Jan 19 our last day with Sunshine

We decided it would be a good idea to set individual times to pack our bags otherwise be falling all over each other if we all tried to pack up at the same time. Our checked luggage will have to be out in the hallway by midnight tonight.  In the a.m we'll do breakfast and then a last check on our room before we walk off with just our carry on bags tomorrow morning. We won't see our checked luggage again until we retrieve them in Vancouver. There’s over 1,400 priority rated people on this cruise which is a huge amount of passengers in the platinum and diamond categories. I know now that i'm in the gold category and therefore all my family or whoever i travel with would get the gold perks as well. But somehow Carnival screwed up and so far i haven’t been recognized as such. It’s way too long of a wait at customer service to get this straightened out today so we’ll just go with the flow of first time cruisers tomorrow and probably be amongst the last to debark. It shouldn’t be a problem as our flight home isn’t until after 4p.m. anyway so no rush.

Breakfast was nice and i then went to the art gallery and there wasn’t much going on there. I sat in the Sunshine lobby for awhile chatting with a nice lady from Nashville then went through the Lido on my way to the trivia contest. I grabbed myself an ice cream forgetting that there was a nice lunch bar near the Ocean Plaza. As i had to walk right by it of course i took a look and everything looked so good I got a plate, loaded up and found a nice table to eat and enjoy the trivia. The questions weren’t really hard and I got a few answers but no prize as there’s people attending who always get all the answers. One team in particular probably has a lot of ships on a stick and good for them; they either study up on misc. facts or are geniuses. I chatted with a different couple also from Nashville and then went to our cabin. Later i met the girls at the 75% off sales and hung out for the raffle draws but didn’t win anything. These raffle draws are weird to me as people wait around for a long time not even knowing what the prizes are. I personally won’t do that again even though they usually add another draw to be done in 10 mins or 20 or more with no mention of what the prize is and a lot of people stand around waiting for it. There’s nowhere to sit, it’s standing room only inside a shop and just not my thing to do in the hopes of winning some unknown prize. 

I returned to the room just in time to accept delivery of a huge platter of seafood canapés that Corinne had ordered for us. Since it was too large to fit in the fridge i went out looking for them as it needed to be eaten asap or refrigerated. The canapés were awesome and we all enjoyed the treat. The girls headed on back out while i stayed behind to pack my bags and get ready for our departure tomorrow morning. I usually do my packing to go on a cruise over a period of days or even a week or more and so it isn’t a big deal but packing up to leave is a huge chore to do all at once and sad to do. I could have stuck around for another couple of weeks!

 

Bye for now and thanks for reading about my cruise! Maybe i'll see the Sunshine again, hopefully sometime sooner than later....

Just a note to let you know whatever it was that was pulling me down took a few days after arriving home to really rear it's ugly head....i've got pneumonia again! I should have at least suspected it was coming but i didn't. I'm now under the Drs. care and on the road to recovery, still coughing like mad with no energy. This is the second time i contracted this on a cruise ship CORRECTION third time!!! or just after leaving one so not very happy about that but what can you do. I still enjoyed my cruise though i did only a fraction of what Corinne and Sabrina and other people did. Awww well, another ship is waiting for me somewhere and i'm going to do my best to catch it and i'll be cruising again asap! Not sure if it'll be on a HUGE megaship or not, lol!

Here's some extra misc. pics from along the way

                                                Fabulous piece of art, just breathtaking irl

 

                                 The spicy necklaces we bought on the Spice Island of Grenada.

 

Bye and thanks for reading!

Jan 18 at sea

Breakfast was nice and i enjoyed lots of fruits and yogurts and a little pastry. The girls took off to the pool and suntanning and i went to a seminar in the piano bar. It was empty when i got there and 20 mins later there was still not a soul around. I thought i must have had my days wrong but i checked and the seminar def was listed for today. Next door was the library so i went in and there was no jig saw puzzle out on a table to work on but a few other games were available that required more people than one. So i checked out a stack of magazines and spent some time browsing through them until i got too cold and it was quiet and lonely in there so i headed back to civilization. I checked out the sunshine lobby and my new friends weren’t there so carried on to the casino where it’s always a lively and fun place for me to be.

For lunch i went to the Bonsai Sushi place and had some edamame beans while waiting for a California roll. I also ate a dessert of some kind of little Japanese green tea cakes with little bits of strawberry sauce and whipped cream. Afterwards I dropped back into the library thinking i’d read some more of the magazines i’d seen earlier and they were gone! In their place was a stack of men’s hobby type mags on woodworking and carpentry and boats. That didn’t interest me and wasn’t into wanting to find a book so i moved on. I ended up back at our cabin but our room attendant was cleaning it so i took the elevator to the highest floor to see what was up there. It turned out to be sort of interesting because their hallways weren’t longggg straight ones but in zigzag form. I ended up sort of lost for awhile and by the time i got back to our floor our cabin it was all clean and freshened up and Corinne was having a nap. I was cold so i climbed into my bed and had a little nap too. I was really starting to notice my energy level had gone down but i didn't question the reason why. Later we got ready for our third formal dinner which was nice but very lengthy. I think we were in the dining room for a couple hours. Afterwards we returned to our room to get less formal and the girls went to a show while i spent a little time in the casino before calling it a day.

