back of the dining room, right near the doors to the midship elevators. It was one of the dreaded long banquettes where the tables are all inches apart from each other, and they pushed all the tables closer together to squeeze Ian’s high chair to the side of our tiny table for 2. The table next to us was 2 tables for 2 pushed together, which would be enough space for 4 people, but they had 3 chairs along the outside of the table, making it a table for 5 people. The waiter looked at it and said no, that is the wrong way to set their table, and he pulled one of the 3 chairs to the far side of the table, thus needing to push the other tables down on that side of the banquette even closer together because now both Ian and one of the people from their table had to fit in the space normally used for walking between the tables to sit on the banquette. Honestly, this was ridiculous and there really wasn’t space to do this, but at least it meant we sort of had our own table. I just realized I never got a photo of our set up, so hopefully my description gives you a good enough idea. Once we were seated, we requested a kid’s dinner menu. I did think it was weird that they didn’t bring it automatically when they brought over the high chair (In fact, we had to ask for it every night as they never automatically gave it to us. By night 3, we realized the kids menu never changes, so we just referred to my photo of it. Ian is still too young to care about coloring or the activities in the menu, but if he enjoyed it, we would have had to ask every single night for him to have a paper copy of the menu.) Our head waiter, Raf, took Ian’s dinner order and asked his assistant, Eva, to run down to the galley right away and grab Ian’s food. This was the single best act of service that we received for the entire cruise. Every single night, Raf prioritized Ian getting his food ASAP and made sure Ian was happy and well fed. We really appreciated this, because when he gets hungry, he gets HANGRY and everyone else in the MDR would know it! It also meant we could feed him and get him settled before our food came out, so when we did get our food, we could eat it while it was still hot. Unsure of the portion sizes and if Ian would like the food, we ordered Ian both the cheese pizza and the chicken nuggets with fries. It came out on two plates (obviously), so we combined them to save space on our tiny table for 2. Ian loved both entrees, and he couldn’t decide what to eat first! Parenting disclaimer: We designated one of Jason’s old android phones to be Ian’s phone. It doesn’t have cell service anymore, but we load videos on the microSD card and only take it out in restaurants to keep Ian calm. We understand that we have certain things we like to do, but those things aren’t always the most exciting for toddlers. Ian has joined us at restaurants since he was 2 months old, and he is usually well-behaved, but after a while, he gets bored of watching all the people nearby, being contained in a high chair, and playing with whatever toys I packed in his diaper bag, and he needs some extra stimulation. That’s when we take out the phone. We allowed Ian to watch movies during dinner every night of the cruise because we know MDR dinners are long, and we didn’t want to be forced to eat in the buffet every night of the cruise when we usually enjoy the MDR experience. Ian does not have nearly this much screen time at home, but it’s his vacation too and we wanted him to be happy. I know screen time can be a controversial parenting topic, but this is how we chose to handle the situation. **end disclaimer**

Hahahaha there are so many milestones in raising Ian where my mantra has been "He will do ______ when he is ready. He won't go to college still unable to do _____." But in the moment, when trying to get him to reach that milestone, it always feel like it's taking forever to click. Something tells me potty training will be no different. Luckily, there are tons of resources available, and we actually spent the car ride back from Long Beach on Sunday listening to an audiobook for a highly recommended method, so fingers crossed!!

