Our cruise began with a bang, thump and crash, literally. We shopped the duty free liquor store right in the San Juan port terminal. There were 4 in our party so we carried on 3 bottles of wine and 3 bottles of 43, a vanilla liquor. We were allowed on the ship around 1:00 pm. We went directly to the lunch buffet on the Lido deck. By the time we finished our lunch, our staterooms were ready and some of our luggage was already there. We unpacked and then went to explore the ship. After we had dinner, we went to pick up the tuxedo's that the men in our party rented for the formal nights (the best way to go) and then returned to our cabin and found that the rest of our luggage had arrived. Because we had a long day, we stayed in our cabin to finish unpacking and because we had adjoining staterooms, we gathered in one and had a drink of 43. We began to sail immediately at 10:00 pm. We wanted to have a fairly early night so I had my husband go into the bathroom to wash out the glass that he used and I heard a thump and crash. My husband tripped over the lip of the shower with the glass in hand and landed in the shower. The glass broke and he had blood all over the place. After looking at the wounds, I noticed that it looked pretty deep and called the ship's 911. The medical personnel were prepared to come up to the cabin but instead told us if we could, wrap his hand in a towel and bring him down to the infirmary. The staff there were phenomenal. They took him right in and x-rayed his hand to make sure there was no glass left in any of the wounds. He ended up with 6 stitches in his hand. He was told to come back the next evening to have the bandages changed which was repeated again the following evening. Every day, we were contacted to check on his progress.
While we were down in the infirmary, my sister-in-law called housekeeping to clean the bathroom of glass and blood. By the time we returned from the infirmary, the bathroom looked just like when we first arrived. Of all the cruises we have been on, this was our first encounter with the medical staff. I have extremely high praise for them. Even now, his wound which is almost all healed looks great.
We had a category 6A oceanview room. This included a king size bead and a sofa but no refrigerator like we had on our inside stateroom on our last Carnival cruise. I was expecting to have a little port hole to look through but was pleasantly surprised at the size of our window. One thing about the location of our state room was we were just above the thrusters. To some people this could have been a good thing or a bad thing. For both of us couples, it was not a bother. We were able to tell when we got into port in the morning by the noise of the thrusters going into reverse to slow the ship down and at night when we were leaving port (if we were in our room at the time). The closet space and overall storage space was more that adequate. Even the bathroom was relatively spacious (for a regular room on a ship). We were toward the end of the hallway so it was pretty quiet except for the first night when there were kids running up and down the hall, but that was the only time.
The food, our room, the shows and the staff are rated very high in our opinion. Our high esteem for this cruise had nothing to do with the fact that this cruise was free for us as we won a cruise for two, ocean view on a prior Carnival cruise. They have a raffle at the end of the cruise during Bingo where the winner wins a cruise for two in a oceanview room for 3, 4, 5, or 7 days. On our last cruise, I won it. The only thing we had to pay was the port fees and taxes and also our transportation to the port.
