The Long Road to Cabo, a Carnival Panorama Review: Day 6 – Sea Dayfeatured

In my opinion, there’s an art to doing nothing — to surrendering yourself fully to the whims of the day and just breathing in and taking in whatever is around you. I’m sure there’s a fancy phrase in another language that makes it sound super profound, but in absence of that, it’s really just what I love about sea days. We make all these plans, favorite all these activities and ultimately do a whole lot of doing nothing.

And that’s okay. In fact, we prefer it — it’s why we love cruises so much.

Our second sea day brought much warmer weather than our first did, but it also brought a time change — we lost an hour overnight as we moved our watches ahead an hour to match Mazatlán time. So when we woke up around 8:00 AM, it was really an hour earlier and we needed, well, a lot of coffee.

And breakfast. Coffee and breakfast will always cure a time change. We had a quick round of both up at the Lido Marketplace, where the offerings for breakfast were diverse and abundant. There were the obvious favorites (arepas from the Blue Iguana Cantina, where they also make made-to-order huevos rancheros and breakfast burritos), but there were also made-to-order omelette, french toast, pancakes, fruits and cereals — all of the breakfast staples.

After that, we moved out to the aft pool to find some open loungers. Around 9:30 AM, the entire deck was open. There were a few chairs but not all that many, and there weren’t many people, which meant it was the perfect time for us to get some sun. We spent the next two hours alternating between the jacuzzi’s (empty), the pool (empty) and our loungers. The sun was high and bright and it wasn’t long before our skin was tinged with red and we were ready to head inside. Coincidentally, that’s also when the deck started filling up so it worked out really well for us.

We headed back to the room to swap our swim gear for our sea day wear (remember: we are excessive over packers) and headed out around the ship. We went down to Ocean Plaza for some coffees, we walked around the ship and got our steps in, we were everywhere.

Just as breakfast options were entirely abundant, lunch options are even more so: there’s bbq on the Lanai, made to order tacos and burritos at the Blue Iguana Cantina, made to order burgers at Guy’s Burger Joint, made to order salads up on Serenity deck, pizzas, seafood — we aren’t even touching the entirety of the Lido Marketplace and all the good stuff they have there — and there’s the main dining room, where they do Sea Day Brunch until 1:00 PM. The day before, Stephanie and I spotted some really amazing looking burgers and decided we had to try them, so we headed to the Vista dining room for brunch.

After lunch, we strolled around for awhile, walking from deck 3 up and around deck 4 and then up to deck 5. We stopped by the Pixels gallery to pick up our Platinum gifts and pins (the gift was a lanyard, the pin didn’t even have the ship name on it and yes, it’s a gift and we appreciate the gesture, it’s a marked difference from a few years ago when we were getting speakers, blankets, dop bags, etc). We also stopped at Java Blue, where they had Vitacoco (coconut water is my vice!). With bottled beverages included on the Cheers! package, there was a real chance I was going to drink this ship out of coconut water this week. We ended up out on the Lanai with our coconut waters, watching the coast of Cabo in the distance as we glided closer to our port in Puerto Vallarta.

Before heading back to the room for a siesta, we stopped up at Serenity, where the bar features a number of really tasty sangrias. I had the Serenity Sangria, Stephanie had the peach sangria and they were really refreshing for such a warm day!

After a couple of hours of relaxing in the room (really just hanging out on the balcony and enjoying being on the water), Stephanie went to shower and Mom and I went upstairs to see if they were still serving gelato or cake since we skipped out on dessert at brunch. Both stations were closed so we walked towards the soft serve machines, and as we got closer, Mom looked out the window and said “I think that’s Los Arcos.” We were sailing VERY close to Cabo.

I went upstairs to Deck 11 to get a better view and just as soon as I started snapping pics, thinking that we were just getting in some scenic sailing, Cruise Director Lee came on with an announcement from the bridge: we had another passenger in need of emergent medical treatment, and the Captain had decided the best course of action was to sail into Cabo to disembark them from the ship. I felt terrible for them and their family — when we used to sail with our grandma, that was always our biggest fear — that she’d need to be medevac’ed. But to make lemonade out of lemons, we got a primo view of Lands End and the Cabo San Lucas coastline.

