Proud Pride Cruisers!! (Feb 8th-Feb 15th Western Review)

[Viscus]

 

Apple pie with ice cream: 8/10, much better than on previous cruises, but the crust is always the worst part. Just kinda...there.

 

 

Pumpkin pie: 5/10, very middle of the road, not bad, but nothing special

 

From here, we all went down to the Red Frog Pub to grab some drinks and watch the band. Again, these guys were great, and every night, had that place hopping. The older people on the cruise were dancing in there every night, and us young whippersnappers enjoyed the show. Lost at the trivia they have in there nightly (first place gets a fishbowl of alcohol instead of just a ship on a stick, don't miss it!), then headed to bed.

 

The next port was a tender port and our private excursion was supposed to meet an hour after first tender, so we had to be up bright and early to get a tender sticker on the lido. We were all excited for the next day as, for the other 3 people in my group, they were all going to be snorkeling for the first time ever in...

 

Grand Cayman!

[Viscus]

Going to take a break and sneak a nap in. This medicine they gave me for this sickness knock me out if I let it. Thanks for reading so far!

[mommom of 7]

Our turn on 1 March

Flying form UK to Tampa on 27th, then on the C Pride

Thanks for the review x

 

 

Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

 

I see you are a new member, come on over to our roll call. We have a good group with a meet & greet planed.

Char

[brenjmull2]

great review.. We too will be on the 14 night cruise March 15th.. Which Pub had the good dance band? I want to find it. I hate ball room dancing. I hope that is not all over the ship..

[Viscus]

great review.. We too will be on the 14 night cruise March 15th.. Which Pub had the good dance band? I want to find it. I hate ball room dancing. I hope that is not all over the ship..

 

If they have the same performers on the ship then (I'm not sure, didn't ask the band when their current contract was up), the one we liked the most was in the Red Frog Pub. Deck 2 fwd.

[marshabear]

Really enjoying this review and pictures!! We sail on the Repo soon...I have a question....looking at the Fun Times, I see shows at night with only 1 time listed...some are at 8pm...we have late dining...will this mean we can not see the shows that night????

 

 

 

 

 

Marsha

[scrinchy]

Thank you so much for this wonderful review. I don't cruise until next year and this gives me so much to look forward to.

[sxyshell]

Really enjoying this review and pictures!! We sail on the Repo soon...I have a question....looking at the Fun Times, I see shows at night with only 1 time listed...some are at 8pm...we have late dining...will this mean we can not see the shows that night????

 

 

 

 

 

Marsha

I was on this cruise too and yes some nights there was only one show. They repeated the show another night at a later time though so you should be able to catch it. I have to say that this cruise was the best I've been on out of the 8 I've done. It is a beautiful ship, the crew is great and the shows were good. I wish the Pride wasn't going back to Baltimore so we could go on it again out of Tampa!

Great review Justin! Hope you feel better soon! My son and I haven't caught the crud that you seem to have caught. Hope it stays that way. LOL

[Viscus]

Lucky :P

 

And when I get an email from photobucket saying I've reached my bandwidth limit, what does that mean? Will I need to use a different site moving forward for pictures? And what about the ones I've already posted?

[Viscus]

Let's get this show on the road! This brings us to...

 

Day 6: Grand Cayman and the Day of 10,000 Steve Irwin jokes!

 

First stop, Fun Times!

 

 

 

 

 

Cayman was the port that took me the most research to figure out what we were going to do. I've been there twice before, once on a cruise with my family when I was a kid, and once with my mom since she loved the island so much from our cruise. Both times, we spent a huge amount of time snorkeling, and it's one of my favorite snorkel spots I've ever been to. I also wanted to take the other 3 to stingray city since it's just such a cool experience the first time.

 

That said, I knew booking through Carnival would be a huge mistake. I remember, even as a kid, being on the boat out to stingray city on a Carnival excursion looking around and thinking, "There are wayyyyyyy too many people here, this is lame". That's only gotten worse. When we got out there on our tour, there were these huge, greyhound bus sized boats carrying like 60 people offloading in a different part of the sandbar. So not only did those people pay more than we ended up paying, they had to have had a worse experience.

