Post Review - Carnival Radiance Feb 2 -5. A Carnival do-over.

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Booked in early June, this cruise has been a long time coming. This time it's me and a good friend who's never cruised before. Hopefully the first of many, if I can infect her with the cruising bug. 

 

I've only ever sailed Carnival one other time, on the Spirit to Alaska. There were positives and negatives and not all were caused by Carnival. Overall we enjoyed the vacation but the negatives outweighed the positives, and DH and I decided CCL wasn't our cruise line of choice. 

 

As time goes on, as with other aspects of life, I start to reassess whether perceived frustrations were really as bad as I thought they were. Was the smoking that bad? Could another ship, layout, and/or passenger demographic make enough of a difference? Would the scheduled entertainment be more appealing if I hadn't been put off by the number of choices that we couldn't or wouldn't all enjoy doing as a family? If I didn't need to be considerate of the preferences of seniors and children, would I have had more fun on a "fun ship" ship?

 

And then I was missing what did make it good. Breakfast burritos. Guys burgers. The Alchemy Bar. Maybe I should give Carnival another chance, I thought. 

 

My GF and I, we've been saying for ages we needed a girl's weekend. For any number of reasons, neither of us has had the time, nor the ability to leave free of mommy guilt. We've talked staycation, spa day, Palm Springs, local wineries but never actually booked anything. Finally, done procrastinating, done making excuses, I knew we could get most of what we wanted from a cruise. But it had to be within driving distance, with minimal time off of work, and minimal scheduling inconveniences and disruptions. Did I mention we each have 2 young kids? Carnival Radiance fit the bill. We also both have husbands whose responsibilities require them to be away several weekends a year. It's our turn now, long overdue, to leave the littles home with their dads. 

 

For her intro to cruising, I booked us a Spa Balcony. I've never gotten thermal suite passes, so that'll all be new to me too. I had envisioned sleeping in, coffee on the balcony in the mornings, a cup or two of wine at night. I imagined luxuriating in the thermal suite during the day, eating at leisure. Well the second part was still in the books but what about the rain? Will the balcony go completely unused? I

wondered.

 

Join me as I tell the tale of these two moms on the Radiance out of Long Beach and our getaway weekend. 

 

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The weather forecast going into the weekend was 100% chance of rain Thursday with declining probabilities through Sunday, and a close certainty of rain again on Monday. You may have caught my frantic, tail-spinning thread asking about rain in long beach. But I know SoCal and we’re more prone to draught than rain, and even when a hurricane is coming (remember that?) we don’t really get all that much water. Except for that record-breaking rain fall the week prior. What the heck was that? But I went to bed Thursday after it rained all day with hope and optimism.

 

Driving to Long Beach. I’m going to skip the part where we talk about prep work and packing. Needless to say, I’m a procrastinator. Friday morning after dropping off the kids at school I ran to Target for last minute cruise items, mainly a bathroom freshener, drove South and picked up my cruising buddy. She suggested a new coffee shop whose drive-thru line made In-n-Out seem abandoned. Well actually it was probably about the same number of cars, but it took almost an hour to get through. If it hadn’t been for my good mood, I may have suggested somewhere else. Coffee in hand, we were on our way by 9:20 a.m. Along the route we saw mostly clear blue skies, a rainbow, and intermittent bouts of rain. The rainbow did reinforce my optimism though.

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Can you see it?

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It wasn't long before we caught our first look at the Radiance and the Queen Mary.

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Never having cruised out of LB I wasn’t sure what to expect. Turns out, Carnival having their own dedicated hub made things quite organized and flowed really well. Our arrival time was set for 10:30 am but we arrived just shy of two hours after hitting the road at about 11:15 am. One thing I did not do was print out our documents. I guessed correctly that since I would be carrying-on due to the bottles of wine, Lynn would not opt to use the porters. I guessed incorrectly that a digital version of the documents would suffice to get through check-in and security.

