New York 2023:Day 6

Here we are for another travel journal post. Day 6 of our New York trip. In case you missed other posts from this trip, they’re listed here.

Day 6 was the last breakfast for Rob’s conference and then we got a tour of Montclair State University since that is where the conference was being hosted. It was a lengthy tour, but I always enjoy seeing other campuses.

Once we were done with the tour, we hopped in the car and drove Rob’s coworker back to the airport so he could catch our flight. Then we drove around to the rental car return at the airport, because we needed to return our rental car and get an Uber to the cruise port. All of this went very smoothly. Things like this make me anxious because there’s so many moving parts, but luckily we had a little bit of wiggle room built in.

Ubering from Newark, NJ to the cruise port in Manhattan was pricey, but it really was our best option. We had to go through the Lincoln Tunnel and deal with a ton of Manhattan traffic. We still got there in pretty good time.

There’s our ship through the windows!!

We dropped our luggage with the porter and headed to the check in line. We got put in a much shorter line after our carry-on went through security. It only took maybe 30 minutes from time we got out of Uber to the time we stepped into ship.

We went to our cabin to drop our stuff off. Then went and did our muster drill and just walked around to get acclimated to this ship.

Here’s a view looking back at our ship after we had passed the Statue of Liberty. This is the Carnival Venezia pronounced [VUH] + [NET] + [SEE] + [UH]. Anyone familiar with Carnival knows their ships usually have the iconic red and blue “Whale-Tail” funnel design. You see here that our ship does not have that but instead had a yellow funnel design. This ship was first intended to be for Carnival’s sister brand Costa Cruises. However, in the summer of 2022, Carnival announced that the Costa Venezia as well as her sister ship Costa Firenze would be transferred to Costa’s sister brand, Carnival Cruise Line in 2023 and 2024, respectively, under a new sub-brand called “Costa by Carnival” operating as “Carnival Fun Italian Style”.

This was a 4 day cruise from Manhattan, NY to Bermuda.

Sailing out of Manhattan is, no doubt a bucket list item, I didn’t even know I needed to have. Yes, you can get on a ferry and see similar sights, but getting to sail all the way down the Hudson River into the Atlantic Ocean is quite a sight. You are so high up and you get such spectacular views of many different sections of NYC.

Such a hazy view when the sun isn’t in the right place.

Passing under the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge that connects the borough of Staten Island and Brooklyn.

As mentioned earlier, this ship just recently became a Carnival ship and had only been cruising out of Manhattan for about a month when we got on the ship. So this newly updated ship boasted quite a different aesthetic since it was originally a Costa ship. I really enjoyed the different look of this ship. We noticed this ship has a lot more shaded areas pool side as well as a retractable cover over one of the pools.

That evening we had dinner in the formal dining room, which had a much different layout than we’d ever seen before. In fact you’re kind of in the middle of an area, so there are doors at the back of the dining room that they don’t close. This allowed people who weren’t currently dining to cut through our dining room (in bathing suits, etc). Not a great part of the atmosphere really.

We enjoyed comedy that night before heading back to the cabin after a long day.