Cabo is a tender port, so we saw a boat come in to get the passenger and Lee came on to tell us a pod of whales was seen off the starboard side, and that we might see manta rays and other wildlife too. Everyone rushed from the port to the starboard side and no sooner did I settle in that we saw that familiar gush of water from a blowhole and two humpback whales breaching off the water.

A pod of whale watching tours zoomed over and for the next half hour, we’d watch for that spout of water and for where the boats would zoom to. Stephanie worried we could be turned away from Cabo (where we planned to do a whale watching tour) because the Panorama voyage before ours was refused entry for Covid cases onboard, but we were getting a free preview of our tour and hoped we’d see as many (or more!) whales in a few days.

Once the passenger and their family were safely on the tender ship, Lee came back and asked us to clap them farewell, and let us know this would not affect our arrival time into Puerto Vallarta the next morning. We headed back to the room and watched the Panorama sail out of the Cabo harbor and back towards Puerto Vallarta.

We took some time to relax because, well, that was plenty of excitement for our day, getting in some more sun on the balcony before getting ready for our dinner at JiJi, one of our favorite Carnival eateries.

I feel like JiJi is the forgotten Carnival eatery. It’s not as modern as the steakhouse and not as comforting as Cucina del Capitano. It’s not on many ships, either, so maybe that’s why. But honestly, it’s one of the greatest meals on the seas that we’ve ever had. Consistently, every time we dine at JiJi, it’s a slam dunk that gets more and more impressive each time. Everything from the food (which is to DIE for) to the friendliness of the staff to just the ambiance — it’s the perfect package.

JiJi offers a family-style service. They’ll recommend you order one starter, entree, side dish and dessert per person in your party so for us, it was three of each. We order the same things each time we come here. Just about everything is my favorite, but if you put a gun to my head and told me to name my favorites, it’d be the pork belly, the soup and the stock pig.

In the middle of dinner, there was a spectacular sunset and I just had to go outside and snap a pic. Sunsets over the water are just so dang beautiful, aren’t they?

Afterwards, we made our way to the Liquid Lounge for another Playlist Tribute Concert, this one Soulbound. I think we’ve seen the actual show before but I honestly can’t remember. This one only had four performers, so either the fifth wasn’t needed or she entered quarantine. The show was shortened to just over a half hour and the Liquid Lounge was pretty sparsely populated — the cast and entertainment crew were obviously doing the best they could under the circumstances, but the concert-style production shows…they just weren’t particularly engaging in the same way a production show usually is.

There was plenty of entertainment to be had throughout the evening — the 80s deck party, a midnight screening of Suicide Squad under the stars — but we headed to the Piano Bar since it was the first time so far this week we didn’t see a line to get in.

After a lengthy singalong sesh, we shimmied on over to the Alchemy Bar since it also wasn’t super crazy busy for the first time (you’ll sense a trend here, I’m sure — we aren’t big fans of crowded spaces, Covid or not).

The drinks at the Alchemy Bar were very good but very very strong — so much so that we nixed the rest of our plans for the evening and ended up grabbing coconut waters from Java Blue, ice cream from the Lido Marketplace and settling in the room to watch Night at the Museum.

Every cruise we go on, I swear things will be different — that I’ll be a night owl and I’ll go out more, do more, have more fun. And then I go to sleep by midnight because the motion of the ship on water puts me out like a baby in a rocker. Thankfully, Carnival probably has the best in room entertainment of any ship we’ve been on — free on demand movies, plenty of actual TV (Food Network and Travel Channel, amongst others). So while part of me wished I’d made it to the Rock and Glow party or the midnight movie, I was perfectly content in my air-conditioned-to-the-lowest-degree room with some refreshing coconut water and a movie, especially since our first proper port day would come in the morning and I wanted to be bright and ready to get into some Mexico fun!