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Imagination review 4/9/12-4/13/12

jackdis

By jackdis,
in Carnival Cruise Lines

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jackdis

jackdis

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Hello! Welcome to trip report #4. Here we go….

 

My husband and I set sail on the Carnival Imagination (once again!!) six short days ago. We had an outstanding time!!!! Words cannot begin to express our thanks and gratitude to CD James Dunn, ACD Squishy, and the entire Entertainment Staff for making this cruise so awesome for us!!!

 

Just a little back story: My family loves to cruise!! Our normal traveling party includes our two daughters, ages 13 and 6. Last April, my husband and I cruised on the Imagination together, without the girls. It was our Christmas gift to each other. We knew that we each wanted the same "gift" again this past Christmas, so we looked at vacation schedules, dates, ports (and unfortunately airfare prices!!!) and the decision was made! The Imagination fit into our plans perfectly. It was so wonderful last year that we didn't think twice about sailing her again one year later. Plus it was the perfect length of time for a grown up trip (4 nights) and we loved the ports: Key West and Cozumel.

 

Wanting to be home and to spend Easter with our girls, we followed the same plan as last year. Fly out on the 6am flight to Miami the day of the cruise. Trip insurance was purchased with the plan B being, worst case scenario, if something happens and we miss the cruise, we will spend a few days in South Beach, the Keys, or wherever our adventure might take us. It went off without a hitch last year. The only bad part was getting up at 2:30am to leave for the airport at 3, but we were going on a cruise, so who cared?? What's a few less hours sleep in the big picture??

 

Well, just like last year, the alarm went off VERY early Monday morning. I looked at the clock. It was a few minutes later than I knew we had set if for. My husband told me he had changed it so I could get a few extra minutes of sleep. And then I heard my husband tell me that we had a little problem……he had received a text message at 2am that our flight was delayed to 9:45am, but that we should be at the airport for the originally scheduled departure time. Apparently, there was a mechanical issue with our flight. That is all we knew as we set out for the airport. Would this trip turn into Plan B???? Obviously not, judging from the title and my first sentence of this report, but not without this trip turning into somewhat of an adventure!!

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jackdis

jackdis

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Can't wait to hear the rest, My Daughter is going on the Imagination in 30 days, it's her first cruise.:)

 

Thank you, re-re. I hope she has a GREAT time! The days leading up to my cruises are always so exciting for us!!

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jackdis

jackdis

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Airport adventures, continued….

 

 

I must start this installment by saying, I HATE to fly in the day of the cruise. In fact, I think we have only done that one other time….last year on the Imagination. I am queen of the "Fly in a day or two before the cruise" club. Too much unneeded stress and worry for me, as I am also the queen of the "stress and worry" club!!! We arrived at the airport ridiculously early for our delayed flight. Nothing had changed with the time, except that we continued to receive text messages regularly about the delayed time of the flight.

 

Now I must say, my husband immediately called the airline (from the house) and we tried to get onto another flight, perhaps even from another airport, but everything was completely booked. So we were just hoping for the best at this point. We got to the airport, went through security and went to our gate to wait. But I could not just sit there and do nothing. The United customer care center in the terminal did not open until 6am. We went over to the 6am Fort Lauderdale (FLL) flight to see if we could just do that as standby guests. We could not. Apparently they were 18 (yes 18!!!!) oversold and not accepting standby requests. All the while my husband was on the phone with United again, who was trying to see if we could get onto another flight, even at another airport, which we knew would not be possible at this point.

 

We went over to another customer care station, which the gate agent at the oversold Fort Lauderdale flight RUDELY told us to do, and there was an agent there. We were about 4th on line. The minutes seemed to drag on forever. I seriously felt like I was in an episode of Amazing Race, trying to catch the flight to win the prize!! We had gone back and forth in the airport, from our gate, to service stations, to another gate, etc., only to stand in line and hear that people ahead of us got the last two seats on a flight connecting through Washington DC to Miami, which we did not want to do anyway, since it seemed even riskier to us. We inquired about the next FLL flight, departing at 7:59am, since nothing else was available to get us to Miami in time for our cruise, and since our flight was still listed at 9:45 am with no real information about what was happening.