 

Anyways, let's take off my judge robe and put on my nerd research glasses. There were a few different companies people on this website recommended, but we ended up going with NativeWay because husband and wife#2 were on a budget and Native offered a $40pp Stingray City and 2 snorkel spot package. All they required was a reservation email, no deposit, and we were set. Only thing that worried me was, our ship started tendering at 10AM, and we were supposed to be leaving on the tour at 11:15AM. Fingers were crossed the tendering process was handled efficiently that day.

 

Flash forward to the actual cruise day! We had to be up on the Lido deck by 8:30AM to pick up a tender ticket. The way Carnival does it (or at least, how they claim they do it) is that they only give 1 sticker to 1 person. So one person can't go up and claim 40 tickets. We got to the deck at 8:15 to find the line already pretty long.

 

[mitsugirly]

Your pictures are not going to show up if you are out of bandwidth (which according to your post, they are not showing up). They limit the amount you can have each month and when it's over, it's over (even deleting other pictures won't give you more bandwidth). You'll either have to upgrade and pay or get another site to use.

 

 

***edit...what the heck, now all of a sudden they are showing up where they were blank last time?

Edited February 18, 2015 by mitsugirly

[Viscus]

Thankfully, they were doing the towel animal display that morning at the Lido midship pool. So we had stuff to gawk at and snap cheesy pictures with. There were also fun games of, "What does that towel animal look like", which no one ever wins.

 

 

 

 

 

After getting our tender sticker (group 10, second group called later that morning), we decided to give regular breakfast buffet food a try. It was actually decent. The Eggs Benedict were a little disappointing as usual, but otherwise, good food.

 

 

There were grits in the bottom left, but I was a little hungry that morning. ;)

[Viscus]

Your pictures are not going to show up if you are out of bandwidth (which according to your post, they are not showing up). They limit the amount you can have each month and when it's over, it's over (even deleting other pictures won't give you more bandwidth). You'll either have to upgrade and pay or get another site to use.

 

I upgraded. So once I'm done with the review, will I need to keep the account upgraded for people to be able to see the pictures in the future?

[Viscus]

After breakfast, we did a lap of the top decks before heading to the lobby to wait for our tender number to be called. It was a perfect snorkel day. No rain, almost no wind, and not miserably hot or too chilly.

 

 

Decided to get some pictures of the lobby while we were waiting. The atrium has some pretty nice views, and I think it's our favorite aesthetic on any of our cruises.

 

 

 

 

[Viscus]

There was also a trophy display area in the atrium. The Pride has (deservedly so in my opinion) won a few awards in its history for service and quality.

 

 

Environmental Award, AKA tree hugger award

 

 

Thinking this award is a big deal. I called it the "Murca Stands For Freedom" Award.

 

 

The pirate ship award. I guess the Pride stole something, that's all I could take away from this. Tell your friends, the Carnival Pride is a pirate ship.

 

Right about this time, our tender number was called, so off we went to pile into the boat to head for the port. It was around 10:20AM at this point, so I was a little concerned, but the ships anchor pretty close to the shore at Cayman.

 

 

 

For those that have never been, Cayman has some of the clearest water I've ever seen. You can be standing in the water up to your neck, look down, and see your toes wiggle. It's crazy. When husband#2 saw it, he got psyched for the snorkeling later.

Edited February 18, 2015 by Viscus

[Viscus]

We arrived at the port terminal about 10 minutes later, and after a painfully slow tender offloading process, we were ready to go find our group and head out. At this point, it was around 11AM, so mission accomplished!

 

 

 

 

So here's where the only negative of the day happened. After about 3 laps around the cruise terminal, it because obvious no one from Nativeway was there. I asked a couple of other company's employees, and after dodging some pushy sales tactics, one of them who knew the owner of Nativeway called the organizer. Apparently, she had just taken another group (at 11AM when we were supposed to be meeting...) and would be back in a few minutes.

 

So I guess our tour was going to be delayed? Am I allowed to leave her and head for their tour boat? Pretty bad customer service to just leave the terminal 15 minutes before another group is scheduled to be leaving without any trace of where you're at. This part was pretty frustrating since we were lugging around beach stuff, it was hot, and people were constantly harassing me to buy stuff.

