CARNIVAL LIBERTY---FEBRUARY 4-18, 2012

February 4-18, 2012 / Carnival Liberty

Saturday, February 4:                

§         Our aft balcony stateroom is absolutely fabulous.  The 12 x 5ft. balcony has 2 chairs, 2 chaise lounges, and a table.  It did not take long for us to find our friends from California and Wisconsin-two lively couples we truly enjoy cruising with.  We explored the ship—since we were on the Liberty in 2009 (when the Steelers won the Super Bowl!), much was familiar. Liberty was just completely refurbished about three months ago.

§         The safety drill was much more stringent than on the Imagination---it lasted much longer with more details.  Before we knew it, we were leaving Miami again and the view from our aft balcony was glorious. The weather is warm and the sea is not too rough.

§         We had dinner at 8 p.m. in the Golden Olympian Dining Room with Donna, Lawrence, Nancy, Brian, and their friends from California, Tammy and Del.

§         Dewa our room steward;

§         Dalibor from Serbia, Cathy from Peru, and Pande from Indonesia are our wait staff.

§         Lawrence looks like Guy Fieri, the Food Network star of Drive-ins, Diners, and Dives, who oversaw the creation of Carnival Cruise Line’s hamburger grills by the pools. This is causing quite a sensation wherever he goes on the ship.

 Sunday, February 5/Nassau:

We were in Nassau a very short time (7 a.m.-1:30 p.m.), so we disembarked early. The downtown area is close to the port. From our balcony we could see Atlantis, a resort we visited the first time we cruised into Nassau.

Sailaway

I read on balcony

TK swims

Dinner

Very raunchy comedy club

Hair cut

Monday, February 6/ At Sea

Meet and Greet---pirate theme; New Cruise Critic friends from Minnesota; Wisconsin; Maryland; Ohio; Pittsburgh; California; one is a priest; We receceived chocolate covered strawberries in our stateroom from Senior Cruise Director at Carnival Cruise Lines. This happened because we are four couples cruising back to back (B2B)

Cabin Crawl—poker game—we saw a suite, inside stateroom, an ocean view stateroom, and our three balconies that connect.
Shopping show --- again!
Formal Dinner—lobster surf and turf; chilled strawberry soup
Show

Tuesday, February 7/St.Thomas

Shopping--Cariloha
Green House--lunch
Dinner-steak pork jerk

Wednesday, February 8 / San Juan

We toured San Juan by bus and visited Fort San Cristobal is a Spanish fort built by Spain to protect against land-based attacks on the city of San Juan. It is part of San Juan National Historic Site and is a U.S. National Park. The streets of San Juan are irregular and narrow. We stopped for appetizers at Restaurant Barrachine (http://barrachina.com/indexb.php), a lovely tropical courtyard restaurant which is the birthplace and home of the pina colada. We had turnovers, corn fritters, and croquettes and pina coladas without the rum.

Thursday, February 9 / Grand Turk
One of my favorite islands—beaches as one disembarks the ship, sun; plaza, Margaritaville—music—swim up bar; Del Sol deal; burgers not as good as Guy Fieri’s; beautiful green beach glass-a handful in 20 minutes; group photo by the parrot;
Sting ray towel animal in our stateroom tonight
Comic club-not as raunchy, not quite as funny
Finished reading “Last Full Measure” by Jeff Shaara; Tim reading his Kindle Fire;

Friday, February 10 / At Sea
Future cruise presentation
Scrapbooking
Burgers and fries with Tim; chocolate buffet—chocolate fountain, cakes, fudge, mousse, etc.
Dinners: We have been eating at 8 p.m. in the Golden Olympian Dining Room; We have such a wonderful wait staff, Dalibor, Cathy, and Pande, and we usually finish dining at 10 p.m.  This is not our usual dining time and we hope that in future cruises we eat just a little earlier.

February 11 / Miami
All eight of us went to the Fontainbleau Hotel in Miami Beach for the day before we rejoined our cruise. James Bond’s Goldfinger, Costner and Houston’s The Bodyguard, a segment of Sopranos, and many other movies have been filmed there. It is a fabulous hotel with beach access on the Atlantic Ocean and multiple swimming pools on multiple levels.

