My transatlantic cruise, with Marlene, has begun. We boarded the ship – the Carnival Pride – in Tampa Thursday around noon. We are now underway.
But before the trip began we had to figure out how to get from home to the ship (Tampa) and from the airport (Miami) back home. The astute reader might notice that Tampa and Miami are two different cities, so driving and leaving the car was not an option.
Why not fly back to Tampa? Because flights from Spain to Tampa cost about twice as much as flights from Spain to Miami. It would be cheaper to fly to Miami and take an Uber to Tampa. But that didn’t seem like a great option either, so we prevailed on our friend Maureen to drive us to Tampa. That took care of the departure problem. To get back from Miami we decided to drive to Coral Springs in two cars, stay overnight with Marlene’s brother Michael and drive home in her car, leaving my Toyota with Mike. He will pick us up at the Miami airport and we can drive home in my car.
Whew! I hope that is the most difficult part of this trip. We haven’t booked hotels in Spain yet, but Marlene assures me that it will be easy to find good accommodations. We will take a train from Barcelona to Madrid.
The Pride. This is one of the smallest ships in the Carnival fleet with a capacity of 2,124 passengers – less than half the capacity of many of their larger vessels. It is also old, launched in 2001. It was refurbished in 2012 and is going into drydock in Europe after this journey, so it is showing its age. But it is still beautiful, with classic Italian decor. And the staff is friendly and efficient. So it made a positive first-day impression.
We have a balcony cabin – spacious compared to some I have had – with an oversized balcony. No complaints except that there is just ONE electrical outlet in the cabin. We don’t have a lot of electrical gadgets with us, but it is annoying to have to share the one outlet. Being an older ship, the television is small and the channel selection is lousy. No on-demand movies. But no big deal. We don’t spend a lot of time in the cabin watching movies.
The buffet is more than adequate and the burgers and pizzas are very good. There is just one dining room and so far the food there has been mediocre, but I am not worried about starving.
We explored the ship a bit. We found the cruise director, Joey, and had a nice chat with him. Turns out that Marlene knew his fiancé who is a cruise director on another Carnival ship. I also took a picture of the American Victory, a WWII vintage ship that is now a floating museum in Tampa. We were docked right next to it.
I was amazed at how long it took to exit Tampa Bay – nearly 2 hours. This bay is HUGE. But we got a lovely view of the sun setting over St Petersburg.
The casino on the first day was kind to me. I walked out with a $1.22 profit.