We went back down to the cabin, only to see our luggage STILL wasn’t there. It was now 2:30pm and I was getting nervous. Did they forget to put the bags on the ship?? Someone walked by pushing a dolly full of luggage so I asked if he knew when ours would come, but he didn’t. I did notice that none of the bags on his dolly had priority or FTTF marked on their luggage tags, so again I questioned why I bothered paying for FTTF since it clearly didn’t give us any priority at all. I still didn’t see our steward in the hall, so I called him with the “steward” button on the phone to request a crib for Ian. He answered right away, and said it was no problem and he would bring the crib now. While we waited, I took out the door decorations which were packed in my carry on bag and decorated our cabin door. I have never bothered to do this before, but I wanted Ian to recognize our door in the long hallway of identical doors. I bought a bunch of New Year’s Eve themed decorations and glued tiny magnets to the back so it would stick to the door. I also made a few custom decorations on my Cricut. I was actually quite impressed with the number of people who decorated their cabin doors, and with the elaborate and creative things people did! This was definitely more than I have seen on any of my prior cruises, maybe because it was a holiday cruise? [This photo was taken later in the week. No, we did not have the Snoozin' sign on the door while waiting for the crib to arrive.] Our steward’s name was Nino, and he brought the crib around 3pm so Ian finally got to nap. He fell right asleep, poor boy was so tired! Jason also took a nap, and I sat out on the balcony with a view of the gangway bridge. I could see there were still tons of people boarding. There were way more than 15 people on the bridge at once so I guess the waves calmed down with low tide? It looked like the last people boarded around 4pm. The boys woke up a little after 4pm, and Ian was hungry so we went to the buffet in search of food. It was sooooo crowded! I assume a lot of these people only just got on the ship and were famished because they hadn’t eaten lunch yet. I got a slice of funfetti cheesecake which was just ok, not great. The lines were way too long everywhere except the general dinner food line so Jason got some pepper steak and sweet potatoes. We didn’t know if Ian would eat it but he did! I was so proud of Ian all week for trying new foods! As we were finishing eating, we felt the ship vibrating and realized we started to sail away. I ran outside to see a beautiful sunset and views of Long Beach in the distance. The timestamps on these photos are at 4:40pm, so despite all the craziness with the tides and slowing down the embarkation process, we still managed to sail away on time. We considered going to the sail away party by the Lido Pool but decided against it because the music was very loud and it was too chaotic for Ian. I put my phone into airplane mode and logged into the Carnival Hub app for the first time. I went to check if they changed our dinner table, and I noticed dinner was at 5:30pm, not 6pm. When we booked the cruise, the options were 6pm, 8:15pm, and ATD. When we did online check in 2 weeks ago, it was the same. We originally had ATD because early dining wasn’t available when I booked the cruise over the summer, but I noticed 6pm fixed dining opened up a few days after check in started so maybe people made changes? I grabbed it right away! So when did they change it to 5:30pm?! And why didn’t they tell anyone?! I was so confused. I actually ran down to the MDR to check, and there was a sign outside saying they were closed (not surprisingly) and it listed the dining times as ‘early’ at 5:30pm and ‘late’ at 7:45pm. So weird, but good thing I saw it now! Side note: I just unpacked our Sign and Sail cards to put them in the little box where I keep the cards from all of our cruises. I just noticed that it actually says our dining time on the card in teeny tiny letters. I went 8 days on the ship and never once noticed that it was printed on our cards, so maybe it’s on me that I didn’t know dinner was at 5:30pm. I never looked that closely at our cards, especially since we were all different colors (I was gold, Jason was red, and Ian was blue) so I didn’t even need to read our names on the cards to tell them apart. It also never occurred to me that I needed to check the cards to know our dining time. I signed up for 6pm dining and just assumed that is what we had. I went back to the cabin to change for dinner and our luggage still wasn’t there so we went down to the guest services desk. The line wrapped across the entire lobby, but then I remembered we have access to the dedicated priority line from FTTF. There were only like 10 people in that line. We got in line and waited for a bit, but it looked like there was only one staff member helping people from the priority line. It was getting close to our new 5:30pm dinner time so I left Jason and Ian in line and ran back to the cabin one last time to get Ian’s diaper bag and our bags were finally there! Over 6 hours after we gave it to the porter! Is that seriously what they consider express luggage service?! By the time I could have gone down to deck 3, grabbed the boys from the guest services line, gotten back to the cabin, gotten myself and Ian changed (sorry Jason, you need to get yourself changed!), then gotten back down to deck 3 to the MDR, we would have been very late for dinner, so we just stayed in our daytime clothes for the evening. This is the first time I have ever had to do that.

The only way to access Camp Ocean is on deck 11 via the mid-ship elevators. Being newbies, we didn’t know that and used the forward elevators since that was closer to our cabin. It took us a bit of running around the perimeter of camp to find the entrance. We found the playground area and tried to enter that way, but an alarm went off when we opened the door. Oops! Eventually we found the front desk (just aft of the midship elevators), where Lin greeted us and explained the rules and procedures. She gave us a phone to use for the whole cruise in case we needed to contact them or if they needed us or Ian was upset or anything at all. Jason and I affectionately called this the Bat Phone, and had to keep making sure we didn’t lose it through the week. It is quite bulky, like the size of the old Nokia phones from the early 2000’s, so of course it didn’t fit in my little wristlet that I usually carry around the ship. Lin said we would be charged $150 if we lost it, so it was precious cargo! After Ian was registered and given his name tag, we went inside the play area to show Ian all the toys and make sure he felt comfortable there. He has been going to daycare full time for 2 years, so he is very used to us leaving him to play with his friends, and he knows that “Mommies always come back” and we aren’t abandoning him. Since this was an unfamiliar place with new teachers and new kids to play with, we wanted him to know it was safe and to see us playing there with him, since after this afternoon, we wouldn’t be allowed back there with him. The camp is one large open space with different sections for each age group. The spaces for the older kids had lots of TVs and video games and places to watch movies. The space for the penguins was much more simple. It was just a large open space, with a few books and toys on a low shelf that the kids could reach, and some other toys towards the back in big bins. Lin showed us the bathroom for the kids and suggested that maybe Ian would be potty trained by the end of the week. We just laughed. Like I said, Ian has been in daycare for 2 years. He is used to being around other kids his age, and his classmates right now are nearly all potty trained (Ian’s birthday is close to the cut off, so half of the kids in his class are nearly a year older as they missed the cut off for the 3 year olds room). Now that we are home from the cruise, we will probably start training him soon, but we purposely didn’t start before the cruise so we wouldn’t have to deal with accidents while traveling. Lin must be used to having kids in the camp who are still home with their parents and haven’t been exposed to watching other kids use the bathroom, so the peer pressure motivates them. Not Ian, that’s for sure! Ian really liked Lin and gave her a big hug when it was time to go. Camp was only open after 10pm tonight for Night Owls, so we told Ian we would bring him back to play tomorrow.