Quote of the day: “Where’s my stupid husband?” When we went to the Fontainbleau, one of the four women asked this question (not me, not Tammy, not Nancy) and as it turned out, her husband was right behind her. Poor Donna. Poor Lawrence. To the rest of this, it was quite funny. Usually Lawrence is nowhere to be found.

 February 12 / At Sea

We had the Cruise Critic meet and greet. Many of the ship’s officers attended. We met people from Virginia, Alaska, Canada, California, Minnesota, New York City, Maryland, Ohio, and more.

After the M&G, we had a Cabin Crawl. That means that each couple pays $5 and we visit various staterooms, inside, ocean view, balcony, and suite. Each couple gets a playing card at each stateroom. At the end of the “tour,” the couple with the best poker hand wins the kitty.  I spent the rest of the day reading on our balcony. In fact, reading and lounging on our balcony was my favorite activity. Tim enjoys the pool.

We had lobster again for dinner.

February 13 / Cozumel

Tim decided to stay on the ship today. His knee has been bothering him and now he is even more anxious for his knee replacement surgery in March. I went ashore alone and hitched a taxi downtown. I made my way through many shops and made my required pure vanilla purchases at Los Cincos Soles, one of my favorite stops. Walking alone is a somewhat challenging feat in this area (not dangerous, the vendors are aggressive), but I did well and only made the purchases I truly wanted. I was back on the ship in plenty of time to enjoy the balcony.

Brian K.’s birthday

February 14-15 / Valentine’s Day
Belize
When cruise ships visit Belize, passengers have to take tenders to the island, a process that takes 25 to 30 minutes one way.  It’s a process. We walked through many small shops but settled at the MOHO chocolate factory (http://mohococoa.com) and watched the people make bars of chocolate. This was Tim’s favorite thing to do!  We returned to the ship about 2 p.m.

Valentine’s night my stomach was not happy. Symptoms mimicked norovirus. I had to see a nurse and was quarantined. Fortunately I was better 24 hours later and I was released from quarantine. The stop in Roatan was cancelled anyway on February 15 because of sea conditions and I just stayed in bed all day.
Donna’s birthday

February 16 / Grand Cayman
Since I was released from quarantine I could go ashore. Grand Cayman is another port where passengers must be tendered, but the ride is only about 5 minutes long. We really like to go to the Guy Harvey store. Guy Harvey is an artist, photographer, and diver with a Ph.D. in Fisheries Management who is a leading conservationist and advocate for the protection of our environment. (http://www.guyharveyinc.com/home.php). His artwork is beautiful and we have collected several examples. We enjoyed lunch in the Guy Harvey restaurant.

Tonight was a formal evening. We do not go all out anymore for formal night and neither do our friends. In fact, not many people seem to “dress to the nines” as one of my friends says.  This suits us fine.
All of us went to the comedy club tonight, but the comedian was lightly humourous.

February 17 / At sea

We spent another day poolside or on the balcony. We decided to pack about 6 p.m., our least favorite part of a cruise. We counted and recounted the luggage we put outside our door for the porters to take away (2 for me and 3 for Tim). A new idea was to put yellow stripes of tape on our luggage so the bags would be easily identifiable.

We will miss our wait staff in Golden Olympian Dining Room: Dalibor (Serbia), Catherine (Peru), and Pande (Indonesia). These young people were superb--we dined with them 13 out of 14 days and they were fabulous, attentive, friendly, helpful, entertaining, and truly wonderful. They were so skillful at their job and accommodated us adeptly. It almost seemed like we were their only guests when actually they were waiting on several other tables at the same time. They should be treasured as valued employees by Carnival.

Tonight’s towel animal was a darling monkey swinging from the ceiling.

We enjoyed the two cruises on the Liberty. I think we will try to do longer cruises rather than two one-week cruises together. The weather was fabulous—sunny with temperatures in the 80s every day and quite tolerable.