REVIEW - Carnival Legend 5/8 - 5/15

Ok guys, Foodie and Mel are already doing reviews of this cruise, but since I was reading every review of the Legend available before we left (and eating them up), I'm sure another one will be useful too - and it's only fair that I spend the time to write a review after I read so many! I also have a few important things to mention about certain places that I think will help future travelers.

So on with the review - I will do this in bits, talking about each day and putting the pics up later.

Day 1 for us was Saturday the 7th - we left early to drive down to Tampa. It's about an 8.5 hour drive for us but it was a very easy drive and we made very good time. I got a hotel room on priceline at the Sheraton Riverwalk Tampa, which is about a mile from the port, for $50 + $13 in taxes.

We went straight to the hotel, did the mandatory valet parking for $16, and got in our room - which, as priceline rooms go, was totally decent. Sometimes you get a lesser room booking through priceline, but this was basically the same as any other room in the hotel. The only bad part about it was that it was right across from the ice machine that was noisy, but that wasn't a big deal. I thought the Sheraton was in nice shape even though others had posted that it was showing its age.

Now, I had a big dilemma before we left about parking, because I read on here that the Sheraton did a cruise parking package for $5/day, but I also read on here that the Sheraton parking garage floods - and I just bought a brand new car in March, so that didn't sound too awesome. If all else failed, I was just going to drive to the port and park there.

When I got to the hotel, we talked to the valet and he confirmed that there was a cruise parking package for $5/day, and the guy at the front desk said the same thing when we checked in. He told me to set it up when I checked out in the morning. But lo and behold, my boyfriend (I'll call him J) left some stuff in the car in the confusion of getting it valeted, and it was stuff we couldn't leave in the car - especially if we were leaving it at the hotel for a whole week. So we go down to the valet stand and tell them we need to get in the car, and they described where it was in the garage and gave us the key.

Here is a very important piece of information to know if you're going to park at the Sheraton during your cruise - there are TWO totally separate garages where the valets park your car. One is actually above street level to the right of the hotel as you're looking at it, but the other one is UNDERNEATH the reception area - basically AT river level. My car was parked in the underground part, and let me tell you, it is the nastiest garage I've ever seen. It smells like a sewer and there is water dripping all over the place, so there are giant standing water puddles everywhere. My car was parked over by a wall, which was better than some (in the sense that water was not dripping on the car) but there was a big area of standing water by the front wheels. Now I understood what that person meant about the garage flooding.... so I immediately became concerned about leaving it there for a week. J thought I was overreacting and that it would never flood, but while we were walking around looking for a place to eat and all through dinner, I agonized about it.

As for places to eat around the Sheraton - there are plenty if you're willing to walk a short ways. We first crossed the bridge to walk over towards the university and found a couple of places there that looked interesting, but then we came back over the bridge and walked down by the waterfront park and found a few other places and eventually ended up at Taps, which had a good beer and wine selection and good food. They also randomly had board games and cards so we played a couple rounds of Uno. I would eat there again.

After thinking about it for a while, I decided I wasn't going to take the chance of my car getting damaged in some way from sitting in the underground garage and we would just drive to the port and park there in the morning. If I hadn't had to go down to the car to see where it was, I probably would have blissfully left it there all week. And I thought about asking the valets if they could move it to the other part of the garage, but I thought it would be easier not having to come back to the hotel when we got back anyway (and it was). So we planned to drive to the port and park there instead.

That night we were sleeping well until some lovely ladies came back from a wedding at 3 am and decided to start screaming in our hallway. I believe I heard someone on the hall ask them to be quiet and that person promptly got cussed out by these lovely ladies. I thought about getting up to call the front desk, but they kept coming in and out and screaming at intervals so they probably would have started again as soon as a hotel employee left, and I wasn't quite coherent enough to get up and do that. Anyway, it wasn't the ideal night to kick off the cruise, but we managed to get back to sleep after they passed out. We thought seriously about running up and down the halls screaming the next morning and waking them up all hungover - but we are too nice :p

Keep it coming!

