Carnival Pride Europe Cruise Review: Day 14 – Sea Dayfeatured

We’ve been on a lot of long cruises. I think our first Mediterranean cruise was the longest at 13 days. We did a really long Baltics cruise that knocked the sails out of us back in 2017. So we’re used to long voyages.

We aren’t used to such port-heavy itineraries that we go to ports back-to-back for seven days. NEW ports, at that. We’ve done a lot of exploring since our last sea day a week earlier. From Gibraltar to Lisbon, Porto to Vigo, into La Coruña, Bilbao and La Rochelle. Seven ports, four countries, in a week.

I don’t know whether I was impressed that we were still standing or just exhausted. Probably a little of both.

So that’s a lot to say that our second (and final) sea day was a day were were crossing down the days to. And when we woke up to gray skies and rain? I think it was relief — an omen to spend the day just relaxing.

With the benefit of a time change that yielded us an extra hour of sleep, we nearly sprung out of bed at 8:00 in the morning. We knew we could get some more sleep in, but we planned on napping later on anyways so we figured we’d get an early start with a sea day brunch.

Service at brunch was prompt. A little cold, still not entirely accurate, but at this point, we were not expecting much more. I will say, though, to Carnival’s credit, the filet mignon they served with the steak and eggs was large and perfectly cooked medium. And Mom’s frittata was really good, as well. I almost wished we had more sea days just so we could get in more sea day brunch (especially because the dining room closed for breakfast at 8:30 AM on port days so we never made it — which was fine by me because they took the breakfast board off the menu!)

We wandered around the ship afterwards to give our room steward time to finish our cabin. We watched the Debarkation Talk and second Fun Aboard, Fun Ashore presentation, found the towel animals up on the Lido deck and finally made our way down to collect our Platinum gifts (a slap on coozie this time — we thought it was a mouse pad for a solid five minutes!). We watched the waves clap up against the ship and found a disco dance class in the atrium. There was plenty of fun around the ship.

After Groove for St. Jude, Felipe announced that because we’d be in port for World Ocean Day, we’d celebrate today, with a giant cake prepared by the pastry chefs. This cake was huge and so on theme with the decorations. They cut it up around 12:30 PM and when I say there was a mad rush for slices — I’ve never seen a group of adults step in front of a group of children for free cake before. It was good cake (better than the usual ones they put out for lunch!) but dang, that’s cold.

Since we were clearly eating lunch in reverse, we washed down the cake with tacos from the Blue Iguana Cantina. Shout out to I Made for his daily mastery of the tortilla press and willingness to make me steak tacos even though they technically aren’t on the menu.

Mom and Steph went off to nap after lunch and I went down to the Taj Mahal for the Q&Awesome with Felipe. I think Jaime Dee started the Q&Awesome (or maybe she was just the first CD I remember running it!), but it’s essentially an interactive Q&A about ship life. According to Felipe, no questions were off-limits except those that pertained to salaries. And he was very honest, though unprepared for some questions (one person asked if there were Covid cases onboard and if anyone had died onboard from Covid) and he had no answer other than there was “probably” Covid onboard. I did learn some really interesting tidbits, though!

• The ship was running at 70% capacity this week, with 1747 guests onboard
• To service nearly 1800 guests, there were 900 staff members onboard. Felipe noted that this was close to regular capacity and that the ratio of team members to guests was “favorable” to the guests this week, but that was a head scratcher given the service lapses we were finding (especially in the dining room and at the specialty dining).
• I found Felipe’s career path at Carnival just fascinating. He had initially applied for the Entertainment staff right out of college because he wanted to travel before settling down and working with his dad at the family business and was told that they didn’t hire Entertainment roles from South American candidates. So instead, he started as a dish washer. He worked himself up to a server for team members and then guests before John Heald took him under his wing, mentored him and hired him to join the Entertainment staff. From there, he worked as a social host, an assistant Cruise Director and was finally promoted to his current role of Cruise Director after a stint as a temporary CD. That’s quite the journey!
• Felipe told the story of a call he and Lee Mason (another wonderful CD!) had with corporate the day before discussing conga lines. I guess Carnival had continued to ix-nay the conga lines and Felipe and Lee were asking how a conga line was different and more risky than a buffet line or a boarding line. Nevertheless, the story ended with Felipe encouraging us to dance in the buffet line.

After a rousing Q&Awesome, it was nap time. The rough seas put me right to sleep! We showered and got gussied up for formal night. I took a Zoom call with one of my Marketing Managers and we made it out just in time for dinner!

Pace-wise, dinner was the best one we’ve had yet at just around 45 minutes bread to dessert. Everything was prepared fine, arrived accurately but…something was just off with the service on this ship. I don’t know if the crew were unhappy or overworked (they’re definitely underpaid!), but I couldn’t quite put my finger on why service was just frequently so slow.

After dinner, we were treated to another production show, Getaway Island. This one was a little different — the cast played roles instead of just performing a revue. There were 3D effects, scents that were pumped in, cocktail flare, pyro — it was a blast and different than anything we’d seen at sea before!

And then, after the show, instead of enjoying the ship on our final sea day, we went to bed. We’d dock in Le Havre before the sun comes up and we had an 11 hour tour to get ready for, so we called it an early night and got as much rest as we could ahead of what we were sure would be a busy final two days!