We flew to Barcelona, Spain on October 30th, 2013 and spent an enjoyable days in Barcelona before getting on the newly refurbished "Carnival Sunshine." The Carnival Sunshine is the newest ship in Carnival’s fleet. They are considering it a “new” ship as it just went through a $155 million dollar facelift! This is the Carnival Destiny, that was built in 1996, that went to dry dock for two months and had crews working 24 hours around the clock doing a complete refurbishing. It is one beautiful ship. It has ONLY been out of dry dock for 3 weeks, when we became part of the “maiden voyage” to America as the “Sunshine”! If you want to see more of this ship, go to U-tube and type in Carnival Sunshine. The “virtual tour gives a good look at what the ship looks like now with many of it’s new features. The “dry dock” u-tube videos are interesting also

I had NOT been on the Destiny before to know the difference, but I do know that the new ship is very beautiful and the stage shows are spectacular in the new "Liquid Lounge". The ship holds about 3,000 passengers, but for this crossing coming to the USA for the first time, we had 3,140 passengers. We left Barcelona and sailed to Mallorca and Malaga, Spain, then Grand Canary Island and Grand Turk in the Caribbean and on to New Orleans. We stayed on the ship the next week also and after a big media blitz and a day and a half in New Orleans, we sailed for Grand Cayman Island, Jamaica and Cozumel, Mexico before heading back to New Orleans. It was a very enjoyable cruise, although there was little problems with the new ship that had to be tweeked.