Day 2 - the first day of the cruise! We woke up and ate a couple granola bars for breakfast - we didn't need much since we knew we'd be eating lunch on the ship soon. We left the hotel probably around 10:30 or so - a little later than I'd planned, but we weren't in any real hurry. After the valet gave J a hard time about not parking at the hotel during the cruise (I was checking out), GPS sent me over to the port and we parked the car on the 4th level of the garage - yay! We then dragged our luggage down the stairs and walked over to the terminal, where a porter immediately saw us and threw our 2 bags on a luggage cart. We tipped him $5 because our bags were really heavy. Then we just had two carry-ons to contend with, but one of them was FULL of soda and extremely heavy (luckily it rolled) and mine had the 2 bottles of wine and a bunch of other stuff which also made it very heavy.

We realized we forgot to bring playing cards - so J walked down to Hooters :rolleyes: to buy some before we went into the terminal. After he selected some sassy cards, we went through the boarding pass check and upstairs to security. The lines were fairly long at security, but not horrible. I got through with no problems, but they stopped J with the rolling bag full of soda and shook our VitaminWaters to make sure they were not alcohol :rolleyes: I found this highly amusing since we carried on 3 rum runners in that bag and on J.... ;)

Next we got in line to check in, which was also fairly long but moved fast. They started calling Zone 1 to board while we were in line, and it was 11:45! I know other people have gotten on the ship earlier than that on previous Legend cruises, so it must have been a little slower getting things ready this day. We were assigned to Zone 17, so once we got our S&S cards, we sat down in the waiting area. We probably only waited about 20-30 minutes or so before they called our zone - they were calling them pretty fast. I think we were on the ship around 12:30. We went straight upstairs to the Lido buffet for lunch, and it was (not surprisingly) packed. We managed to snag a table and some food and tried to figure out what food was where - which was a little tough at this point. We heard a lot of people complaining about the lines, but what do you do? It's embarkation day and that's how it goes :)

After lunch we headed to the Serenity deck because I wanted to spend some time in a big chair or a hammock while we could, and we got a clamshell :) I went to the bar and bought a bucket of beers to kick things off, and we enjoyed our clamshell for a while. A little after 1:30 we decided to head to the room, since they were supposed to be ready by then, and our bags were already outside! Sweet - the last 2 of our rum runners made it through unscathed ;)

We were in balcony room 7216 - right by the midship elevators and stairs. I was somewhat worried that there would be noise from the elevators and people in that area, but this was NO problem because the hallway to the cabins is set back from the elevator lobby area and it has some turns so you're not directly across from the opening to the area no matter where you are. It was a fantastic location for us because we use the stairs most of the time and it was so easy to get everywhere.

We unpacked and settled in and checked out the balcony.

More later - have to restart my browser

Thank you for sharing your adventures with us. It's a great start, and I'm waiting to read more.

Something else that just occurred to me to mention about the room, since there have been many questions about this - our room did not have a flat screen TV, it was still the old kind.

Ok, back to the review - after we unpacked to my satisfaction, we went out to do a few things - check out our table in the dining room, check out the night's menu, and explore the ship. It was really difficult to figure out what table we were at because ours wasn't marked, but we basically figured out which one it was, and we were at a table for 8. Luckily our tablemates turned out to be pretty good, but more on that later.

We checked out the menu and it looked good, but we were still seriously considering eating at the steakhouse the first night. I thought J would like it because he loves steak, but for me it wasn't all that important since I don't eat steak (I'd be getting the chicken), and J seemed to think that the only way it would be worth doing was if we were getting the free bottle of wine (he is pretty cheap). Eventually we decided not to go to the steakhouse and just eat in the MDR the first night so we could meet our tablemates and see how the food was.

We walked around and explored the casino and the dance club and the firebird lounge. The Legend is an extravagantly decorated ship, but the excess of urns didn't really bother me. I thought the dining room was actually one of the more beautiful/non-tacky ones I've seen (and was very nice with all the light coloring). The casino was HUGE (probably 3x bigger than the ones on the Royal Caribbean and Celebrity ships we've been on recently) and we looked at the electronic poker table so J could see what it was like - not surprisingly, he would spend a significant amount of time there during the week...

Before I look at my notes to figure out what we did next, I'll stop here and tell you a little about J and I - we're 30 (me) and 33 (him - although he accidentally told his tablemates he was 32 - HA! not so much) and, as you can see from my signature, this was my first Carnival cruise in about 7.5 years. I was on the Victory back then, also in a balcony room.