 

Around 11:30AM, the lady comes running up to us, introduces herself, apologizes for the wait (wasn't mad about that ma'am, but whatever, take me to the ocean please), and escorts the 4 of us and 3 other people to the taxi van. Apparently, our group was going to be 7 big and we were going to be using a speedboat for the tour. Now thaaaaaat part was cool. No more boring boat trips between sites going 5mph, we were going to be sailing in style with speed.

 

 

Uh, sir, did you know your steering wheel is on the wrong side of the vehicle? You might need a mechanic to look at that.

 

 

Our marina home for the day.

Edited February 18, 2015 by Viscus

[Viscus]

 

The girls were starting to get kind of excited.

 

 

The exit of the marina into the bay where the 3 sites are. The houses on this part of the island are gorgeous. If I hit the lottery...

 

 

My wife freaked when she saw this. "HONEY, A PINK BEACH HOUSE, CAN I HAVE ONE?!"

 

 

Gawd that water is pretty. Just thinking about it makes me want to go back.

 

 

A couple of sailboats we followed out then quickly lapped after we got out of the no wake zone.

[Viscus]

Let me just let you know now, I didn't have an underwater camera or waterproof case for my iPad. I wish I would've invested in one, because the snorkeling on this trip was really great, especially for the price. Nativeway provides all needed snorkeling equipment required, and also doesn't require you to wear one of those annoying life jackets unless you want one. Hate wearing those, you can't dive down when snorkeling with them.

 

Our first stop was Stingray City, and we were one of the earlier boats to get there even though there were 2 other cruise ships in port that day that beat us there (A Princess ship and the Splendor). After we had been there for a bit and had interacted with the stingrays, the giant cattle call boats started arriving. Groups of 60+ people would pile out of them, the guides tried their best to give everyone a fair amount of time with the stingrays they had corralled, but wouldn't let people do their own thing. I would've been miserable if we would've been on one of those.

 

 

This was the only picture I took at the Stringray sandbar. None of those boats in the picture are what I'm talking about with the Carnival excursion groups. If we go to Cayman again, I'd love to do a snorkel trip using those jet skis. That looked like a blast.

 

Our guide for our group did a great job with our smaller group. Everyone got a couple of squid to feed the rays, he "caught" a couple of the largest female rays so we could hold them, kiss them, and get ray back massages (wife #2 was too chicken :P ), and even found a live conch and brought it over to show us. Was a really cool stop. We stayed on the sandbar for about 45 minutes until everyone was ready to head over to the snorkel spot.

 

I don't have any pictures of this part since I was soaking wet from the sandbar and didn't want to risk anything. The spot is called Coral Gardens, and it's a really solid snorkel spot. Vibrant coral, including huge fans, saw a few barracuda, huge schools of colorful fish, and even spotted an Eel hiding inside a rock. He was around 8-10ft, dude was massive. This spot was way better than anything I remember snorkeling off the shore at 7 mile beach. The other 3 had never been snorkeling before, and they might have gotten a little spoiled starting at such a good spot.

 

After about an hour, we all climbed back on the boat, told each other the coolest thing we had seen, then headed over to starfish island.

 

 

Starfish Island is a very shallow sandbar where starfish go to during the day to feed on sea grass. We were able to find around 15 different starfish that day, of all different colors. Again, not a ton of pictures on my iPad, although husband and wife#2 have a few on their phones.

 

As we were loading back onto the boat about 45 minutes later, I noticed a ray had shown up at the sandbar.

 

 

When I pointed her out to our guide, he immediately recognized her as Frisbee. Apparently, she's been hanging out there for 20 years and was born without a tail. Can't tell in the picture, but she's pretty big, about 8ft across at her widest.

[mitsugirly]

 

When I pointed her out to our guide, he immediately recognized her as Frisbee. Apparently, she's been hanging out there for 20 years and was born without a tail. Can't tell in the picture, but she's pretty big, about 8ft across at her widest.

 

 

Haha...she showed up when we were at the snorkeling spot when we were there Dec 2013. He caught her and brought her up for us to touch and get pictures with (we did the snorkeling portion before the stingray city so we got some stingrays before actually getting to the sand bar lol)...although she wasn't 8' across, at least not at that time.