 

They have a guy at the entrance to specifically deal with us uninformed, unprepared millennials. It was quite annoying that he didn’t simply scan the barcode and print the paper, but also ask for our passports. Nobody that had a paper doc got asked for so much as ID. It looked like he was finding our reservation from our names, but that’s just inefficient if you ask me. I was more annoyed that the family who immediately preceded us had some sort of issue and we saw waves of people going in while we were stuck waiting…. Ugh. Well now I know. Barring that unforeseen delay, due to our later arrival time, our port arrival was as quick as you can hope for. From parking the car to sitting down with lunch in front of us took less than 30 minutes.

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Inside the terminal

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First order of business was muster and then lunch while escaping the mad house that tends to be embarkation day on Lido. I lead us straight to Pig and Anchor, and luckily there was zero line and a few open tables nearby with a great view.

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The sky was clear, and although it was slightly chilly and windy, we had our jackets and had an easy going start to our vacation. We did get cold though, so after lunch, we walked our suitcases through the dessert line and went off in search of a place to enjoy it indoors. The lobby patronage was already going strong and loud so that wasn’t gonna do it. Headed to Liquid Lounge where we had done muster but after a short stay we decided to look again elsewhere. We had passed Limelight Lounge earlier, so we did a little zigzagging and were able to find it again. We sat there until we were kicked out (ok, ok, nicely asked) due to a crew training of some sort that was about to start. At that point we started making our way toward our cabin which worked out perfectly, since we heard the announcement that cabins were ready just as we reached the elevator banks. This was shortly before the anticipated time of 1:30. It was nice that cabins were ready a little early.

 

Speaking of elevators. I’ve so far been on ships with 3 sets of elevator banks: Forward, Mid, and Aft. The Radiance has three sets of banks too, but I’m used the elevators by the lobby/atrium to be the Midship elevators. Not so here. These are considered the Forward elevators, and it caused my brain all kinds of directionally challenged orientation confusion.

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Dessert was extra tasty. The German Choco was pre-cut but the Caramel Cheesecake was sliced to order. I didn't see fun-fetti but that was ok because I only really enjoy the cheesecake part anyway. 

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That's funny I got a "hot!" It's just been me posting but I wrote this all out before starting to post so I've been able to update quickly. Separating it out, because let's face it, who wants to read a whole term paper in one post?

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Stateroom and Steward. We booked cabin #1053. The room was as you would expect for a Balcony cabin. We had the two twin beds and the couch which we never really used. I liked that there was storage directly in front of the foot of one of the beds which made it super simple to keep out belongings separate. My only complaint would be that there were no outlets near the beds themselves which made it so I could charge my phone, lay on the bed, or browse on my phone, but not all three at once. Not the most convenient but not a deal breaker. Our steward for this sailing was Michael. As odds would have it, he is Filipino and so is my friend. Let’s call her L. He introduced himself right away, asked about preferred cleaning time, and said something I couldn’t quite discern. I’m hard of hearing sometimes anyway, but this time it was because he spoke in Tagalog. I realized this a couple seconds later when L translated for me. Michael did an amazing job, and our room was well stocked, made-up, and set with a towel animal every day. To be fair, we are a couple of moms traveling together for the first time, so our messiness was virtually non-existent.

 

Location-wise we were just off the elevators to the starboard side on 10. It was very convenient for getting to the Spa, Lobby, Sunrise (MDR), Serenity, and Lido Marketplace. It took some maneuvering to get to Sunset (other MDR), Alchemy Bar, and other aft areas.

 

It was the elevator thing. I kept taking the mid or forward elevators, rather than the aft, before remembering yeah I can’t get through on 3. Not to mention, the closest aft elevators to our stateroom would be on 9 after going all the way through past the marketplace and after zig zagging past all the people. Or I guess we could have remembered to go down to 8 and then walking aft. On 4 we could sometimes go through but sometimes Limelight or Sunrise would be closed. 5 had the casino, which I would rather avoid. We often ended up getting through by going outside and back in on 3 or 4, but they always had the doors closed and they’re not exactly marked or windowed. Sometimes it was trial and error to see which door to use to get back in where we wanted to be. But the majority of our time was spent on the forward part of the ship, so the inconvenience was minor.

