09-JUL-2007
Road to Victory
I know it's a cheap line
But it was SOOO easy
(Music Up) [VO] This is a voyage of the Motor Vessel VICTORY. It’s 5 day mission - To seek out old life and even older civilizations. To boldly go where only 12,350,000 tourists have gone in the past ten years – (Roll Intro).
OK. OK. Enough bad parody. I thought that would come out much better than it did. This journal records the impressions of six adults & 2 kids on a cruise to Canada in July, 2007 aboard a Carnival Funship, The Victory. It’s a review of sorts but not a gospel so please relax and enjoy yourself.
Valuable information item # 1 - It is possible to drive into New York City with minimal traffic. It just has to be on a Sunday morning and not going south of 59th street or anywhere east of 10th Avenue.
15-JAN-2008
Carnival's Idea of Traffic Control
Hasn't Changed All that Much
The first thing we learned was that cruising Carnival Lines means spending huge blocks of time standing in Carnival lines. It’s looks like the Motor Vehicle Bureau on steroids.
To be fair, you’ll really only stand in line: (a) to get on the ship; (b) to get off the ship; (c) to get something to eat outside the dining room; (d) to enter or leave the photo gallery; (e) to buy anything at the shops and (f) anyplace else that isn’t your cabin, the casino or one of the lounges after the shows. On the other hand, once you stand in 4 different lines just to get aboard, the shock wears off. After that, standing in just one line (no matter how huge) is somewhat of a relief. Good psychology there Carnival. Whack ‘em early then back off.
15-JAN-2008
Our V.P. of Traffic Engineering
Of course, long lines on a 3,000+ passenger ship is hardly unique to Carnival. What makes Funship lines so especially entertaining is the traffic patterns apparently designed by the
Gomez Addams School of Railroading. The truly demented concept of running as many opposing lines as possible straight at each other must be intended to teach us all some lesson or other but I have no idea what it is.
09-JUL-2007
Home Away From Home For The Week
Anyway, onto the ship and up to quarters. We were in balcony cabin 7351 on Empress Deck. The stateroom itself felt a bit tight but the balcony felt larger than Princess and the bathroom was positively palatial by comparison. You could even change your mind about your intended purpose without coming back out. There’s plenty of stowage, two large closets and a brand new TV that pretty much gets only the ship’s internal system and Malcom the Cruise Director (more on this guy later). What there isn’t is a refrigerator or any way to order bottled alcohol and setups for use during the cruise. Next time we’ll do the honorable thing and smuggle our cabin liquor aboard like everybody else.
We also found several uniquely American warning labels of the "Sleeping Pills may cause Drowsiness" variety scattered around the cabin and ship. Our legal system surely dazzles (or at least amuses) the rest of the world by our determination to prove that there are no idiots in America, only victims not sufficiently warned of the incredibly obvious. Honestly, most people I know are aware that scalding water may be hot.
09-JUL-2007
When Carnival Holds a Disaster Drill
IT MEANS IT
With the cabin set up it’s time for the required SURVIVAL DRILL. On Princess, this was pretty much a sales seminar conducted over drinks in the lounge. On Carnival however, it’s much more of an actual fight for survival not conceptually all that different from meeting Ted Bundy or David Berkowitz.
Once again demonstrating their total inability to handle more than six people at a time, the crew tried to shoehorn 150 life jacketed people into a space that might fit 50 if nobody weighed more than 120 lbs. Since anyone on a cruise who is over 7 months old weighs more than that, the Carnival solution is to mash the early arrivals against the bulkhead and pile row after row of people in front of them. In less than 10 minutes, the people in the back couldn’t breathe and the women up front were hoping that was only somebody’s thumb. This madness continued until at least three people suffered claustrophobic frenzy and/or compression asphyxia which was, apparently, the objective of the drill. At that point the mission was declared a success, leaving the crew free to immediately and wordlessly disappear while the mob sorted itself out and the casualties were treated by a salesman who earned a merit badge for first aid 35 years ago.
14-JUL-2007
There Are No Strippers
and It's Not In New Orleans
But Siren's Pool Was Still
Our Favorite Late Night Hangout
Back in the cabin, we realized the location was pretty much dead on for our interests. The aft elevators/stairs took us two decks up to the Siren’s Pool area and all the way down the Pacific DR for dinner. We rarely hit the rack before 3:00 AM and since the midrats (pizza, burgers, hot dogs and ice cream) on Victory are very good and all the 24 hour services are at Siren’s, our location was convenience itself to us. Finally, two short flights below are the Casino (where my wife lived for the week) and the Adriatic Lounge where a former bandmate and I lived with our newest favorite crew member, Marcie the K (who was way too young and attractive to even know about her atavistic ancestor Murray). Our most frequent other activity was getting away from the speakers whenever announcements started. Sales announcements, which occurred roughly every third minute, were easy to ignore once you got used to them. Somewhat harder to tune out was CD Malcom because (1) he might have something important to say, (2) he was kind of funny in a Bob Hope/USO show kind of way and (3) he ended every announcement with a blood curdling WOO-HOO sound that had the ASPCA in both New York and Canada swearing out warrants to search for crudely neutered cats.
