You're Leaving Again?: Boarding Day

Wednesday was the day to board the Carnival Vista for our cruise around the southern Caribbean, finally docking in Miami after 11 days. The plan was to get a cab from the hotel to the pier. Being the plebe that I am, I imagined taxis whizzing by the hotel and us tipping the bell hop to flag one down. Nope, wasn’t going to happen. Plan B meant rolling our suitcases (thank God the wheels didn’t fall off mine) to the taxi stand around the corner by the bus depot.

Here's Grant looking for a taxi in front of the hotel

The taxi stand around the corner had plenty of taxis

It took probably 20 minutes to get to the pier and dropped off. The lines were pretty long, but we got checked in, got our cruise cards and finally set foot on the ship around 1:15. Our luggage had been left with the porters on the pier, but we spotted one suitcase on a carriage in the lobby of our cabin floor and the other one was already parked at our door. There’ve been times when we didn’t get our suitcases until well after dinner. It was nice being able to unpack earlier rather than later.

There's the Carnival funnel

The Carnival Vista

We checked out the room then headed for lunch up on Lido deck. Carnival has a deal with Guy Fieri and one of the options is Guy’s Burgers. I had several of these while on the cruise. They’re quite good, but you have to get there early because the line can get quite long. I’ve heard they’re about 1200 calories each, so I tried to behave myself and only eat these every other day.

The Carnival Vista is a new ship to Carnival’s fleet having just come over from Europe in October. We’ve been on a lot of cruises, but always cruise on the older ships. This ship was obviously shiny and new. In talking with the crew, they all said they liked the ship, but mumbled about it being too big. Maybe that means a lot more walking for them.

The next hours were spent wandering around the ship taking pictures. Below you'll find photos of our room, a balcony cabin on deck 8, which was positioned nicely between the food on the lido deck 10 and all the activities on the Plaza deck 5.

Dinner was at 6:00 in the main dining room, but we wanted to watch the sail away scheduled for the same time, so we skipped dinner. As I’d hoped, sailing through the harbor/down the river was very nice. The Statue of Liberty was spectacular. This was also the time I noticed my camera quit focusing. Of course! For the rest of our vacation I took pictures on my phone and my Kindle. Not the best quality, but better than nothing. I used Grant’s camera, too, which is an Olympus Tough and works great.