Today I’m continuing to talk about our cruise on the Carnival Legend. This was a 16 day cruise with a lot of days at sea. I am not going to do a post for each of those days. Here’s the first of my Days at Sea posts, covering what our first few sea days were like.
Before I get into it, I did want to share that this cruise was a Carnival “Journey” cruise, which is a longer, slower-paced sailing that focuses on unique ports, extra sea days, and special onboard activities that highlight local culture and interesting topics. It’s designed to feel more immersive and nostalgic than a typical itinerary, giving you time to settle into the voyage and the destinations.
So now we’ll jump into what the first few days at sea were like…
Most mornings Rob would get up before I would and he would go out on the balcony, do his Bible study, and just enjoy being out there. I’d eventually mosy on out there. I’d do some journaling and then we’d make our way to sit down breakfast (meaning not the buffet). A few times, we sat with other folks, which was really enjoyable.Many people were from Texas, because this cruise was ending in Galveston, something we hadn’t even thought about!
The rest of the morning, we would attend special Carnival Journey talks or hanging out on our balcony as well as walking a mile or two out on deck.
For lunch we’d often just grab a Guy’s burger, Asian cuisine from the Chop Sticks buffet, or tacos from the Blue Iguana.
Afternoons usually consisted of lounging out on deck, going to other fun activities (live music, trivia, Q & A) on board, and of course, I had to get a nap in, while Rob would usually sit out on the balcony or find a quiet spot to relax somewhere on the ship.
I loved watching the birds that were traveling along with us.
A couple of our favorite Journey events were talks by Francis French, one called Race to the Moon, where he discussed working directly with astronauts telling stories about that and answering the question “How did the Apollo 11 crew beat the Soviets to the moon?”
The other talk he did was about photography, so I was interested to see what he had to share. Pretty interesting, but I think Rob learned more than I did about angles and thinking about your next photograph differently.
We enjoyed heading up to the 10th floor for mini-golf a few times throughout the cruise.
Since pretty much leaving San Francisco, we’d been hearing from our captain that we trying to stay ahead of Hurricane Priscilla. He was confident we’d get to go to our first port of call which was supposed to be Cabo San Lucas. However on day 5, he made an announcement in the late afternoon that Hurricane Priscilla had been downgraded to a tropical storm, but that officials had closed the port of Cabo and so we’d have to skip that port, sadly.
I was very surprised the next day we got an announcement from Captain Mark Harlow that they have added Acapulco to our itinerary since no Cabo! Everyone cheered in excitment when they heard the news. We were hanging out in the Serenity deck area. After hearing that news, we went up to our balcony, Rob got on his laptop so we could research Acapulco and figure out what we might want to do.
In the evenings, before dinner we would go listen to live music with John at the piano bar to Rick and Ruby (middle aged couple who sang and played keyboard) to Alter Idem Rock band. After dinner, we would go to the show in the big theater. Magic show and broadway type shows by the Playlist Cast.
Here I am ready for formal night
To sum up our dinner saga…our 2nd night was another terrible dinner experience where the other 2 couples basically ignored us even with our attempts to make eye contact and speak. We talked with the maître d’ on our way out. He put us at another table, so the next night we went to said table and met some really nice folks, two other couples. One from Texas, the others from Henderson, NV. Both couples retired and living their best cruising lives. They welcomed us so warmly and we felt right at home with them at dinner the rest of the cruise!
I will say these first few days at sea were pretty rocky on board because with a hurricane in the distance the seas were rough! It made for some interesting traversing on the ship and we felt fine for the most part. One night I remember praying that I would just go to sleep because my stomach was just hurting…no nausea or anything just some pain.
Day 6 will bring us to Acapulco, so keep an eye out for that next post!
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