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Review: Carnival Conquest 10/30/05

Sablerose

By Sablerose,
in Carnival Cruise Lines

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Sablerose

Sablerose

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Hi, all!

 

I can't tell you how it warms my heart to see you guys welcoming us back -- not only us but all the folks in our rollcall who were also on the same cruise.

 

My review is going to be probably pretty long and wordy so I will do my best to get it all in here. But I'm going to break it up, by days probably.

 

Our trip was absolutely amazing. Some things happened on this trip and on this ship that are going to set our review apart from many ... I'll just say this in advance. We ended up having the experience of our lives. And I'm still working on finding out exactly why or how it happened. But there are some things that happened with us on our ship that won't happen for everyone on their trips, and I don't mention the things for any other reason than to share our cruise experience and to describe it in total. We just had a couple of "stand-out" events while we were onboard, and they were amazing, and I can't wait to share the stories with you guys.

 

What I will say in pre-review summary is:

 

1) Apparently I'm way too stressed out and it takes me a few days to unwind. I need another cruise already.

 

2) The irons on the cruise ship get HOT!

 

3) The drink of the day is always very potent, which let us come in under budget!

 

4) We got to go to Playa Del Carmen instead of Cozumel and I was just happy to be in Mexico!

 

5) If it weren't for the tips we got from all of our CruiseCritic friends, some things wouldn't have gone so smoothly.

 

Coming very soon...... Day One! :D:D

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Sablerose

Sablerose

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Day One: Embarkation

 

At 5:45 a.m. on Sunday, 10/30/05, my husband tapped me on the arm and said, "It's 5:45. Should I go back to sleep or should I just get up?" We got up. Too excited to sleep.

 

After a morning's drive from San Antonio, we parked at EZ Cruise Parking (www.ezcruiseparking.com) and a shuttle took us to the terminal, which was completely clogged with people. It was about 11:30 a.m. and we were tugging on our bags trying to find the spot where we could get new luggage tags. We hauled them quite a distance when a porter flagged us down and let us know they would give us luggage tags "right through this door" and then followed us in, and loaded up his cart with our bags. We got our luggage tags, tipped the porter, and made our way into the terminal.

 

We filled out all our information in our docs (hadn't done that yet) and made our way to the Funpass line, where we received our Sail & Sign cards and the like. Our documents had an old cabin number as we had upgraded and changed cabins, so at first she handed us the wrong Sail & Sign cards! But, hubby got it all figured out and noticed immediately they shouldn't have been ours (they were gold, and we are first-timers) so she fixed that and we were on our way to the terminal.

 

Following the advice of folks on Cruise Critic, we tried to get a seat in the farthest left bank of chairs. We did find two chairs. They told us we weren't going to get onboard until 2:00 p.m., and that we should take some time (with all our bags we were hauling as carry-ons) and go visit the Strand in Galveston. We politely declined. Three times. And had a seat. I picked up the cellphone to call one of my new Cruise Critic friends to find out where they were -- Bette answered her phone, and told me to stand up. They were about 10 rows behind us in the same section! So we met up with our CC Roll Call group, and settled in for what ended up being a short wait. At 12:30 they came out to let us on the ship after a quick warm-up and some HUGE laughs in our group. We took our embarkation photo, stopped at the Purser's to get our S&S cards punched, grabbed a couple of copies of the first-day Capers (we were told we couldn't go to our rooms until 2:00 pm) and were onboard sipping a Fun Ship Special before 1:00 p.m. We ran into some of the CC'ers at the Sky Bar, and shared the capers, and started making the "Hey! I'm onboard the ship!" phone calls home and such.

 

After the first Fun Ship Special we wandered up to the bar and had a conversation with the bartender (Jan, Czech Republic, Sky Bar) and the waiter (Boris, Czech Republic, Sky Bar) and immediately knew they were going to be our favorite stop. They were so friendly, and happy to see us, immediately asked us our names and shook our hands. They were an absolute hoot.

