Carnival Ecstasy Review
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This was my first ever cruise and I was actually talked into it by a sorority sister who had the idea to bring three of her closest sisters together for a reunion and being that it was close to spring, a mini Spring Break flashback for us all. So with a couple bags packed with summer clothing and a lot of sunscreen, I went down to Galveston and boarded the Carnival Ecstasy.
Being my first cruise I though that it was all quick and easy, but one of my sisters did say that in the past the embarkation has been really slow, but this time we were on before noon and had time to grab lunch up in the Panorama Grill because our cabins were not open till 1:30pm. Once in our cabin on the Empress Deck we had a nice sized cabin for three girls, and enough closet space for us all to have room to hang things. The bathroom was small for even two people to be in, but we quickly worked out a solution and everyone was happy.
The public rooms on the Ecstasy are all really nice and there are ample places for you to sit and read or look out on the ocean. The nice thing is the show lounges and many of the other rooms are smoke free so that makes it nice, but we saw so many people not following the rules and smoking in places they should not have. That makes me have to say one thing that made the cruise end on a weird note. The final morning of the cruise we all woke up at 2:30 to an alarm bell going off. I thought it was someone who had hit the alarm in the hall and ran off, because I had heard some kids giggling earlier. Turns out there really was a fire down on the Main deck and we started hearing more and more people out in the halls talking of fire. In a panic all three of us got dressed and grabbed our life jackets and went up to our assigned muster station in the Starlight Lounge. We didn't actually see any Carnival crew on the way to the lounge or even inside the lounge for quite a while. The only ones I did see were assisting some elderly people who were having some trouble up the stairs, and Steve Cassel, but he was only on the intercom after they had put the fire out. I will say this, he was as calm as he was doing the normal announcements, but still I would have thought that there would have been more communication involved, even if the fire was over fast.