A lot of people looked at me incredulously when I told them recently that I was going with my family on a Carnival Cruise this summer. This was mainly due, no doubt, to the bad press that Carnival had been getting this year: first with the stranding and sinking of the Costa Concordia last year where 32 people died off of the coast of Italy (yes, owned by Carnival,) and also by the multiple-day "Feces cruise" stranding of the Carnival Triumph after a fire in the Gulf of Mexico. Then, there were also problems this past spring with both the Carnival Legend and Carnival Dream and even while we were on our own cruise, there was yet another man who died on the Carnival Magic after tragically slipping off the railing on his balcony. However, regardless all of the negative press, even analysts were surprised to report a rise in the company's profits for the first half of the year, even above estimates, due to promotions and discounts that the company ran, as well as the publicized planned $300M upgrade to every ship in its fleet by the middle of 2015, which, as the Carnival parent company, currently holds ten cruise brands, has a corner on 50% of the cruise market worldwide. Knowing one of the members of the "Carnival Care Team" which responded to the springtime incidents, she advised me that now was a better time than ever to go, especially with the heavy discounts from the cruise line, and so I asked my mother in law Robin and my sister in law Christy, if they wanted to go, and we booked our adventure.

Me, Christy & Robin on Carnival Paradise - July 2013

Our Cruise: Our 5-day, Western Caribbean (Tampa--> Grand Cayman--> Cozumel, Mexico--> Tampa) cruise was a first for me and my two fellow cruise mates, Robin and Christy. Considering that we had all never been on a similar extended overnight cruise before, our expectations were moderate. Knowing all of the incidents that had happened with other ships this past year and definitely this past spring, I shared our own Nadow-family motto, "It's all a part of the adventure," our standard catchphrase in vacation episodes of surprise, disappointment, change, delay, cancelations, annoyance, sickness, or danger, knowing ahead of time that something could very well go wrong. Robin was able to find a great deal on a single room, three berth (two twins, one lofted bunk) for the 5-day cruise online, and an even better rate if you were a Florida Resident (which I was). Also convenient (for me) was the fact that it sailed out of Tampa, twenty minutes from my house, so my husband could drop all of us off, and we didn't have to pay the exorbitant overnight car parking fees at the Cruise Terminal. Read more