 

After the second Fun Ship Special, I realized there's some BOOZE in those things! We were pleasantly tipsy and ready to go exploring the ship a little. We went up to our room, dropped off our carryons, ooh-ed and aah-ed over our balcony, took a bunch of pictures of the room, and found that our rolling cooler had been delivered but none of our other luggage yet. We made our reservations for the Point Supper Club. Muster Drill was somewhere in this portion of the afternoon. We went and got another refill on our Fun Ship Special and started exploring the ship a little bit. Ended up on the deck at sailaway. I phoned my mom and she answered the phone and said, "I'm looking at the webcam! You're moving! You're moving!" She was watching us on www.galveston.com and we had indeed started pulling away from the port! We walked the deck and sailed into the sunset, watching Galveston fade out of sight. Went back in, through the Promenade and had some sushi and just tried to check as much out as we could before dinner.

 

We went back to our room and still had no luggage. Hubby went wandering up the hallway to try to find some ice so we could start icing our cooler, as we hadn't seen our steward yet and had paged him earlier in the day to try to meet him but they were all very busy delivering luggage. Not-so-surprisingly, the person Shawn stopped in the hallway to ask where he could find ice, was our steward! (Harold) Harold came in, introduced himself, shook our hands, took our cooler and filled it with ice and returned it. When he asked if there was anything he could do to help make our experience fabulous, I joked and just said that aside from not having our luggage yet, everything was great and that I knew they were still delivering bags.

 

Harold surprised me when he said, "You don't have your luggage yet? I thought everyone had theirs." I looked at my watch and noticed it was already about 7:45.

 

Harold told us he would track down our bags and headed out down the hallway. I instantly started to get a little bit freaked out (it seems I function better under stress, or at least that's what I thought before this cruise!) and eventually, Harold came back with all our bags. We opened our "fun bag" that had all of our door decorations, and decorated the door up and we got unpacked, changed, and headed down to dinner.

 

The first night in the dining room we were sitting with our tablemates and having a conversation with them, filling one another in on our purpose for cruising (a honeymoon couple, a couple on a romantic getaway, us with an anniversary/honeymoon and another with an anniversary). Then we started talking about military discounts. Then the wife seated to my right said, "Have you ever been on Cruise Critic Dot Com?" "Yes," I said, "I LOVE that website!" Her husband pointed at me, and said, "SABLEROSE!" Turned out one of the only couples who hadn't shown up to the rollcall get together at embarkation, was seated with us at dinner! So we instantly had something more in common.

 

Dinner was fabulous, and our servers (Davis and Jilene) were great. Our first little taste of what was to come, though, happened at dinner in the Renoir dining room the first night.

 

The Maitre'D came over to our table and asked for Mr. and Mrs. T----. We told him that was us. He leaned down and said, "I just wanted to take a moment and thank you for dining with us, we are so excited to have you aboard the Conquest. May I ask what night you were planning to have dinner in the Supper Club?" I let him know what night. Then he said, "And I understand you are having an anniversary, can you tell me what night you will be celebrating?" We told him our anniversary was on Halloween night. He thanked us and then went back to doing his rounds. After dinner, the honeymoon couple at our table received a gift of some photo coupons and bar coupons, and they were delivered by the hostess for the Renoir dining room, whose name temporarily escapes me. After she got done making their night more exciting with their wonderful gifts, she asked, "Now who is Mr. and Mrs. T----?" We again raised our hands and she said, "Ohhhh, they told us you were coming, we know all about you!" And smiled and giggled, and walked away.

 

Little did we know that was only a sign of things to come!

 

After dinner, we had all intentions of making the first-night show and the Halloween Haunted House that was put on by the crew, but the fruit juice and rum in the Fun Ship Specials was catching up with my hubby and he had a blinding headache from all the sugar. So, he laid down for a while and insisted that he would "feel better in a few minutes." By about 11:00 p.m., he was asleep and I was getting a little tired myself (we'd been on the road since 6:30a.m.) We settled in to a fluffy, squishy, cool white bed after one more "last chance of the night" visit to our balcony. We pulled the curtains back and waited for the sunlight to wake us up on our first Fun Day At Sea.

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Sablerose

Sablerose

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Day Two -- Fun Day At Sea (Halloween!)

 

Here's where my memory of our cruise experience starts to get a little iffy, because on the days at sea we just didn't do a whole heck of a lot of anything.

