Carnival Horizon Review: Days 1+2 – Chicago to Barcelonafeatured

These trip journals usually start the same way. Work was busy, the trip just snuck up on me.

Not with this one. Not this time.

The time leading up to this trip passed by in slow, languid motion, each day that dragged on bringing us one step closer to our first steps onto the Carnival Horizon. It couldn’t sneak up on us because the anticipation dragged on with each passing day, moving us closer but not fast enough.

Then again, nothing about this trip was on script.

First of all, we didn’t book this trip – I won it. Yeah. When Carnival announced their new ship was named the Carnival Horizon, they ran a contest on Instagram and asked their followers to post pictures of their favorite horizons. And you know me – I’ve got pictures for days (one of the reasons you should follow me on Instagram!). I didn’t enter it to win, I just wanted to post one of my fave pics of the Breeze. And maybe Carnival would like it or something, but that was it.

And then a month or so later, a random comment popped up onto my post, asking me to contact a marketing agency about my prize.

Like WHAT?!

That kind of stuff never happens. It certainly never happens to me. I posted a picture on Instagram and won a cruise for four on the inaugural voyage and airfare to Barcelona. Well, the package was for four. We travel as a pack of three, and the idea of adding a fourth and trying to cram four adults into an Oceanview cabin for 13 days just seemed like…not my idea of vacation.

So I won our cruise. That was different. We were traveling in April instead of May. That was different. We were going to do an inaugural on a brand new ship. That was definitely different.

But what’s different is exciting, right?

We added an extra day to our itinerary so we could have just one more day in Barcelona because I’m convinced it’s one of the greatest cities in the world, and we left on a Thursday evening for a Monday cruise.

I tried something new this time to try to combat any jet lag: I went to bed early and woke up at 3:30 in the morning. And I just about jumped out of bed. I was ready to get my day started because getting to this point of even leaving felt like it had taken years. I’d taken the day off of work so I could have a leisurely, relaxing day. Brunch, maybe. Watch the Cubs game. Do nothing at all. I’m so good at doing nothing.

I showered, blew out my hair, cleaned my apartment, made some breakfast, watched the news. And by 8:30, I had nothing left to do. So I went to work. On my day off.

To be fair, I was going to stop at work on my way to the airport anyways, so I could touch base with my boss and to see my team, but I wasn’t planning on a full day. But hey – I like my job, and going in made the day go a little faster.

I hopped on the Blue Line to meet Mom and Stephanie at O’Hare and suddenly, everything was moving at hyper-speed. I couldn’t fathom the adventure we were about to embark on. All of it felt entirely surreal – like I was watching it happen but not really living it. I kept waiting for something to go wrong and the proverbial other shoe to drop. I checked the forecast for Chicago, London and Barcelona obsessively for the two weeks leading up to our departure. I tracked our inbound plane starting two days out. I was convinced something was going to go wrong.

But it didn’t.

Our flight to London not only boarded on time, but left early and was not even close to full – to the point where we were able to move Mom to the row behind us, where she had a full row of Main Cabin Extra to herself and Stephanie and I got to reap the comfort of having an empty seat between us on an otherwise cramped Dreamliner. We hit some unexpected and rough turbulence as we entered the airspace over Toronto (and intermittently throughout the flight from there), but we waited for it to pass as we sipped our red wine and picked through our dinners of Cajun chicken and pesto pasta. And, sidebar, I was pretty proud of myself for how I’d come in coping with turbulence. Ten years ago, I would have been near tears, breathing into a paper bag and gripping the arm of the person closest to me and now? I just sipped my wine and ate my dinner while that big ole airplane went bump bump bump.

I made it through half of Eat, Pray, Love before I started dozing off, but I couldn’t stay asleep because I had the aisle seat and people kept bumping into me when they’d walk up and down the aisle. Stephanie suggested I switch to Mom’s row and take the empty window seat and I made a poor man’s business class seat with a foot hammock (Amazon for the win), some ear plugs and a plush eye mask.

I woke up three hours later feeling much more rested, but strong jet winds were working in our favor and we were scheduled to land an hour ahead of schedule – a relief because we had a connecting flight that boarded an hour after our originally scheduled arrival time! The standard American boxed breakfast was handed out shortly thereafter – a blueberry muffin top with granola, dried fruit and blueberry yogurt.

We landed at Heathrow’s Terminal 3 and followed the purple signs to connecting flights. Thankfully, we didn’t need to change terminals like we did the year prior, but we did need to go back through security and collect our boarding passes from British Airways. Since London was the final destination for many of the people on our flight and there weren’t any other planes landing alongside ours, we made our way through all checks in plenty of time to enjoy the shopping at Heathrow.

The first time we flew into Heathrow was a mess. Our flight from Chicago was delayed so much that we missed our original connecting flight and the second connecting flight they had rebooked us on, and I was so stressed out about losing a day in Barcelona that I didn’t get to enjoy the airport. I love airports and I really love international terminals where there’s a ton of hustle, bustle and SHOPPING! Heathrow’s T3 is like a high end shopping mall, with Louis Vuitton, Gucci and Tiffany & Co lining the corridors. UK staples like Boots and Harrods are also there, and I spent all of the extra time we had from our early arriving flight trapeizing through the terminal all Come at me duty free shopping. My credit card has no foreign transaction fees ka-ching.

