Bob's Bahamas Cruise Review

Overall, my wife and I received very good value on this cruise vacation for our money.  All of the ship's service personnel and management folks were efficient, polite and professional.  The ship was maintained excellently from what I saw while wandering the ship's gigantic passageways. Carnival offered myriad activities to engage in, both on and off the ship.  If you don't like being bored it's your fault alone if you become that way while on this vacation.  We saw three song and dance shows in the Encore Theatre and thought they were all highly energized, entertaining, and professionally produced.  Our meals in the Scarlet Dining Room were all attractively presented and were well prepared, for the most part.  During the five cruises that my wife and I have taken with Carnival over the past five years on three different vessels, however, it seems that the dinner menus have changed very little since we began cruising with Carnival. We especially enjoyed eating lunch at the Mongolian Wok and Pasta Bella eateries.  The couple of times that we went to the Lido dinner buffet instead of eating in the Scarlet Dining Room, however, we were generally unimpressed with the quality and selection of buffet entrees and side dishes.  Some entrees appeared to be hastily prepared and looked like they could have been compilations of lunch leftovers.  I'm sure they weren't but I got the feeling that the Lido's dinner buffet didn't have as much effort put into preparing it as their lunch buffets did.  Regardless, we found plenty of tasty and nutritious things to eat anytime we wanted while on board, whether it was room service or one of the many other food venues.  I was very impressed with Carnival's embarkation process in New Orleans.  Although we encountered pretty long lines once we arrived at 1:30 pm in the terminal, those lines moved along quickly and it didn't take very long before we had our Sail and Sign cards and were on board.  I was even more impressed with the debarkation system.  We were in group 5, the first group to leave the ship immediately following the self-assist passengers.  I couldn't believe how quickly we sailed through the luggage hold area and Customs and found ourselves on the elevator taking us up to where we parked our car.  In hardly no time we were on our way home to Biloxi.  We had a great time.  Bob in Biloxi