 

We got up fairly early on our first Fun Day At Sea, with the help of some room service coffee, bagels/lox, and pastries. We went out onto the balcony and soaked up the sound of the waves, sipped coffee, nibbled our breakfast, watched the Conquest Morning Show on TV (Poor Todd, the cruise director, looked quite dragged out after that long night with the haunted house) and started going through our Capers for things we wanted to see. We left a post-it note for Harold and headed out.

 

Things We Wanted To See Or Do But Did Not: Wine tasting seminar at the Point; Ship tour; Who Wants To Be A Millionaire; Hairy Chest; Ice Carving; The Dating Game; The Main Show (Ron Joseph)

 

Things we did do and see: About half of the port orientation/adventure talk (we had booked our excursions already and just wanted to see if they gave us any information about Playa Del Carmen, but didn't wait long enough to find out)

 

After having cheeseburgers a couple of beverages with our new friends Jan and Boris, we headed back to the room for a few minutes. We were in the room for about 2 minutes when something came sliding under the door. It was a note card addressed to the two of us.

 

It read:

 

"Captain Carlo Quierolo requests the pleasure of your company at his table at dinner, in the Monet Dining Room on Tuesday, November 1, 2005 at 8:30 p.m."

 

We had to re-read it three times.

 

I was giddy with excitement and 100% in shock. And decided I'd better get out my first night's formal outfit and make sure it looked nice! After all! It was only! Tomorrow! I had to! Have it! All put together!

 

I grabbed my flowy polyester formal "carwash pants" and went down to the self-service launderette on Deck 8, thinking I'd give them a quick press. Found the laundry room, filled the iron with water, set the timer, set the iron on "low" (the recommended setting for my pants), waited for it to warm up, and started pressing. After a couple of minutes of pressing, I proceeded to melt a hole right through my brand new black formal pants.

 

Right. Through.

 

Turned out the hard-wired iron got MUCH hotter than it suggested it did. The temperature dial had little or nothing to do with the actual temperature of the iron. And since I ironed a hole in my pants right in the middle of the thigh, the pants were unwearable. I turned off the iron and ran back to the room in tears, my husband comforted me, and I decided I would have to rent an outfit. I phoned Bette in her room and asked her, since they had rented her husband's tux from the Formalities shop, if she saw they had women's clothes. She said they did. We went downstairs to try to rent a skirt but the shop was closed from for an hour.

 

We went and finally found Sur Mer (but didn't eat that day) and grabbed a bite to eat somewhere else. I think we had pizza. I wasn't thinking clearly.

 

We made it to the Formalities shop and they had a black skirt in my size, so I rented it ($30.00 for the entire cruise) and we were instructed to return it on Saturday.

 

At 2:00 we met up with the CC'ers for our Meet and Greet at the Sky Bar. We had quite a group and we ended up taking up a bunch of space and really getting to know each other better, talking about all our plans for the cruise, and things we had already seen. It was determined that I am not allowed to ever iron anything, ever, again. At about 3:00, we got a little note when we tried to pay for a drink, saying our S&S account was over its limit. We excused ourselves from the group and went down to the Purser's desk, where there was a little bit of a wait. We knew there was just a glitch, so hubby went up to the room to get our visa card, and our documents, while I held our spot in line.

 

I was in line behind the meanest, most unhappy, most snotty, angry, devoid-of-all-grace individuals I had ever had the displeasure of meeting. Or hearing. Or seeing.

 

They all had different complaints, some of which were reasonable and some of which were just idiotic. And the more they talked to one another the more they escalated their anger and they became louder, and ruder. They kept talking about "waiting in line for an hour" to see the Purser, although I had only been in line with them at five minutes (and was in line for a total of 15 minutes). At one point, the rather large man in front of me actually touched one of the pursers on the arm as he came out of the "secret door" in the hallway and said, "Excuse me, I'm going to need you to get the Captain down here right now, I need to speak to him." The Purser turned and asked him how he could help him, and he just kept saying, "You can get the Captain down here, he needs to take care of my problems for me." The Purser asked over and over what the issues were. On this man's list of issues were, "My door key doesn't work. My phone doesn't work. I can't be made to wait in line for an hour for these things to be resolved, no one else can help me."