 

I am very happy to report that the smoking smell was completely avoidable, and I never noticed it except for when actually going through the Casino. The smoking areas outside are placed on deck 3 starboard and the smoke did not reach our balcony on 10. Nor was it heavily used. The other area is on deck 10 aft but again, we weren’t anywhere close to that.

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Continuing on with Day 1 adventures. We found our stateroom and unpacked. We rested and read the fun times to see what’s what.

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We decided to attend the spa tour at 2:30 pm. It was good to orient ourselves and get our scrub kit. They offered us some embarkation deals and gave us the 411 on what our room booking included. We actually didn’t take advantage of any of it, with the exception of the thermal area and scrub kit, prioritizing other activities. Just not a whole lot of time really in a 3-night cruise.

 

Spa Cabin Info:

 

Embarkation Specials:

 

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Fitness schedule:

 

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We asked what time they would open the thermal suite and went back to the cabin to rest some more. That’s what vacation is all about, right? Some deserved R&R. I headed to the bar to grab a souvenir cup, two champagne flutes, and a Fun Ship then I changed into swim clothes to watch the sail-away from the hot tub. Lynn continued to nap. Great view of sail-away, but unfortunately the hot tub was not hot at all and there were more kids than adults. Not that I minded at all, but also it wasn’t the R&R this trip was all about so I didn’t stay long. Paully the CD did do a great job of amping up the crowd with the expected Cupid Shuffle, Wobble, and roof-raising.

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Close to sunset, we watched the ship pull away from the dock

 

 

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After sail-away, L put on her swim suit and we set out to take advantage of those thermal loungers.

OMG those thermal loungers. This is the way. Usually on embarkation day it takes a while for vacation mode to really set in. By the time we get the family organized and settled, it tends to be dinner time. By the time kid’s clubs open for drop-off, I’m quite pooped. The hot loungers have completely changed my mentality, and I hope I can figure out how to work them into the schedule when cruising with the fam. Besides the loungers we tried all the other rooms. There’s the aromatherapy room, wet sauna, dry sauna, and infrared room. They were all good in their own way.

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When we returned to our room to dress for dinner, we found the first towel animal of this trip. We opted to continue to enjoy the first of the two wine bottles we brought onboard and then head to the first comedy show of the cruise. By then the wine had kicked in, plus John Dicrosta, from now on referred to as “mustache guy,” was truly funny. He got sidetracked but was able to improv several times, like when someone responded “f-ed-up eye.” He rolled with it, and we all laughed and had a good time. L pre-warned me that she doesn’t “get” jokes. Um? Who doesn’t “get” jokes? But anyway, even she was laughing out loud. Mustache-guy also self-admittedly picks up material from us passengers. I love a good laugh at the stupidity of people. We are dumb; we are dumber on vacation.

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Our buddy. L promptly killed him and used him as extra towels. How dare she? 

 

Our drinks

 

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Dinner. Our serving crew for this sailing were Preeti, Mary Ann and Richard. We headed straight to dinner after the comedy show and found our table relatively quickly. We sat next to the glass partition on deck 4 and had an excellent view of the diners and showtime happening on deck 3 of the MDR. Dinner was excellent. All the meals on this ship were not just good, but truly delicious. Maybe it was due to our prior cruise still being on COVID protocols? But late dining means I’m too hungry to think, so I didn’t get a picture of our bread or appetizer. I had the Strudel which was reminiscent of an egg roll and Lynn had the Pappardelle. Both excellent. For dinner, Lynn had Emeril’s BBQ salmon and I had the Indian vegetarian. Dessert was orange cake and chocolate ice cream. Accidentally or on purpose we shared it between us, and the flavor combination was extra yum.

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We were still tired though and with belies full of drink and food we headed back to the cabin for more book reading and R&R. We stepped into the balcony to enjoy fresh air and were surprised to find a flock of birds sailing aside the ship. So many! 

 

That's it for today, I'll come back later and tell you all about our Day 2. 

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Did I say I prewrote this? Obviously I didn't proof read much. How the heck did I end up using "excellent" 3x in post #22?