Last Thursday I gave you my thoughts on our most recent Carnival Cruise on the Pride. It was a Journey cruise (meaning it was 14 days) and we hit seven different islands. We did four official Carnival excursions. The other days we did our own thing…wandering to see the sights. We’ve always booked official Carnival excursions. Yes they are more expensive, BUT if your non Carnival excursion is running late the ship CAN leave without you!! Then you’d be on your own to figure out how to meet back up with the ship at the next port stop. Carnival excursions guarantee that even if you get back to the ship late, it will still be there waiting for you. 🙂 Read on for part two of my Carnival Cruise recap!
Baltimore
We live just about 25 minutes to the port of Baltimore. So while the Carnival Pride isn’t the biggest or fanciest ship out there, she certainly is convenient! Parking is a piece of cake and embarkation was fast!! The Pride pulled in late due to fog so our embarkation time was pushed back. No big deal, this just means that we got right on and went straight to dinner.
St. Thomas:
No official excursion here. Instead we walked over to the sky ride that took us up to Paradise Point…beautiful views. (That’s our Carnival ship, pictured below, at the end of the pier, looking pretty tiny compared to those two Holland American ship!) We sat outside In the shade, (yay!) and shared a few appetizers. You can easily walk there and don’t need to buy tickets ahead of time. It’s a smooth ride going both up and down. I recommend stopping by the Pirate museum on the way back to the ship. Very informative and lots of hands on stuff to do…while we didn’t have our kids with us I can tell they would have loved it. On the way back to ship we poked around in a few of the nicely laid out shops. We didn’t encounter any high pressure sales people here which was awesome!
Antigua
Nick and my mom did a zip line excursion at this port and they said it was great, but I can only rate the actual port as that’s all I saw. It was crowded and the market area was full of high pressure sales. I didn’t enjoy this at all.
Grenada
We did a spice tour here (official Carnival excursion). The tour was good. We saw lots of the island and visited several interesting sites including the nutmeg processing plant. Our tour guide was very hard to understand…not so much the accent as he just couldn’t keep his mouth off the microphone! Very twisty roads…great potential for motion sickness if you suffer from that. Take a Dramamine ahead of time! Apparently I neglected to take many pictures at this stop! #bloggerfail 😉 (see that cute cross body purse? It was the perfect way to carry just the necessaries. Look here for more cruise must haves.)
St. Lucia
Beautiful island, the Pitons, the port views, the volcano and the gardens were lovely. Our tour guide was awesome (Felixia). She was super friendly, funny and gave us loads of information. I will say this tour is nothing but super curvy roads with lots of switchbacks and up and down hills. I ended up needing to switch with someone sitting in the front of the bus on the way back as I was feeling ill. I knew I couldn’t eat or drink anything at our lunch stop or I would have been sick. My car sick kid would have suffered greatly on this tour.
St. Maarten
My dad and I did the helmet diving tour! It was awesome. The boat ride there was fun and easy. You arrive at a floating platform and after your safety talk you descend a ladder into the water. Once you are are shoulder deep they place the helmet on your head and you continue your descent. You have a diver with you at all times as you go down the ladder. You have to “clear your ears” every single step down (atleast I did) or the pressure builds up and can become quite painful. If you can pop your ears by yawning, swallowing, etc. then you should be fine. My ears are particularly sensitive to elevation changes and I was able to get all the way to the bottom with no pain. It’s a bit disconcerting, knowing you are under water (25 feet down), but breathing is easy and walking around, holding the handrails makes seeing the underwater objects a piece of cake. Be aware water comes up into the helmet but never got more than just under my chin. Once you walk around the whole area then you head back up the ladder. It was easier on my ears going up, but the current is strong and banged me into the ladder more than once. Once you are back up top you are offered a punch or a rum punch and you can either hang out on the dock or swim around with noodles and snorkel gear. The water felt really quite cold going in (72 degree water in January), but once I was used to it, it felt great and after the dive I swam around and the water was perfect. On the way back we had the choice of getting off the water taxi at the cruise port or continuing onto the town to do some shopping. If you do the shopping you will need to find your own way back to port via taxi, water taxi or walking.
San Juan, Puerto Rico
No Carnival excursions here. Our plan was to tour the Fort BUT Because of the government shut down we were unable to visit (it was closed). Instead Nick and I just walked around and checked out San Juan. We found a lively city square where we were able to buy some coffee and hang out and listen to music. Then we found this fun area tucked away over by part of the old city wall where there are hundreds of pigeons! They will land all over you. It was really fun. You can buy feed to encourage them even more but even without feeding them we were still able to get quite a few to land on our arms (and even our heads…one got stuck in my hair!! LOL!)
Grand Turk
I wish I could rate this one higher and would have if we had simply stayed at the port. In lieu of going on any of the Carnival excursions, we rented a golf cart so we could cruise around on our own and see the island. What we saw was nothing. Mostly run down shacks and lots of garbage everywhere. We did stop at Governors beach and it was beautiful! Seeing the donkeys (which roam the island freely) was fun too. Upon return we found out we should have just stayed at the port!! The large pool (with a swim up bar!), clean beaches, fun restaurant, little shops and lively music would have been more than enough for us to enjoy our time. I understand that Grand Turk is recovering (slowly) from a large hurricane, but until they recover more I’d recommend sticking to just the port and skipping the rest of the island.
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Looking to go on a Carnival cruise? Then you’ll want to get in touch with the personal vacation planner we have used for years. She is fantastic to work with, friendly, and always finds us the best deals. Contact me for more info!
Carnival Cruises are, hands down, our favorite way to vacation. We can’t wait to go on our next one…maybe a 14 day Panama Canal cruise in 2021!