In the meantime I've cruised RC and Celebrity, not for any particular reason, just based on itinerary and such, and because the friends I cruised with in Dec. 2007 are diehard RC fans (for reasons I do not understand - if you ask me, RC/Carnival/Celebrity are all more or less interchangeable with a few small differences in crowd/ship/atmosphere/dining room attire/etc). I was anxious to try Carnival again because it's more my speed price-wise and I wanted a more casual, young atmosphere (but not as many families as RC). J was totally open to the idea of any cruise because he's had such good luck playing poker on his other 2 cruises.

The crowd on this Legend cruise was surprisingly old - I could not believe the number of people walking with canes and walkers - I've never seen anything like it on any other cruise. There were probably about 10 kids total on the ship, which was perfect for me because I'm not into kids. The rest of the crowd was perfect - about our age mostly, 20s - 40s. I would definitely cruise in early May again for this type of crowd. :)

DW and I love the Legend. Can't wait to read more.

Day 2 continued -

I checked my notes and it looks like we did some exploring, then went out for the muster drill, then did some more exploring. We got to the muster drill early so we were stuck in the back by a vent :( but it was over pretty quickly. Anyway, I think after exploring we went back to the room to hang out and take a shower and get ready for dinner. We picked late seating because we generally eat later at home. When we got to the dining room, however, it was closed and there was a giant line to get in. I don't think it opened until about 8:25 or 8:30 that night. We tried to get to a good vantage point where we could see when the line was moving, but we ended up sitting on deck 3 and saw that line moving while the line on deck 2 was still not moving.

Eventually we got in, and because we weren't totally sure where our table was, we had someone seat us - except he didn't know where it was either and had to ask about 5 other waiters. We should have just gone to the table we suspected was ours because we were right all along. I think we were the last couple to get there the first night. Our other tablemates were a couple from Atlanta, a couple from Tampa, and a couple from DC and Charlottesville, Virginia. We were all in the same age group (25-35) and we kept the conversation going. It later turned out that I had a lot in common with the couple from DC/Virginia (being that I'm from Virginia and we attended the same schools, etc). I'll get into that later.

Service in the MDR this first night was somewhat disjointed, and it was never very good throughout the week. Our waiter was nice enough, although he seemed older and maybe a little burned out on working cruise ships. Our assistant waiter completely lacked personality. I think we saw her smile about 3 times in the course of the week (sometimes while she was dancing), and she hardly said a word to any of us. This was very odd for me because I've always had very personable waiters on cruises. She was very efficient about refilling water glasses and giving us bread and such, but the service in the MDR, in general, was just ok.

I don't do food pictures, but I do remember that the fried chicken tenders with honey mustard appetizer that night was delicious. J got it, not me, but I stole a bunch of it from him. I think I had fruit for my appetizer, and the fruit was always very good in the MDR. I had the WCMC for dessert and it was delicious! I think I had this pesto chicken thing for my entree and it was very mediocre. Tablemates who got the same thing agreed.

Because it was Mother's Day, they came around and gave every woman a pink carnation, and then we also got a special chocolate heart dessert. None of us at our table were mothers, but I do have a cat, and it was a nice gesture for the ladies. The chocolate heart thing was pretty delicious too - I was on chocolate overload that night. We didn't get out of dinner until close to 10 because the dining room opened up late and it took a while to get all the food out.

After dinner, I was pretty exhausted and I had a bad headache - probably from lack of sleep after being woken up by screaming people at 3 am and the stress of the day - so I headed back to the room to go to bed. J went to play poker and didn't do well - he came back to the room later when I was dead asleep and woke me up :rolleyes: (this happened about 4 more times during the cruise).

So that was Day 2 for us (and Day 1 of the actual cruise)!

;)

 

We were in balcony room 7216 - right by the midship elevators and stairs. I was somewhat worried that there would be noise from the elevators and people in that area, but this was NO problem because the hallway to the cabins is set back from the elevator lobby area and it has some turns so you're not directly across from the opening to the area no matter where you are. It was a fantastic location for us because we use the stairs most of the time and it was so easy to get everywhere.

