Carnival Vista, Here We Come!featured

Can’t keep this girl off the seas for too long!

When I started writing about our Vision cruise, it was for three reasons: one, to pay it forward for all of the information I asked for and took in planning our trip, two, so my family could go back and read about our trips and three, so I could selfishly re-live what has been, to date, the greatest adventure I’ve ever been on.

But in re-living this trip, that wanderlust to explore more of Europe just kept getting stronger. And there’s only one cure for this kind of wanderlust: booking another cruise.

We were torn between a 12-nighter on the Brilliance of the Seas and a 10-nigher on the so-new-it-isn’t-even-sailing-yet Carnival Vista. The Brilliance offered more new ports. The Vista offered a brand new ship to report on and take pictures of, and ultimately won when after weeks of searching, a Havana balcony room opened up today (because, hello, a hammock on my patio? All the yassssss).

A Havana balcony room on the Vista was almost half the price of an oceanview cabin on the Brilliance, on a brand new ship where we have Platinum perks (free laundry service, anyone?), and we can not only explore new ports (Provence, Rhodes and Crete), but we can go back and re-visit some ports that we haven’t fully discovered yet (Florence/Pisa, Rome, Naples, Kusadasi and Athens). Two less days than the Brilliance, yes, but that will allow us to fly to a yet to be determined country for a couple of days before we cap off our trip in (probably) Paris (…again. You’ll understand why when we get to the Paris part of this current review!).

So I hope you’ll continue to follow along as we take what we learned on this trip to try to plan an even bigger and better trip for next May on the Vista. I’ll be blogging through our entire planning process (and maybe even live blogging the cruise!). And if you have tips and recs? We’d love to hear them!