 

When the Purser asked the man for his S&S card so he could start to fix it immediately, the man had the gall to say, "I am NOT going to get HELPED in FRONT of all of these PEOPLE in LINE in FRONT of ME! You have to HELP all of THEM first, I reFUSE to CUT in LINE, so I will WAIT my TURN." The Purser just kept saying, "I'm going to help you now, I'm going to help you now, please, sir, give me your card." Finally my husband said, under his breath, "Please. Let him help you now." The Pursers were just trying to break up the group of rabblerousers and get them all worked out and on their way because since we were right adjacent to the lobby and common areas, they were causing quite a scene. The man "let" the Purser help him. Thank God.

 

We were helped shortly thereafter. Andre explained that there must have been some kind of glitch between the port of Galveston and the ship, and that there was no credit card listed on our account. He processed the Visa card and said everything would be fine. I showed him our documents and because of the confusion at embarkation asked him if he would be so kind as to check the people who had the room we were originally assigned to, to see if for some reason my credit card had been put on their room. He pulled up the other room's records discretely and checked my card number against the card that was being used with that account, and confirmed that there was no overlap. We were done and on our way!

 

The rest of the afternoon is a little bit of a blur. I know I also realized that afternoon I had left my hair spray and my makeup mirror at my Mother-In-Law's house. I was having a control freak's disaster day.

 

We made it to dinner and had a fabulous meal again with our dining room staff and tablemates. The other CC couple at our table were given a bottle of wine from the Maitre'D that evening, which was such a neat surprise! Then as we were getting ready to get up from dinner and go change into our Halloween garb, the dining room staff brought us a beautiful chocolate Anniversary cake and sang "Happy Vers'ry To You!" They tied our hands together with a napkin and "made us" kiss in front of everyone. The cake was delicious!

 

We ran back up to the room, changed for Halloween, and knew we'd be too late to find our CC group (but they all got the neatest group picture taken in costume, can't wait for someone to post it). We saw some of the costume parade and stuff, but were looking for the gang. In retrospect we missed a lot of Halloween because I was trying so hard to find everyone, I probably missed a lot of the great costumes. Was just having "one of those days" and was getting way, too overly stressed about everything. (But in real life, that's how I am -- stressed constantly about even the littlest things). We finally ran into everyone up at the Sky Bar (standard meeting place) but by then all the formal portrait places had been wrapped up and put away so we didn't even get pictures of ourselves in costume. Bette was kind enough to take some shots of us. I noticed I had torn a hole in my bodice, maybe from stressing/breathing too hard or maybe from tying it too tight. The weather was getting rough and the ship was really rocking so we went to change out of our costumes, lest we end up face-first on the pool deck. Went back up and found the group again, had a Pina Colada, wandered around a little bit, and then hit the sack.

 

The 12+ foot seas rocked us to sleep. That was the roughest night we had.

 

End of day 2!

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Sablerose

Sablerose

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Shamefully, the "stated agenda" was from time to time pushed aside due to "Drinks of the day make me want to take a nap" and "Holy crap, I can't believe it's already 12:15" and other distracting cruise factors! ;)

 

But I can't tell you EVERYTHING!

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big_duck

big_duck

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Shamefully, the "stated agenda" was from time to time pushed aside due to "Drinks of the day make me want to take a nap" and "Holy crap, I can't believe it's already 12:15" and other distracting cruise factors! ;)

 

But I can't tell you EVERYTHING!

 

I take it Stang is too much of a gentleman to post his version. :p

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DH30

DH30

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Shamefully, the "stated agenda" was from time to time pushed aside due to "Drinks of the day make me want to take a nap" and "Holy crap, I can't believe it's already 12:15" and other distracting cruise factors! ;)

 

But I can't tell you EVERYTHING!

 

Sablerose,

I see that you are being discrete, but I was beginning to worry that "other cruising factors" were not occurring often enough....LOL.

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Cruisin Oma

Cruisin Oma

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After a couple of minutes of pressing, I proceeded to melt a hole right through my brand new black formal pants.

 

Right. Through.

 

 

See Big Duck - It pays to have those nice cocktail dresses packed for the informal nights as well - they can be backup!

 

Rose darling - you got me in stitches. At least you get to be a control freak - my family just refers to me as Ana! :)

 

Can't wait for the other days!

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