Carnival Horizon Review: Day 16 – Cagliarifeatured

Our final port of call on the inaugural Carnival Horizon voyage brought us into Cagliari, the capital of Sardinia. After sixteen days out of the country, twelve days of cruising, eight countries and seven ports of call, our trip was winding to a close and we had reached our final port day.

I wasn’t ready. I thought I would be – I thought I was. This entire cruise, all I could think of was how much time we had left. This cruise didn’t fly by – it felt like we’d been gone for ages – but is there really too much of a good thing? Despite a few things I could have done without (my sinuses acting up, that really terrible sunburn and losing that photo album in Amalfi top that list), this trip had been so incredibly wonderful and had brought us to so many beautiful, culturally rich cities. I was exhausted. I was beyond exhausted. But I wasn’t ready for it to end.

Time keeps moving on, whether we want it to or not, and this day was always going to come. And I was going to make the most of it…if I could get out of bed. Every time we travel overseas, I can’t quite get on a regular sleep schedule and this morning was pretty gruesome. Because I was napping so much, I couldn’t sleep at night, which meant I was up crazy late and even waking up not-so-early took a serious effort. When Mom was trying to lure me out of bed with a jug of chocolate milk, I knew I had to get up – I just couldn’t get my eyes to open.

((And two things on the chocolate milk: I swear I’m a functioning adult – just one who happens to enjoy a little cocoa in her leche on cruise ships and two, it was an actual jug. I think they ran out of the cartons at some point and just started putting out bottles))

We wanted to do the port day breakfast in the dining room and this was our best (and last) chance to do it, but I just couldn’t get out of bed. That was okay though – we did plenty of port day breakfasts onboard the Splendor a few months earlier, and the breakfast up at the Lido Market place offered plenty of tasty, made to order options. And also arepas. Breakfast arepas are the best option of all options on any cruise ship. Actually, if I could get arepas with the sea day steak and eggs, that might be the breakfast to end all breakfasts, but Carnival hasn’t put that together yet (you reading this, powers that be? I’m telling you, it’d be a s-l-a-m dunk).

The ship offered plenty of tours for our day in Cagliari, but since we were docking right in town, we declined to book one. That was kind of our MO for this cruise – if we docked in town, we did a DIY touring day. If we docked outside of the main destination, we did an excursion. The thing was, much like Malta, we had no idea what we should do in Cagliari. Google was our friend slash travel advisor here, so we knew that while there wasn’t a Hop On Hop Off bus, there were a few sightseeing tours that would pick up at the cruise terminal and there was plenty of shopping and cafés within walking distance.

We got off the ship right after breakfast. Once you disembark the ship, you pass through a terminal with a bunch of shopping, with locally produced food stuffs and typical souvenirs. Don’t buy your items there unless you’re in a time crunch coming back from a tour – the prices are lower in town. Inside the terminal, you’ll also find booths where you can buy private transfers to just about anywhere on the island, tuk tuk rides and tickets for the sightseeing bus. Don’t buy your tickets in the terminal – when we passed through, they were listed at €22 with the next available bus time over an hour later. When we got outside, we found both the Red and the Green buses at less than €12 and immediate availability (our ticket had €10 printed on it even though we paid €12, so they’re definitely marking them up).

The cruise terminal is a ways away from the main street leading into town, and the port offers a shuttle that runs constantly and will take you door to door from the terminal building to the street across from Via Roma (the main street). This is where you can pick up the sightseeing tours, grab a taxi or walk into town. We found a half-empty Red bus and paid the €12 admission for a one-hour sightseeing tour.

It was a gorgeous day in Cagliari, perfect for an open airbus ride through town. The sightseeing bus tours don’t allow you to hop on and off – it runs a loop around Cagliari hitting the top attractions. At some of them, the bus would stop so everyone could stand up and take pictures. At others, it would drive by slowly enough for everyone to get a snapshot (and on most of those, it would loop back to pass by on both sides of the bus so everyone could see or get a picture). Headphones were given out and the narration was given in both English and Italian and it was a really nice way to acquaint ourselves with a new city and see all of the touristy stuff.

The tour started and ended at the port, with eight highlights in between. We stopped at the Municipio and the Basilica di Bonaria. We drove through the scenic Marina Piccola. We saw the beautiful beachfront at the Lungomare Poetto and the protected marshlands at Molentargius-Saline Regional Park, where dozens of flamingos flock to the shallow waters. We saw the basilica of San Santurnino and the Bastione Saint Remy. The highlight for me, though, was the drive up to Monte Urpinu, a public park up on a hilltop, with a scenic overlook of the city where the views stretch out for miles.

We continued on our drive back to the port, and I kept snapping pictures of the buildings. Cagliari, bizarrely enough, reminded me a lot of Miami, with many art deco-style buildings. And I love love love art deco, so I was fascinated by just about everything we passed. When we were on the bus, I almost didn’t feel like we were in Italy. Cagliari felt like some unique crossbreed of Miami and Helsinki, with the architecture and colors of Miami and the hilly, open terrain of Helsinki. And since it’s not the biggest vacation destination in Italy, it feels relatively untouched by tourism – a far cry from most of our other ports of call.

The bus left us where it picked us up, and we headed to the Via Roma in search of Dulci’s Pasticceria, a bakery Stephanie had found on Instagram. When we travel, Instagram has become our top go-to to discover new eateries and coffee shops, and it definitely didn’t let us down here. Dulci’s had strong espresso and some pretty tasty Italian cookies, and between the caffeine jolt and the morning on the open air bus in the most beautiful weather, I was awake as I was going to get.