The piano bar.....I love blue so needless to say loved sitting in here, surrounded by blue

 Pics of the pics

                                This one isn't that impressive but IRL it was pretty awesome.

Jan 17 St. Kitts

We were docked by 7a.m. In beautiful St. Kitts. Formally known as Saint Christopher Island together with its neighbour Nevis makes up a single two island nation. St. Kitts was the first English colony in the Caribbean.

The girls decided to go ashore and find a beach while i decided to stay aboard as i'm experiencing some minor breathing issues, coughing, headache and chills. Soon they were off and i got ready and went to the Lido for a breakfast of fruit and yogurt. As well a nice young crew man offered to get me a chocolate milk which he said was really good so I said ok. It turned out to not be to my taste and so i left it after just one sip. I really deplore food waste and it made me feel bad contributing to the huge mound of wasted cruise ship food but what can you do.

Later i walked around and when i spotted the Costa Pacifica cruiseship coming into port i beat it on down back to the Lido deck to take pics of it parking beside us. A lot of people on the arriving Pacifica watched from their top deck and many watched from their balconies. It was pretty cool watching it gently drift towards us and belly up to the bar, lol. People on our ship waved and some waved from their ship even though we knew they couldn’t see us as the windows are tinted and look like mirrors from the outside. I was curious as to whether the Pacifica was larger or smaller than us but nobody could really tell from our Lido view. Later i checked it out for size and we are bigger, ha ha, we win, lol!

Speaking of big ships......i was talking about trying a mega ship cruise in the future and brought up the subject to a couple of people now and each one had a different slant on it. The guy i talked to today said it’s important to study the ships layout/map/diagram and take note of what you want to do onboard and then choose your cabin accordingly. Ok, so i knew that and i thought the only answer was to always get a midship cabin, doesn’t matter what floor. Well, he said no, that doesn’t work on a mega ship because it’s split down the center lengthwise with cabins that face in and the view is to the center, like looking at people in a park. I said oh, ok, but not really understanding why that would matter much. I do however understand that if the showroom was a place that you wanted to attend each night then consider getting your cabin on a deck near the corresponding elevator which usually is the closest one to the front of the ship. Ditto if you were going to go to the casino every day then get a room above it or below it obviously and so forth. Well, not sure i’d want it to be exactly below the casino listening to its sound effects until the wee hours and who knows, it might be a 24 hr. casino. So if a woman knew she was going to do the gym or the spa every day then it makes sense to be in that area up above it, down under it or just slightly sideways of it. But i think most people are going to be all over their ship so i’m thinking you still can’t beat a midway cabin close the elevators. Don’t worry about elevator noise, there really isn’t any and the convenience is well worth it. Then he mentioned that on mega ships passengers are given a designated time that they can attend things, such as the stage show. I did not like that idea at all! I want to go whenever i want to go! I can adapt to a designated time to eat in the dining room but, still....you get your choice of early (6p.m.) or late (8 or 9p.m)  As well, most ships have what they call “Anytime dining” which is what we did for this cruise and it’s not really as nice as it dining when you have a set time with the same dinner mates but it’s really not a huge difference. I also don’t really want an inside view of the ship, i want to see and hear the ocean; i am a Pisces after all. I dunno, this is getting complicated but it's really starting to look like i won't even consider cruising on a mega ship!

There was another funny thing that happened and that was this guy i was talking to said he could tell that this was my first cruise with Carnival and i said, nope, my second and what makes you think it's my first? So he says well, you were given a blue card and that means some screw up made Carnival think it was your first time. He asked me for the details of my previous cruise with them and i told him it was in 2012 on the Spirit on her last cruise in American and Canadian waters. We cruised to Hawaii from Vancouver and flew home and the Spirit sailed off to Australia never to return. So he asked me how long it was and i told him and he said that one added to this one would have made me a gold member and i along with my kids would have received a few perks for me being a returning guest. One of the perks might have been priority boarding and we wouldn’t have had to do that long lineup. Also possibly free laundromat or free transfer or something. Geez, that ticked me off good as i paid $100. for our transfer. When i get home i’ll straighten it out with Carnival and i’m confident some perk will click in to make me want to cruise with them again. Now i’ve got a good idea.....maybe i’ll compromise and find out which is their largest ship and book a short cruise on it just to try it out!

I met up with my daughter and granddaughter when they got back and they had a fun time at a beach on St. Kitts and had added a lot to their tans. Sabrina had awesome little beaded braids done in her hair and they had been able to hold and pet a monkey and the beach they found had beautiful white sand. Corinne then got ready for her apt. with an acupuncturist onboard as she was having a problem with her leg. She had 25 painless needles and said she thinks it worked! We sat in the Lido for a long time watching St. Kitts and Nevis disappear and then went to Guys Burgers and ordered just fries and they were very tasty. The two of them went on to the ventriloquist show while i got an ice cream cone and returned to the cabin.