Cruising Again!

How did we get here? Where have we been? It’s had been six long years since we cruised. Life got in the way, and we thought we would try land-based Disney vacations for awhile. We really enjoyed our trips to Disney, but I missed the sea, and the price of a Disney cruise vacation was pretty prohibitive, so we did budget Disney trips. Our last trip to Disney wasn’t the greatest, so we thought we’d look to cruising again.

In the fall of 2009 I started reading the boards over at Cruise Critic and was pretty disappointed to see that the general consensus was that Carnival service had generally declined in the last few years. This was really not a big surprise because of the economy and our experience in declining services at Disney as well. We’ve been pretty loyal to Carnival, but with all the bad press we thought about choosing another cruise line this time. We started shopping for a cruise in February or March of 2010 but found the prices on Carnival were still winning out. What to do, what to do?

Then in the middle of my searching, I got a “Save the Date” announcement for my cousin Camille’s wedding. She was getting married in St. Thomas while on the Carnival Liberty in March! I’m not particularly close to my cousin—we are in the same generation in our family tree, but there are 17 years between us, so it’s not as though we grew up together. Still it’s family, and how bad would I feel if I went on a cruise and didn’t choose their wedding cruise.

I had been hanging out on Twitter quite a bit and had added quite a few Disney freaks to my list. One of my “twits” was Bryan AKA theCTA on Twitter. He’s an independent travel agent who books a lot of Disney vacations, but he also books cruises. I am an over-planner and a control freak, so I always do my own travel plans, but I thought I would go ahead and give Bryan the booking. I liked him and it costs me nothing and in this economy, I figure we should help out our buddies all we can. It turns out I was Bryan’s first twitter client! I always hesitate when dealing with somebody online, because you really don’t know what you’re getting into, but he was very professional and answered my emails very quickly. I am at my computer all day (and, okay all night too!) and it’s just easier for me to communicate through email or twitter. He was always quick with a reply to my questions, and offered great suggestions for my trip. If you’re in the market for a travel agent, I can recommend Bryan Harris at Operation Destination

So it was settled. The Carnival Liberty, March 20-27, visiting Miami, Half Moon Cay Bahamas, St. Thomas, San Juan, and Grand Turk. Now we just had to plan the week.