We browsed some shops after our coffee stop. For general souvenirs, you’ll find better shopping in other ports of call, but there are many Sardinian food shops selling local delicacies like flavored salts, baked goods and liquors. We didn’t buy much because we were rapidly running out of space in our luggage, but browsing was fun!

Being not only our last port of call, but our last stop in Italy, we decided we needed to have one final lunch. There are a ton of cafés off of the Via Roma. Many of them offer prix fixe specials and you’ll find just about every Italian cuisine represented, but we wanted Sardinian food because how often do you find yourself in Sardinia? So we ended up at Sa Schironada with a big cheese plate, bigger plates of pasta and that Sardinian flatbread that’s so thin it’s almost translucent. How do they even pack so much flavor into a cracker so thin? It’s some kind of voodoo magic, I’m convinced. And since Stephanie just discovered Aperol on this cruise and was newly obsessed,we had some Spritz’s, too. Hashtag vacation diet. The food at Sa Schironada was amazing, and we had some primo seats where we watched other table’s orders coming out and even though I was full to the top of my eyes with gnocchetti,when they started bringing plates of melon draped in fresh prosciutto, my mouth watered. Every time.

We were so full when we left Sa Schironada. We wandered around the streets behind the Via Roma, narrow, tall and colorful, just the way I like ‘em. We started walking back to the ship, but we had to stop for one last gelato, the best amarena gelati I’d had all trip.

After the morning rush, the shuttle service to the terminal slowed down, so we took a short walk around the harbor, admiring the white boats and the colorful buildings that rose up from the Cagliari streets. I didn’t know what to expect before we arrived, but there wasn’t much I didn’t love about our time here.

Stephanie wanted to do some shopping at the terminal before we headed back onboard the boat. The prices were a few Euros higher than they were in town, but the convenience of not having to carry bags around with you may make up for the mark up.

We got back on board, got back to the room and we all promptly passed out. Like, one minute I was talking about going up to Deck 14 to take some pictures of the buildings and palm trees and the next, it was three hours later and we were about to set sail. I blame the Aperol.

Seagulls were swooping around deck 5, where we would usually watch sailaway from, so we headed up to deck 15, which gave us a much better view (with much less bird interference – and pro tip: if you have a balcony cabin, don’t throw food onto the Lanai for the birds to eat. It causes a mess and it’s super gross).

Once the horn sounded and we started to pull away, we went back down to the bow on Deck 5 and watched as the Captain and the harbor master navigated an incredibly narrow turn from the port into the open waters.

As the sky got darker and the colorful buildings of Cagliari faded into the graying sky behind us, we headed inside to browse some of the shops. There was a Souvenir & Gift Bazaar in the Fun Times and I was hoping we’d find some fun trinkets from the ports we’d visited, but all we found were watches and fine jewelry. Oh well. We bought more than plenty of souvenirs and trinkets over the past twelve days!

We were lukewarm on the main dining room on this cruise, but we really loved the specialty restaurants, so we initially booked dinner at the steakhouse again. After such a heavy lunch, though, none of us could fathom a nearly multi-course steak dinner. So before we all passed out, we swapped our early ressie at the steakhouse for a late ressie at Cucina del Capitano, where we feasted on Italian fare almost as good as the food we’d eaten in the Italian ports (including the surprise hit of the night, the Risotto Milanese, which was so good that I didn’t miss the Bistec a la Griglia that had been taken off the menu!).

Mom wanted to pack after dinner, but I took one look at the bags of souvenirs I’d scattered across our cabin and got completely overwhelmed by the thought of how Stephanie and I were going to figure out how to get all of these bags home. So Mom gave up on packing and went to bed, and Stephanie and I hit deck five.

I don’t know why we always wait until the end of a cruise to really go out go out, but we’re just as consistent with that as we are eating arepas for breakfast or riding the Hop On Hop Off bus in just about any port that offers it. Tonight, though, we wanted to check out some of the other live music that everyone we met onboard had been raving about. We started at the Havana Bar, where Mambo Magic was playing Despacito to a packed dance floor. Like, seriously packed with people dancing their hearts out. I loved it – almost as much as I love Despacito (it’s totally my jam — don’t judge me).

Ocean Plaza was next. Crushed Velvet was jamming out to some Edge of Seventeen and I dig on some 80s rock, so we hopped into the first (and only) available table we could as they played a really great set of some of our favorite 80s bops.

Our last stop was the Piano Bar, where Eden crushed some heavy hitting piano bar faves (Celine Dion? Billy Joel? Hello!) and we had so much fun singing along. I love the piano bar. It’s one of my favorite part of Carnival’s nightlife. For the life of me, I don’t know why I always wait until the end of the cruise to go. I think, in part, it’s because early on, I just like to rest and sleep because I sleep so little at home that I’m practically nocturnal, and part of being on vacation, for me, is sleep. But then there’s the other part of me that thinks sleep is wasteful when there are so many amazingly fun activities waiting for me outside of my stateroom. It’s a tug of war I can never seem to pull myself out of.

We dragged ourselves back to the room in the early morning hours. We had one last sea day ahead of us, and plenty of the Horizon left to explore before we had to leave the ship to a new round of cruisers who were starting to flock to Barcelona with the same excitement we arrived with two weeks earlier.