I bought a new Longchamp bag because the prices were much lower at the airport than they were in the US and we settled in with some breakfast sandwiches from Pret before we left to make our connection. Unlike the US where you’ll know what gate you’re at hours (and sometimes days) before your departure, at Heathrow, they assign it, like, 10 minutes ahead of boarding. Some gates can be up to a 20-minute walk away, but thankfully ours was a brisk 10-minute walk from the waiting area.

And get this: our British Airways flight? That boarded on time and took off early. There had to be some kind of vacation karma on my side, but to be fair, after all of the delayed and cancelled Oneworld flights I’d suffered through in the past year, I like to think I was due for an easy one. I fell asleep as soon as the safety demo was over and woke up to the captain announcing we were approaching the Pyrenees mountains just outside of the window as we began our descent into Barcelona.

We landed just on time, we had no wait to pass through immigration even though we were walking off a full flight and our luggage was quickly off the carousel. We made a quick stop at the ATM outside of the luggage claim (where the Dollar to Euro conversion is far more favorable than at the currency exchange inside the luggage claim area, even with foreign transaction fees and my bank’s ATM fees) and then we hopped into a taxi. Many people on our cruise group had booked private transportation, but we’ve always found the taxi service in Barcelona to be efficient and reliable. The 25-minute drive from the airport to our hotel in Eixample was around €35, which broke out to just under €12 a person.

With the Horizon’s inaugural voyage scheduled on the same weekend as the inaugural voyage for a new Royal Caribbean ship, hotels in Barcelona booked up quickly, including the Olivia Balmes, where we had a wonderful stay the last time we were in Barcelona. We knew we wanted to stay in Eixample again because the area is so beautiful and centrally located, so we ended up at Hotel Casa Fuster, which was located off the Passeig de Gràcia, which is like the Rodeo Drive of Barcelona, with its high end designer shopping and numerous cafes. A bellhop greeted us by our family name and whisked away our luggage as we checked in. I had booked us in a junior suite and it was one of the most well-appointed, luxurious hotel rooms I’ve stayed in, with a private balcony overlooking the Passeig de Gràcia, a bathroom with a marble Jacuzzi bathtub, a separate shower and Chopard amenities and a separate bedroom and living room. The staff was beyond friendly and accommodating, making sure we had enough bottled water, power adapters, maps and offering recommendations and safety tips for our time in Barcelona.

By the time we settled into the room, it was nearing the late afternoon hours and it would have been so easy to crash for the rest of the day, but I’m incapable of getting any kind of rest when there are cities to take pictures of and coffee to drink, so we freshened up and headed outside to walk through Eixample and see Casa Batillo and Casa Milà, two buildings designed by renowned Spanish architect, Antoni Gaudí. And they are magnificent and beautiful and a very short walk away from each other. I won’t dwell too much on Gaudí – I’ve waxed enough poetic about his works and my fondness for Parque Guell and La Sagrada Familia, in particular, in my other Barcelona posts, but if you go to Barcelona, you need to experience some of his work. It’s a must. Gaudí is an integral thread in the vibrant architecture of Barcelona, his use of color and the intricate details so captivating that people literally just stand outside his buildings and gawk. This was our third time in Barcelona and I still found myself outside of two of his buildings — two buildings I’d seen in person before – and gawked.

We wandered around the neighborhood, noting fun cafes, shops and bars we wanted to stop at over the course of the weekend and taking pictures of everything and anything because the city of Barcelona is just so pretty. If you asked me to name my favorite city that I’ve ever been to, I’d probably give you a different answer each time you asked, but Barcelona would always be on the list. I love everything about this city from the architecture and the dialect to the sidewalk cafes and markets and I had to keep reminding myself that this was happening and I was here *again* because it still felt so incredibly surreal.

Mom crashed after our walk and Stephanie and I ended up on the rooftop deck to watch the sunset. Dusk in Barcelona is like something out of a fairytale, the sky splashed with shades of cotton candy pink and mystical purples. I say this in just about every trip journal I write, but I couldn’t fathom how anything could get any better.

We scrapped our plans to go to Balmes/Rosselló, a tapas place we fell in love with the last time we were in Barcelona and went to Buenas Migas, a little café just across the street that served pizzas and freshly squeezed juices. At 8:30 in the evening, the café was full of people enjoying espresso and I couldn’t say no to that – it was only 1:30 in the afternoon at home, which is perfectly acceptable coffee time.

Stephanie and I roamed the streets a little more after dinner, lingering in the brisk spring air for as long as we could. All day, I couldn’t help but feel like the city was far less crowded than we remembered it to be, maybe due to us traveling in just before high season kicked in, or maybe because it was Good Friday and the Easter weekend are some of the holiest days in Spain and filled with a ton of events.

We ultimately made it back to the room and a half hour in that bathtub was like the holy cure to spending ten hours on airplanes. We planned for our next day and everything we wanted to see, but it still felt so bizarrely surreal to even be in that hotel room, in that city, waiting to spend two weeks on a brand new cruise ship.

But you know, it was and we had so many adventures ahead of us over the next two weeks!

((And if you’re not following me on Instagram, what are you waiting for?! I’ll be posting some extra pictures from our trip as I post this review! Join me over at @nicolesonthego))