 

 

 

 

 

[Viscus]

So all in all, for $40pp, you get around 2hr30min in the water. Plus they pick you up at the terminal and drop you back off there unless you request to be dropped off at 7 mile beach, and they provide bottles of water. If it wasn't for the craziness at the start of the day, it would've probably been the best excursion value-wise.

 

On the way back to the marina, our guide took us by some more of the super nice houses on the island and also pointed out all the iguanas sunning themselves in their backyards. Instead of squirrels, these people get dinosaurs.

 

 

We got back to the marina, said our goodbyes, loaded back into a taxi van, and headed back for the cruise terminal. The other 3 people in our group decided to stop at 7 Mile beach, and the driver let them off at the Royal Palm resort. Can't comment on anything past that, our driver peeled out of there like he had somewhere to be.

 

Got back to the terminal, did some light shopping and attempted to use their public wifi there (don't bother, it's a steaming pile of garbage), then jumped on a tender back to the ship.

 

 

The Regal Princess was anchored next to us. Looked like a really nice ship, we've been considering giving Princess a try soon, looked like a good first Princess ship for the future.

 

There was also a pirate ship. Since we've established the Pride is also a pirate ship earlier, maybe it was a pirate convention that day? Who knows...

 

 

 

The last shot we'd have from this perspective before getting back off in Tampa. :(

[Viscus]

When we got back on the ship, it was around 4:30PM, so nothing was open except for Guy's and the Deli. Everyone else did Guy's, but I was determined to get something from the deli and the pizza place for the review.

 

The line for both took a little bit since both make everything to order, but the food was pretty good.

 

I got a reuben and a hotdog with sauerkraut from the deli and the mushroom and mozzarella pizza from the pizza pirate.

 

 

The reuben was really good, 8/10, the hot dog was a hot dog, 5/10.

 

 

The pizza was amazing, 9/10. I've read reviews saying the pizza isn't any better than they get at home. Maybe the pizza is just awful in Atlanta, but this pizza was delicious to me. Quit being snobs, snobs.

 

From here, it was time to shower and change for the evening. Since we had eaten "lunch" so late, we were going to just do our own thing as far as dinner went. Husband#2 and I would later end up in the buffet, can't remember what the girls did. Before that, though, we went to a performance of 88 Keys.

 

Now, I normally can't stand the shows on the ships, I'm just not a theater person. I really liked the music in this show. The main singer/dancer was amazing. I wish it was just an hour of him behind a piano singing.

 

 

The main singer guy

 

 

A very low quality picture I snuck in during the show.

 

So yeah, I actually enjoyed that show, and my wife loved it.

 

After the show, husband#2 and I went to the buffet for some late night food (it was around 9PM I think). The buffet food was pretty mediocre that night, but I figure it was because we were eating so close to them shutting down for the night, so I won't fault them for that. Plus, it's still better than what I normally eat at home. See? I'm not a snob. ;)

 

The wife and I headed for bed after that, and couple#2 went up to watch some sappy love movie on the movie screen. My wife and I never did that for some reason this cruise, think it was a combo of how busy we were on port days and the selection of movies. They were either terrible or we'd seen them too many times before (we go to the theater a lot).

 

I'm going to stop here for the night, but all we have left now is the last sea day and debarkation day. This review has been nice because it kind of extends the vacation a little bit, but I didn't realize I'd have a second wave of depression when I was nearing the end of the review. It's almost as bad as that feeling you get at dinner on the last night of the cruise. :(

 

I'm going to go drown my tears with hydrocodone cough syrup and try to finally shake this bug.

 

If you have any questions, feel free to ask!

[boaterette]

I am really enjoying your review. I have been on the Pride three times with number 4 coming up next month for the 14 day repositioning. The first three times were all on the west coast though. Hope you feel better soon.

[NoDayButToday]

Thank you for the wonderful review! We leave on the Pride on Sunday, so your review has been getting me excited to go.

 

I hope you feel better soon!

[petesweet]

Our turn on 1 March

Flying form UK to Tampa on 27th, then on the C Pride

Thanks for the review x

 

 

Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

 

Hey, welcome to Cruise Critic. You have already found out how valuable this site is.

 

Happy sails.:)

 

Kathy

[bev.pearce]

Hi yes Kathy it's great thanks

Not so sure about this tapatalk app though :/

 

 

Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk