This year, my family of four decided to take a family cruise with my parents and my sister and her family (total of 5 in that party). There were 11 of us total. My dad, the non-traveler of the group, was the deciding factor on what cruise we took. He wanted the shortest one in our timeframe, so we ended up taking a Carnival cruise from Port Canaveral (PC) to Freeport to Nassau and back to PC. We were on the Victory.
This post is about what I learned about cruising in general. I will make future posts about our particular experiences, both on the ship and off.
First, as someone who has done two all-inclusive trips, cruising was a different animal. When you book an all-inclusive, it is all inclusive. No extras except if you go to the casino or take a trip away from the resort. However, when you book a cruise, you still have to get to the ship, pay gratuities, buy drinks, get off the boat and do fun things, etc.
When I saw the price for our trip, I was excited. Until I learned that we had extra stuff to pay for on top of that price. And then we had to buy a new vehicle (which might end up coming back to this blog again as a lesson in marriage or travel or purchasing or RENTING A DAMN CAR WHEN YOU NEED ONE).
Gratuities add a good chunk of money to the total price. So do drinks. Carnival has a Cheers package that I highly recommend. It's a great value if you are like me and rather prefer to drink your way through life than live it sober. I kid...but not really. The drinks package is $50/per person/per stateroom (fancy term for room) at legal drinking age. So in our case, Miles was not 21, so we did not have to buy it for him. But, Dave and I had to both get it because we are both of age. Did I mention you have to pay gratuities on top of that too?
Then I started looking at excursions. Wow. Some are SUPER expensive. We of course did a super expensive one (more in a later post!). Each day you are in port, you should budget $100 per person for things off ship.
More to come - Brevity is not my strength.
