My Mother's 60th Birthday

I am close to my mother. This year, she turns 60. She is throwing herself a birthday party and I am throwing her a cruise.

Perhaps, not me exactly, but it worked out that way.

After my last cruise, which was also my first cruise, I was hooked. My husband and I signed up for another in January.

As I have stated, my goal is to travel occasionally. More often would be better. However, I need to get away from work and home with some type of regularity. I'm tired of living my life in an endless cycle of work and home and work and home. My goal was one vacation a year with plans for at least two. Maybe, I would start to take an occasional weekend trip as well.

Well, my big vacation for this year was a trip to Hong Kong. Last week, that was canceled. I was upset but not devastated. I didn't want to go to Hong Kong with the passion that I wanted to go to Japan. However, I wanted to go. I'd been reading and watching shows about it.

The time that I had taken off of work started the week after my mother's birthday. With enough money to travel to Asia in my pocket, I decided to see if my mother wanted to take a birthday cruise with me instead.

She said she did.

So I wound up booking us on a cruise. Two months after my last one and two months before my one with my husband. It is both rediculious and exillerating at the same time. I can't make this to much of a habit or I will be in the poor house. However, the next four months will be filled with a lot of personal activities.

Carnival Sensation - First Views

We entered the ship right at the base of the four story atrium. Another group entered as we did and said, “You can’t even tell that you are one a ship!”. It was true. It was like being inside of a Vegas Hotel. Lots of neon, bold colors, crazy decorations, and a bar full of people right in front of us. We stepped into the glass, neon elevators and headed up so that we could get out of the flood of boarding people.

Boarding officially starts around 1230 but if the ship is ready they start taking them as early as 1130. We were on board by 1200.

We went up to the Lido deck. I figured that wherever everything was, up would mean the open decks. The Lido deck is where the pools and the buffet are. There is also the Mongolian grill and a burger and hot dog buffet as well. These are all free ship food places. We had our backpacks and bags of soda so we wanted to find some place to settle down until we could go to our room.

We picked a table at random and settled in. My husband went off looking for something to eat. I guarded the bags and people watched. The food lines where already very long and it was only about 1230. However, most people were carrying their bags and waiting to go to their rooms

The Pool on the Sensation is very small. It is around 15 by 30. It looks to be very shallow. It is not a swimming pool. It is a body of water to play in. If you just want to splash around head to the aft (rear) of the ship and try the water park. There are several slides and lots of water works to splash around in.
At each end of the pool is a circular hot tub. There are two of these. Lounge chairs abound. They are full of sun burnt people. These sun burnt people seem to be enjoying themselves. I left them to it. I was interested in swimming in only one body of water and it was not on the ship.

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There are another two, small hot tubs on the Serenity Deck which is the adult only area. This did not open until the second day we were out. The lounge chairs here are also more comfortable. They are padded and for the most part set up side by side.

My husband wandered back with a plate from the Mongolian Grill. It wasn’t bad. I would have liked a bit more sauce. He got it schezuan style and it was quite spicy. I did find the deserts and they are the first things that I took photographs of.

Chocolate Cake – Very Rich

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Candied Fruit Cupcake – It’s like a fruit cake with regular cake. I didn’t try it
but Tim said it was tasty.

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We also had some salad and fresh fruit. There was watermelon, cantaloupe and money do melon. I nabbed a few pieces of french bread and Tim found the rotisserie and had some meat carved. The lines were getting long and we didn’t know how to navigate them. The lines for the Grill the Mongolian and the Rotisserie all pool in the same general area but there are three stations. In the main buffet area there are two sides that mirror each other. This all helps the traffic to funnel through and move quickly because there are three different stations for a total of six places to fill your plate.

It was a lot of food and plenty of places to sit. Sadly, some of those places were outside. Not adjusted to the heat yet, we found a hallway and settled down there.
I also learned not to use unisex bathrooms. The seat did not lift and men had been using it and missing. I do not blame this on the ship. The bathroom was clean. It did not smell bad. It was just obvious that people had been using it and using it poorly.

There are plenty of gender specific bathrooms scattered around the ship. I avoided the unisex ones after that. They are right off of the pool area and lots of people trotted around barefooted. Yuck. My eyes cross just thinking about it.

A quick bit about the upcoming cruise

Last month I looked at my husband and said, "We need to go on vacation."

"I agree," he told me. "Where? Vegas?"

"Maybe? I don't know. I want to do something. I need to get away from my job."

"Think they will let you go?"

"I've taken two days of leave this year and they where both in February. They better let me leave."

He looked skeptical. I couldn't blame him. Last year, when planning our Tokyo trip my boss had told me that two days in the middle of my trip might not be approved because of staffing issues. I said that I couldn't exactly fly from Tokyo back home for two days and fly back.

Conversations like that tire me out. I have co-workers that hand the boss a schedule of leave at the beginning of the year. It seems reasonable to give two or three months notice to take time off but these co-workers leave me feeling as if I do everything at the last minute.

I didn't care. I wanted to go on vacation and I was going to stomp my feet and have a tantrum if that is what it took.

Vacations where never part of my childhood. I had planned to make them part of my adulthood. Life had a habit of inserting itself into that equation and destroying my plans. This year, I wanted to go somewhere and do something new.

Our first thought wasn't new. It was to take a trip to Vegas as my husband had suggested. We really enjoyed Vegas when we went there to get married in 2007. What we were looking for was a stop gap before we went to England. My husband travels extensively for work and I have decide to start tagging along to expand my own horizons. Originally, we were going to go to England in October. Now, we were perhaps not going anywhere until the spring and I needed and wanted a break. This led to a frantic discussion and a random search on Expedia.com.

The thought was that we could do a cheap trip to Vegas for a few days. We had been to Vegas four years before to get married. We had enjoyed it and I wanted to stay atthe Venetian this time.

However, I saw an advert for cruises and I decided to see how much a cruise to Carrabian would be.

79 dollars a night!

What?

I did some more searching and sure enough, a full cruise could be as low as 70 odd dollars a night for the interior state rooms. Rooms and prices went up as the room quality went up. However, the prices were reasonable.

After a few hours of frantic searching we decided to book a cruise on Carnival to the Bahamas on the Sensation for 4 nights. And why the hell not, we went with the Grand Suite and an extended balcony while we where at it.

The frantic searching also included some visits to Cruise Critic for reviews of the cruise line, the boat, the rooms, and everything else.

It feels like a good decision.