Thanksgiving week cruise

We had a suite and an inside cabin, I paid a lot of money for the week and the suite was the smallest I've ever seen.....other than the bed not much else could be fit in the room and our kids room that's all that could be fit was their beds, they had to store their luggage in our room. 

The GOOD for the week was we really enjoyed Jamie the Cruise Director and Darnell her right hand something....lol, they made the cruise enjoyable, The 4 shows were good but the "70's" show whould be renamed "Disco" because that's the only music they had representing the 70's but the entertainers did an amazing job and we certainly was entertained. The last show on the ship, was amazing and I could of watched it over and over again.  I had 4 girls with me on this trip, my wife and a 14, 16 and 17 who turned 18 on Thanksgiving with me and they nicknamed one of the entertainers, "Beach Boy".  He's the one from England and they all fell in love with him.....I will say this, he has a great voice and did a fantastic job on his solo's......he has a lot of talent and I think will do very well in the entertainment field.  The Blond Girl (wish I could remember all of their names) did Donna Summer's songs justice.....she was pretty spectacular too.  All of the entertainers were very good but for my family those 2 certainly stood out.   Food  was adequate but we really enjoyed the specialty restaurant JiJi's....I would recommend that to everyone and worth the $15 compared to the food we had in the main dining room.  We also ate in the Italian restaurant.  It was very good but not as good as JiJi's.  We had our exchange student with us from Italy and was disappointed that no one in that restaurant could speak Italian.  The last part of the good was the ship seemed to be ok with the internet.  They have a new app that certainly helped with everything but the service had to be reconnected several times throughout the ship but it made switching between devices very easy.....I would give it a grade of A-.

The Bad:  Out of their control was the weather.  The sea was very choppy and not much could be done about that....17 to 20 foot swales made this ship very uncomfortable on the last day and we spent the entire day until dinner in our room.  That was ok because on the last sea day there wasn't much to do. The flexible dining time really sucked.  We were not happy with the main dining room at all.  We had to stand in line on deck 5 to get a ticket to go to deck 3 to eat....what a pain and it took anywhere from 15 min to 45 minutes to secure a table.  We never had the same people serving us so no relationship was ever developed and in the past that's always been something we've enjoyed, getting to know our servers and the countries they are from.....that part of the cruise was disappointing.  Shopping on board really was not good, don't waste you time. 

The Ugly:  8x10 photo's for 21.95.....really...wow.......we ended up getting 14 photo's along with a canvas print and still had to pay extra money for a jump drive of these photo's.  Probably the biggest rip off on board but they have you and squeeze every dollar they can out of you here......you love to have some memories from your trip, we probably had 30 to 40 pictures taken as a family and it would of been nice since all they do is throw the pictures away to have a buy them all package available.  Certainly paying over $300 should of given us the pictures they just throw away.  I understand an extra charge to have the rights to the pictures but what a waste.

We waited 45 minutes to take a picture with the Captain who never showed up and no one ever made a statement that he wasn't coming but me keeping the girls away from seeing Beach Boy just wasn't happening any longer.  The Captain was Italian so it would of been nice if he was available to have a conversation with our exchange student but that didn't happen. With the weather he was probably busy keeping us all safe so I guess we can cut him some slack here.

Overall, we've been on several Carnival cruises and have enjoyed them but the weather was the overall factor that made this one only ear 3 stars.  It was disappointing from the fact mostly.  The ports and time in the port was ok but Everything on Grand Turk was cancelled and my girls were looking forward to swimming with the Rays.....well, I guess it's time to plan the next cruise.  Would I recommend this cruise to family and friends......not as much as other one's I've been on but how can you beat cruising.