 

We unpacked and settled in and checked out the balcony.

 

More later - have to restart my browser

Great to hear there is no noise!:) We are booked in 8197 up and across on our cruise next month. Noise was definately a concern. Thanks for the great detail.

Thank you for posting your review. We are looking forward to more. We're on the Legend in september.

Great to hear there is no noise!:) We are booked in 8197 up and across on our cruise next month. Noise was definately a concern. Thanks for the great detail.

Yeah, you will be fine - I wasn't sure how the hallways would be laid out as far as access to the elevator lobby went, but to give you more detail, our area of rooms was totally set back from the lobby area. There was a place to get to the stairs right by 7210, but you had to kind of go into the room hallway and turn before you got to any rooms. The opening near the atrium elevators was right in front of 7218 and if I remember correctly, this was more of just a straight opening without any turns. But being near the openings, you would have thought we might get some noise just from people walking by to get to their rooms, and it wasn't ever an issue. Occasionally I heard people out in the hallway, but no one was bothersome - certainly NOTHING like the people at our hotel. And J coming back from playing poker was the only thing that ever woke me up. :rolleyes:

If anyone has any other questions, let me know - I try to get into a lot of detail but I'm sure I'll miss something!

How was the view from the balcony? Could you look striaght down to the awter without obstruction? We are traveling with friends in the neighboring cabin and plan to get the divider opened to legthen the balconies. Do you have any pictures of the view?:)

Geoff

How was the view from the balcony? Could you look striaght down to the awter without obstruction? We are traveling with friends in the neighboring cabin and plan to get the divider opened to legthen the balconies. Do you have any pictures of the view?:)

 

Geoff

I have about 20 pictures of the view straight from the balcony :D and I actually do have one looking straight down where it looked like we were either dumping something in the water around Belize or we were churning some crazy dirt up :eek: I will post that pic and my pics from the first cruise day later today if I get the chance (all pics are on home computer right now).

But yes, we could look down with no obstruction - I could see down straight to the water and to the promenade on deck 3. I thought about getting an extended balcony instead of a regular one, but I really didn't want to look down and see lifeboats, so I specifically chose this area of the ship to have no obstructions, and it was perfect. It was just balconies straight up and down, no obstructions either way. I don't think an extended balcony would have been worth the extra money either - we had plenty of room and we spent a good amount of time on the balcony.

Oh, also - I saw lots of balconies with the dividers moved over to make one big balcony. In fact, the people next to us (more about them later :rolleyes:) had that done for their two cabins next to each other. I love that you can do this - we went on a family cruise in December and it would have been awesome to open dividers between our balconies - especially since we had FOUR rooms - what an awesome balcony that could have been! Unfortunately, we were on an older RC ship and we couldn't do that (although my devil may care older brother did almost attempt to jump over the balcony divider to my balcony :eek:). I told my mom that we need to go on Carnival for our next family cruise so we can do this! Even though I imagine some of the newer ships on other lines have this feature as well ;)

Great review so far...thanks. We sail the end of August.

Loving your review, thanks for taking the time to post it!

Thanks for the review, lots of details.

Kirk

This is awesome, thank you!

Oh, also - I saw lots of balconies with the dividers moved over to make one big balcony. In fact, the people next to us (more about them later :rolleyes:) had that done for their two cabins next to each other. I love that you can do this - we went on a family cruise in December and it would have been awesome to open dividers between our balconies - especially since we had FOUR rooms - what an awesome balcony that could have been! Unfortunately, we were on an older RC ship and we couldn't do that (although my devil may care older brother did almost attempt to jump over the balcony divider to my balcony :eek:). I told my mom that we need to go on Carnival for our next family cruise so we can do this! Even though I imagine some of the newer ships on other lines have this feature as well ;)

I see you were on the Magesty of the Sea. DW and I travel on her on our honeymoon 19 years ago. we had an OV, but it was still nice.:D

Great review, keep it coming! We sail the Legend on July 31st this year for our Honeymoon! :)

