Carnival Magic- June 2018- Intro and Pre-Cruise Drama

Introduction: 

Photo Review of the Carnival Magic sailing from June 16-23, 2018.

The Cruise:
Checking out St. Thomas was high on our priority list so in May 2017 we booked a 7-day Eastern Caribbean on the Carnival Magic for June 2018. This itinerary included 4 stops: Amber Cove (Dominican Republic), St. Thomas, San Juan, and Grand Turk; it also placed a sea day on either side of the 4 ports. My husband and I haven't been to any of those ports so we were very excited to explore 4 new places! We were originally booked in an oceanview on deck 7 forward overlooking the “secret deck” but I received an upsell email a few months before the cruise to get a balcony for a small price increase. I snagged it and we ended up in 6434, a port aft balcony (that’s left back for all those non-ship readers). We’ve never had a room close to the elevators and stairwell but it ended up being awesome and not too noisy. As you’ll read in the Pre-Cruise section below, we were thrown a very unexpected and frustrating curve ball the morning of the cruise that lead to a few timing and itinerary changes. It definitely wasn’t the way we wanted to start our trip but we still had a great cruise.

Who We Are:

We’re newlyweds! My husband and I got married in October 2017. We are both originally from the Chicago area but are living and loving life out in Iowa (Go Hawkeyes!). We're also recent first time home-owners and were looking forward to relaxing on this cruise after all the craziness of moving. We are in our mid-20s, and this was my 10th cruise and his 6th. I began cruising with my parents in 2007 and introduced my now-husband to ship life in 2015. It’s very safe to say that cruising plays a huge role in our life and we’re always looking for the next adventure.

The Equipment:

Some of the photos were taken on our Sony a5100 mirrorless digital camera, a little gift we bought ourselves since we knew we'd want to properly document our cruising adventures in the future. We also have a YI 4K Action Camera for videos and some of the pictures, including waterproof casing and head and chest mounts to get some awesome footage. The rest of the photos were either taken on an iPhone 7 or a Samsung Galaxy S7. 

This Review:

This review will cover our pre-cruise experience and the cruise and ship itself, including menus, Fun Times, and lots of photos. Of course opinions will be peppered throughout but I think that I’m fair enough that the negative opinions get outweighed by the positive experiences. I don’t want to tell you “how it is,” but only give insight and explanations of the things we encountered, struggled with, and loved.  That's not to say there aren't some negatives we encountered (which will be covered), but let's all take a second to realize that it's hard to complain when someone else cooks and cleans for you 7 days in a row. Oh and floating on the ocean while basking in the sun instead of working is a pretty nice benefit too.

Pre-Cruise:

We always fly down to Florida the day before a cruise in order to mitigate weather issues and airline delays, so we drove from Iowa to the Chicago area on Thursday night before making our way at 5am to the Midway Park Saver lot on the morning of Friday, June 15th. They charge $12 a day to park in a lot across the street from the airport and this was our second time using it. We haven't had any issues either time and would recommend it to any readers in the Chicago area flying out of Midway. We arrived to the lot, grabbed a spot, and walked over to the airport (they also have a free shuttle if needed). My carry-on bag got selected for extra screening because of my iPad, but once they checked it out, we were good to go. We waited at our gate for about an hour before boarding started, and our plane left on time with no issues (yay!). We almost exclusively fly Southwest (because I'm cheap) which allows passengers to pick their own seats when they board. Imagine our surprise and delight when we saw seats in the exit row that were open. Extra leg room, here we come!

Happiness from the exit row! Also, we strongly represent the Iowa Hawkeyes whenever we travel, so this won't be the last time you see our black and gold pride:

After the brief 2.5 hours on the plane, we landed at MCO (Orlando) and headed to pick up our bags. I bought a Fly, Snooze, Cruise package from GoPortCanaveral, which was our second or third time using their company. The package includes: transportation from MCO to your hotel, hotel stay, hotel to the cruise ship, and cruise ship to MCO. We met at the designated spot in the transportation area and our shuttle was there within 10 minutes of us stepping outside. The passenger van was fine, although the air vents in the ceiling were all broken so there was constant and non-directable freezing air blowing on us for 45 minutes. I'm basically a cold-blooded animal and would live under a blanket and heat lamp if I could, so it was a less-than-comfortable drive because of that. We arrived at the Hilton Oceanfront Cocoa Beach around noon and they had a room ready for us. After dropping off our bags and freshening up, we headed downstairs to one of their restaurants at the hotel- Longboards Tiki Beach Grille. There were a ton of options on the menu and it was hard to choose, but the food was great. We ate under an umbrella and took in the warm and salty air; it was perfect and made me very happy (as the aforementioned cold-blooded reptile-type). While eating lunch, we received an email from Carnival letting us know that there was a medical emergency on the current sailing of the Magic and they needed to make a medical debark, resulting in a later arrival time into Port Canaveral.  Of course I was concerned about the passenger with the medical emergency, but it didn't seem like the ship would be in too late, we were still 20+ hours out from the scheduled arrival. The email also said we'd receive more information in about 5 hours, so at this point all we could do is wait.

Sitting out at the Longboards Tiki Beach Grille:

We treated ourselves to gelato at the hotel and it was pretty fantastic:

After lunch we hiked half a mile to Publix for pop and Red Bull to carry on the ship. It was a little toasty outside, but we can't really complain when we're in Florida in June. Upon returning to our hotel, we watched TV and took a nap before waking up to eat dinner. There were huge storms rolling in so we cancelled our previous plans to walk to dinner down the beach and ordered a pizza instead. While we were waiting for the pizza to arrive, my husband went to the hotel bar to get a few drinks and said it was crazy there because only one bartender was working. Seems like a poor plan on someone's part for a Friday night.  While we were eating pizza and watching TV in our room, the storms took out the TV signal for a long time and we were left feeling pretty confused why a hotel would purchase satellite in Florida given the climate. We received an update from Carnival that provided little-to-no actual information (so not really an update). The email simply said they will continue to try to make up time and to not head to the terminal in the morning until we hear from them at 9am. We kept our fingers crossed that all would work out and we'd hear good news in the morning. 

Spoiler: we didn't.

An artsy photo to sum up our dining experience:

UP NEXT: Saturday, June 16th, Embarkation [LINK]