So this makes my 10th cruise with Carnival and my official platinum level! Yay!!!!! So this was just a short 3 day graduation present for my DW. She finished up her bachelors in accounting! This was a great feat because she was juggling work, home and school for the past 6 years and it was not easy for her. So to get started I booked this as an porthole room on main deck ES and I got a few OBC when it dropped and then Carnival had that huge spring sale and I used ES to get a OBC AND upgrade to a window on Empress. 3 days out the upsell fairy called and offered a balcony for $140 more. Well I already had a $70 OBC which means I really was only paying $70 for the balcony and I jumped on it. I did not tell DW as I wanted that to be a surprise.

Day 1

So the day of the cruise came and off we went from Tampa about 7:30am. We drove over to visit my DW brother who lives near Disney and had breakfast with him and then head toward the port. Instead of parking at the port like we did the last time, we used Park N Cruise and it was great! Within 10 minutes we were checked in and on our way to the port. This unfortunately was where the only hiccup in the trip began. So with all of the construction on the new pier the bus drive had to follow a predetermined route that literally made us circle the entire parking lot twice before he could drop us off...once on an outer road that took him to a place to pay to drop us off and then instead of letting him go directly to the drop off point we had to circle around again in an inner road. It was cool to see the work on the new pier though! Here are a few shots: Read more