 

We agreed to try this flight standby, since it was also completely sold out. Then, at the last minute, when I asked what exactly we needed to do, since I never have flown standby before, as the customer care agent looked up at us, she very quietly and calmly told us she got us two seats on the flight!!!!! I could not believe what I was hearing! Yes!!! I immediately called Carnival to find out about transfers from FLL to the Port of Miami, since we were just going to take a cab from Miami airport. Not a problem at all, as long as we landed before 2, which we would. We did later find out that our original flight did end up leaving sometime after 10, so it would have been fine, but this switch took away a lot of the worry and uncertainty for us. Before we knew it, we were on our way to Florida, for our CRUISE, and very excited at this point, as you can imagine.

 

I want to finish this up and begin the cruise report, but our "adventure" ended with us taking a private cab for a few bucks more than the Carnival transfers would have cost us. We did not have to wait for a busload of people to leave, and most importantly, the driver made a very important wine stop for us on the way to the ship!!!! Life was good and we were on our way to the Imagination!

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jackdis

jackdis

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Cant wait to hear the rest! My daughter and I are sailing on her 5/7/12. I hope you have lots of pics!!

 

Thank you! I will try to post another installment today. How exciting that you will be sailing on the Imagination so soon!!!

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jackdis

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ONBOARD, BABY!!!!

 

We arrived at the Port of Miami around 11:45. We checked in right away at the automated kiosks, which are very easy to use, minus us trying to scan our passports in the credit card reader! We went right over to get our sign and sail cards. These were the last time we would be getting gold ones. We will become Platinum members on our next cruise! This was cruise #9 for us!!! We then continued moving, and within a few minutes, we were onboard. There was really no wait. I think I saw people with Zone 12 cards at this point, but it didn't matter. We weren't even given a zone card. We were just told to ride up that magical escalator towards our home for the next five days!!!

 

I had that great feeling as we walked into the lobby, and we headed upstairs to get some lunch. Since we had been on the Imagination a year before, we immediately felt at home an did not feel the need to "explore" as we always do when we board a ship for the first time. Out of all the variety on the first day buffet line, I had my usual…..warm turkey sandwich from the deli and a slice (or two!) of the pizza. Nothing quite screams cruise to me as those two food choices! Just kidding! Well, maybe not entirely!

 

We dropped off our bags in our cabins. We had U18 this sailing. Porthole cabin. Loved it! Last year, we had U17, same location, other side of ship and it was great too. That made us want it again. (The only complaint we had last year was the odor of smoke around our cabin at times, and we had read about it online, so knew to expect it.) One day on this trip, we noticed the same odor. So we are not quite sure where the odor was coming from. Our guess is there might be some sort of crew area nearby that gave us the occasional smell of smoke.)

 

Anyway, back to the trip report. We walked around and headed to Serenity for a little while. Mandatory safety drill seemed a little more regimented, probably in light of the Concordia incident. Before long we were on our way to the Sailaway party on deck. Let the fun times begin!!!

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tekman26

tekman26

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Great review, looking forward to reading more about your trip. We are setting sail June 11th with 2 other couples and NO kids... Not sure how my DW and I will be with out them but looking forward to the adult time alone.

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jackdis

jackdis

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Great review, looking forward to reading more about your trip. We are setting sail June 11th with 2 other couples and NO kids... Not sure how my DW and I will be with out them but looking forward to the adult time alone.

 

Thanks, tek! You will have a great time! A little grown up vacation every now and again is much needed - and deserved!

 

We missed the girls so much, especially since they love cruising as much as we do. But we were in touch regularly via cell phone and text. We shall see what the bill is! Hopefully not too bad since our contact was short and sweet.

 

We also used the in cabin phone to call the girls one night. It is now only $1.99 per minute, so we made a 5 minute call and really, in the big picture, we didn't think that was bad at all.

 

Thanks again! I will try to post a little more tonight!

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jackdis

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DEPARTURE DAY CONTINUED

 

While we were setting sail, we also went up to the front of the verandah deck to see the harbor pilot leave the Imagination and get back to his boat. Last year on the Imagination was the first time I had actually seen this and I thought it was very interesting. So we watched again and I still found it to be exciting to see him make the jump to his boat. Leaving Miami is very pretty…..I'm a New York girl, so I must say, there's nothing quite like sailing out of Manhattan, through NY Harbor, but I enjoy leaving from Miami too. We made our last call to the girls before we began to roam, and then just wandered the ship a bit and headed back to our cabin.

 

This was our first time trying Your Time dining. We loved it!!! But more about that in a moment. Our luggage had arrived before the safety drill, so we unpacked at this point and headed to the Pride dining room. On our way there, we stopped for trivia with Kelly, since we could. We were not locked into a set dining time and we loved that feeling. Trivia was about inventors. Luckily, my husband and I were the only two people playing, so we earned a much coveted ship on a stick!! (Yes, he won!!!)