Ok, since I can't post any pictures yet, I'll keep you all entertained with some stories about our balcony neighbors. They were very LOUD talkers, so I could hear literally every word they said (and I'm a natural eavesdropper to begin with, always listening to everything going on around me). They got pretty annoying at times, but they did provide me with some amusement because the things they talked about were just so... odd. From what I could gather, there were 3 teenage/adult kids and grandparents - I couldn't figure out if the parents were on the cruise too. The grandfather (GF) had a lot of interesting views and many, many lectures for his grandson (GS). Here are a few examples - I hope none of them are on CC :D:

GF: You know, if you work hard, you can have ALL THIS one day. When I was working, I knew a lot of people who made a lot of money and just lived like kings! They just spent all their money - and then they had to work their entire lives. I know one guy who had to work until he was 85! And I didn't want to do that, I wanted to retire early. So I worked hard and disciplined myself, and saved my money - and it was hard, don't get me wrong, but if you work hard like I did, and discipline yourself, you can have all this one day... (and so on and so forth)

Note: "all this" = balcony cabin on Carnival? I have this already and I'm only 30 ;)

GF also told GS not to take cocktails around the ship - which I thought meant that he was underage and they were letting him drink in the room or something, but I think he was actually over 21 and the GF just thought it wasn't right :confused: But as I learned, GF had a lot of interesting ideas about things...

GS is talking about some woman he knows who became a master teacher of Buddhism...

GF: You know what I think about that &%#? (pause for emphasis) It SUCKS.

Then they somehow jumped to talking about a family member who I gathered was an alcoholic, and GS mentioned that he didn't seem to have any problems with alcohol like that (which is why I thought he was over 21)...

GF: Well, when I retired, I decided to do what everyone does when they retire - BECOME AN ALCOHOLIC.

:confused:

GS: ... I don't think that's what everyone does with they retire.

GF then starts talking about how when he retired, his wife wanted to maintain a certain lifestyle - and he told her that if she wanted to live that way, she needed to get a job, and on and on and on.

On Roatan day, they made an announcement calling for 3 people to contact Guest Services, and then just for 1 person to contact GS, and I knew it was people that had not made it back to the boat. Later, J and I were out on the balcony and J saw a girl RUNNING down the pier. Our balcony neighbors must have heard more about it than we did, because they started cussing this poor girl out for being late to the ship (we were maybe delayed for like 15 minutes - not a big deal). Apparently she left her card somewhere she had been on the island and she went back to get it. They were like, omg, how did she lose her card, that's so stupid, what'd she do, lose it in the sand? Did she have to go digging in the sand? And why would she go back for it, why wouldn't she just come to the $&@#ing ship and be like, "hey, I lost my card?"

God forbid someone make a mistake and lose their S&S card - I mean, geez! And if I were that girl, my first instinct would be to go back and get the card if I knew where it was, because what if you go to the ship and they make you go back and get it then :eek: I don't know how it would work if I lost my S&S card, and I don't want to know!

I know I'm forgetting something they talked about but I'll probably remember as I'm writing more of the review. Oh, and GF also had this little Ipod stereo system he took out on the balcony to play music... which we all so wanted to hear :rolleyes:

I'm sure they wouldn't have talked so much about personal family matters if they'd been able to see that I was sitting there listening to everything they said!

Hmmmm...our friends can be loud talkers too. Something to remember.:cool:

Hmmmm...our friends can be loud talkers too. Something to remember.:cool:

It's all good if you're talking about something funny or interesting! ;)

Another thing I'll mention while I'm thinking about it. The Legend rocked the least of any ship I've been on, which I'm sure was partly because the seas were so calm (the weather was fantastic the whole time), but it was really nice that it didn't rock much because I tend to have a bad time adjusting to my land legs after the cruise, and I feel almost normal already.

Oh, also, I chose not to take on bottled water because a lot of people said they thought the ship's water was good. Whatever floats your boat, but I thought the ship's tap water was terrible! I could not drink it. I even brought these Nuun tablets that flavor water and I still thought it was gross. Luckily I brought along a water bottle that I refilled at the Lido buffet every morning. I wished I had a few bottles of water with me, though.

Great review - and loving all the stories and details! (but I would think the tap water and water on the Lido were one and the same? Am I wrong?)

And we did a family cruise on the Miracle a few years back and opened up the balcony dividers and it was amazing!