Picking up where we left off… We were now left with a dilemma. I had assumed we would be on the ship by noon at the latest, and we would drop our bags in the cabin, go get something to eat for lunch on Lido, do our self-muster, and be able to put Ian down for his usual 1pm nap in time. It was now 1:35pm, so clearly all of those original plans were out the window… err, out the balcony door! I knew it was possible to request a crib for the cabin from our steward, but he was no where to be found. I was concerned that there would be a high demand for cribs given that this was a holiday week cruise with lots of families on board, so we also brought our Pack N Play from home just in case we couldn’t get a crib for Ian. I gave it to the porters to check onto the ship because it was too much for us to carry with all our other carry on bags and Ian’s stroller. Silly me, I assumed that FTTF meant our bags would be at the cabin by 1pm in time for Ian’s nap! So with both of our options for Ian’s nap MIA, we decided to go up to Lido for lunch. I grabbed the copy of the Fun Times from our cabin and started to look at it as we walked to the elevators. It said the Maitre’ D would be at the MDR from 12-2pm for questions and dining concerns. This was ridiculous considering no one was on the ship for the first half of that time, and the vast majority of passengers wouldn’t board until after 2pm. Jason has a few dietary concerns, so we definitely needed to speak to the Maitre’D. Lunch would have to wait, and we made our way down to deck 3 forward to find the MDR. There was no one else in line (likely because no one thought that this had to be their very first stop after boarding!), so I approached the desk. Jason mentioned his dietary concerns so it could be noted in their system. They gave him the option to pre-order his dinner each night for the following day, but he prefers to order in the moment depending on what he is in the mood for. It’s really hard to know a day in advance if you will be very hungry for a big heavy dinner, or still be full from a late lunch and prefer a lighter option. He opted to just order each night like everyone else, and if he had questions about what was in a dish, he could ask the head waiter. I requested a high chair for Ian, and if possible, that we wanted a table just for the 3 of us because… toddlers. She said we were at a table for 6, sharing with 3 strangers. I really didn’t want to do that because Ian is unpredictable and I didn’t want to be stressed about ruining someone else’s dinner every night if he was in a bad mood. Why on earth would they think that was a good table for us?! She said the other people were older adults, so it wasn’t even like they paired us with another young family with their own unpredictable toddler. I asked to change tables so we could have our own space, and she said she would try and we should check in the app to see if the table number changed closer to dinner time. With our fingers crossed, we left to get lunch on Lido. It was hectic as it always is on embarkation day, but not nearly as bad as it could have been since so many people had yet to board, and those that were on board had access to their cabins by now so everyone was more spread out around the ship. There was no line at all for Guy’s Burgers, so I got that, and Jason went to the Blue Iguana for tacos. By now, it was 1:50pm and all I had eaten all day was a granola bar at 7am. That burger has never tasted so good!!! We sat at a table near Guy’s, with a beautiful view of the Long Beach Cruise Terminal dome and the Queen Mary docked next door. Those white puffy clouds in the sky looked like something out of a cartoon! They were so bright and fluffy! We were desperate to put Ian down for a nap because he was getting cranky, so we went back to the cabin. Unfortunately, our luggage was not there yet, and we still couldn’t find the steward to ask for a crib. Continuing on with our embarkation day errands, we went up to Camp Ocean to get Ian registered. On our way, we took our traditional life ring photos that we take on every cruise. We never ended up getting one of the 3 of us, but at least we each got photos with Ian.