 

When my husband and I travel with the girls, we tend to get late dining, since we like to enjoy the ports and not feel rushed to get to dinner. I do feel that this is sometimes a little bit late to have such a full belly. When we travel with family, we tend to do early dining, since they like that better. Aside from often feeling rushed to get ready, early seating tends to "fit better" with the Camp Carnival activities. So we have been torn with which seating we prefer, but I would favor the late over the early.

 

Anyway, since it was just the two of us this time around, we thought, let's finally give Your Time a try. We ended up going around 6:30 or 7:00 most nights and didn't have a wait. On Cozumel night we got there around 8, since we stayed off the ship for longer than we had planned. (More about that later. Let's just say it involved a cell phone left in a taxi cab.) That night we were given a pager, but it went off almost immediately for us. I must point out, we loved our service team the first night and requested to be seated with them the following nights. On the Cozumel night, we got the last table in that team's section. Had we not gotten there when we did, we would have had a more significant wait for their section. But we would not have minded. We would have simply had a drink while we waited for the pager to go off.

 

We had a table for two each night, but with the exception of one night, the tables were relatively close to each other, so we did end up talking with people who were nearby to us. We didn't mind that,

but it was nice at the same time to just be able to have our own conversations, and enjoy a quiet meal, not be interrupted by the two girls at home who we love and who we missed dearly!!

 

I must say, the servers in Your Time work hard and do not get much down time. With traditional dining, the courses come out all at once for the tables that are in the section. So they have a little break in between course, if you want to call it that. But, with Your Time, since people come in randomly, they are constantly serving and there's not much down time for them, since their sections are all ordering at different times. I hope that makes sense. My big concern was that we would not have the personalized attention with Your Time as we did with traditional, but I was wrong. We were still called by name. My husband's drink was always brought to him. The wait staff paid close attention to us. One difference I did notice was that we had three people assigned to us…the head waiter, the assistant waiter, and one other person. Maybe that's to assist with the constant movement and orders coming in??

 

Back to that night……we went to the Welcome Aboard show. FUN as always. This is the fun ship, after all!! We walked around the ship, checked out the casino, and even though we missed the girls, I would be lying if I did not say that we THOROUGHLY enjoyed not having to coordinate Camp Carnival and Circle C drop offs, pick ups and activities!!!

 

We headed to bed and couldn't wait to get to Key West in the morning!!!!!!

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tekman26

tekman26

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Thanks, tek! You will have a great time! A little grown up vacation every now and again is much needed - and deserved!

 

We missed the girls so much, especially since they love cruising as much as we do. But we were in touch regularly via cell phone and text. We shall see what the bill is! Hopefully not too bad since our contact was short and sweet.

 

We also used the in cabin phone to call the girls one night. It is now only $1.99 per minute, so we made a 5 minute call and really, in the big picture, we didn't think that was bad at all.

 

Thanks again! I will try to post a little more tonight!

 

Yes, a grown up vacation is we needed and deserved. I am sure we will miss them and not sure if we will call them. They are younger and would be hard to explain mommy and daddy are at work for the next 4 to 5 days. I have international on my cell but still will have to think twice about what it might cause for the grandparents watching the kids.

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jackdis

jackdis

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Yes, a grown up vacation is we needed and deserved. I am sure we will miss them and not sure if we will call them. They are younger and would be hard to explain mommy and daddy are at work for the next 4 to 5 days. I have international on my cell but still will have to think twice about what it might cause for the grandparents watching the kids.

 

I agree....it could be harder with the little ones - for all involved. I know when we went last year, the younger one would tell my mom often that she missed us. This year, not so much! LOL....

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jackdis

jackdis

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Great review! Thanks for sharing your vacation!:)

 

Thank you!!! I am glad you are enjoying it! I really enjoy looking back at the trip reports too. They remind me of so many of the details that I would otherwise quickly forget!

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tekman26

tekman26

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I agree....it could be harder with the little ones - for all involved. I know when we went last year, the younger one would tell my mom often that she missed us. This year, not so much! LOL....

 

I am not sure how they are going to be with us going away. They just think we are going to be going to work for a longer time then normal. We went to Disney last year for a couple of days and talked to the grandparents about the girls and they never seemed to miss us or cared we were gone since they got away with murder they whole time.

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