10-JUL-2007
Where is Richard Dreyfuss
When You Need Him??
My major impression of Victory’s public areas was “very green”. (Say it like Paul’s description of his grandfather in Hard Day’s Night for the correct effect).
In typical Carnival style, the decor is intended to best las Vegas in the
Worldiwde Tacky Off competitionand anything that isn’t green must have come from the “Fido’s Accident” color collection on discount day at Home Depot.
Victory’s deck plan also takes some getting used to and we did run into the occasional wall. However, our 12 and 10 year old division had the entire ship scoped out in less than 24 hours and if we had Poseidon-ed, I’m sure they would have gotten us out even without Pamela Sue Martin’s nether bits to follow.
10-JUL-2007
The Only Proof We Had
That Anything Was out There
On the trip north, sea conditions were mostly dead calm. I get sick on a Ferris Wheel, so the fact that I didn’t use any scopolamine was very good news.
The bad news was that dead calm usually means fog and once we hit Montauk, there really wasn’t any reason to look outboard since whatever was out there wasn’t visible. We knew there was a bow to the ship only because that's where they keep the foghorn.
For all I knew, we never got more than 50' off shore and until we got to St. John we could have been sailing in circles off the coast of New Jersey, with the officers praying the Stockholm wasn’t still out there somewhere.
11-JUL-2007
Balcony View
All we saw of St. John and all you're gonna see.
In port at St. John, leaving the ship resembled a human demolition derby with only one gangplank available whether you were getting on, getting off, going sideways (which some people seemed determined to do), walking, riding or doing the “land mine shuffle” with a variety of walkers and canes. Carnival has created a mathematically paradoxical state where extremely regimented linear motion approaches it’s opposite state --- total chaos. Einstein would be both proud and thoroughly confused.
Once ashore and looking for stuff to do, we saw a brochure for a “Diversity Tour” touting the factoid that St. John has historically had twice as many minorities as anywhere else in the Maritimes. Unfortunately they were both away that day, so we passed on the tour. Everything else we saw was either a cemetery, a church or the Bay of Fundy retaining 45 feet water which the wives weren't all that crazy to watch for some reason. We ended up paying a cab driver $45.00US per hour plus tip to drive us around and point out the places we would have seen IF we could have seen them. I know it sounds like we got taken, but Taxi Tom was friendly and it was worth the money to give us a laugh and stick him with a story nobody’s ever gonna believe about tourists that incredibly stupid. Canadiens are uniformly nice people and Tom, perhaps feeling guilty as we stopped to look at another invisible landmark, told me a local fable about a huge and bizarre monster which makes horrible noises in the fog, apparently never leaves and won’t ever die. My immediate reaction was
“so what - we’ve got Rosie and Hillary” but I didn’t want to be rude so I kept quiet. With Reversing Falls in neutral/boring mode and being unable to find a restaurant that had both lobster and a table for eight at the same time, the wives went back to shopping and guys took the kids back to the ship. Turned out to be a really bad move. Once again for emphasis –
a . really . bad . move.
11-JUL-2007
Convergence Theory
Carnival Style
Getting back aboard was a nightmare that only Stephen King or a cruise ship can dream up. Aside from the standard one lane/two way traffic with 2,500 people and assorted wheelchairs and walkers, the staff at the metal detectors just kind of tossed all the shopping bags through at once. They came out in no particular order and since there were only two places that everyone shopped, ALL the bags were identical. Also, most of them were in custody of husbands who had NO IDEA what their wives had bought. The resulting strange and truly desperate version of Secret Santa kept the line from moving at all efficiently, almost caused several frustration fistfights and must have led to some hellacious screaming back in the cabins when all the respective honeybuns got back. The military has an incredibly apt term for all this that starts with "cluster".
Now don’t think that all that alpha male roaring and tooth gnashing deterred security from it’s ongoing war with 4' 6" terrorists. No way! Our two youngest members attempted to sneak wooden guns and rubber band ammo aboard. They did this by handing them to the staff. Apparently taught by TSA, Carnival security believes that Mom’s old worry that “you can put somebody’s eye out” is now a sufficient threat for a 12 year old to commandeer the bridge of a cruise ship. Then again, they’ve met the captain and I haven’t, so I can’t say he doesn’t have a paralyzing rubber phobia or something. In any event, the confiscated weapons were returned to the junior felons back in New York, after the crew was done playing with them.
10-JUL-2007
Marcie the K
We departed St. John to the mournful strains of an Irish Whoopie Cushion and the overnight passage meant Arcade for the kids, Bingo and Casino for the wife and karaoke with Marci for the rest of us.
Once the Adriatic Lounge crowd figured out that Simon and Paula weren’t there and weren't coming, things loosened up nicely and a lot of fun was had by all (or at least some). About the only downside (which is true pretty much all over the ship) is that the drink waiters are more persistent than gnats at a barbecue. Plus I think there are more of them.
