Carnival Elation Bahamas Trip Report: Day 2
If you would like to start this trip report from the beginning, click here.
No alarm + no work = awesome! Since the ship wasn’t scheduled to dock in Freeport until 1:00pm, we slept in and decided to go to the lido deck for breakfast. The buffet had standard breakfast fare but we decided on breakfast burritos from Blue Iguana Cantina.
Lots of filling options like scrambled eggs, sausage, ham, salsa, and cheese
One side of the toppings bar
The other side of the toppings bar
And finally, the salsa bar
The finished product… a ham, egg and cheese breakfast burrito on a whole wheat tortilla
We left the lido deck and checked out Carnival WaterWorks which would be open later
The racing slides
The shorter racing slides for smaller kids
The whole WaterWorks area with the big twisty slide in the background
One of the activities we go to pretty regularly is the Fun Aboard, Fun Ashore talk, where the Cruise Director talks about all of the things to do in the ports of call. This usually happens on the first full day of the cruise. We like to go to hear about the places we’ll be stopping and for the chance to win shore excursions (your chances of winning are actually not too bad given the usual crowd size). When we walked into the theater, we put our names and cabin numbers on the little raffle tickets like usual.
Kevin, our Cruise Director, started his talk and highlighted some of the places that people like to go shopping. He also talked about some of the popular shore excursions that were still available. Freeport and Nassau have so many things to do shore excursion-wise. It is actually a good idea to book a shore excursion in Freeport because there’s not much to do in the immediate port area. Toward the end of the presentation, Kevin pulled a few raffle tickets from the box and this time Mark won something – two passes for an all inclusive beach getaway! Since we already had the wedding scheduled for today, we talked to the Shore Excursions Manager and he helped us find a different option for tomorrow. We decided on the Private Island Stingray Encounter and Beach. More about that later. Here’s our V.I.P. tour pass… so excited!
After leaving the theater on cloud 9 (carnival joke) thanks to our awesome free shore excursion, we looked at some of the FunShots pictures taken around the ship. It’s kind of like looking at Where’s Waldo books where everybody blurs together. Look at all of the faces having fun on the ship!
We took a look at the Virtual World, aka the arcade
Air hockey table
Continuing our tour of the ship, we also popped in the FunShops area which is by the casino
It was small but it had all of the usual treats and goodies like boxed candy and suckers
And of course the bulk options to fill a bag
Clearance t-shirt and hat sale out by the pool! 2 for $20!
Pulling into Freeport
There were some other ships already docked including the Grand Celebration, a Bahamas Paradise Cruise Line ship that was previously owned by Carnival. We also saw the Carnival Victory, currently at the Grand Bahama Ship Yard in dry dock. The Victory was in Freeport getting some of our favorite upgrades, like a Guy’s Burger Joint and a Blue Iguana Cantina. We caught the tail end of her stay in dry dock as she was only slated to be there until January 20th. From the ship we could see Fat Tuesday and Senior Frog’s. These would be pretty busy later in the day since they’re so close to the ship.
We were scheduled to dock at 1pm but weren’t allowed off the ship until about 3:15pm due to an overnight incident onboard. As soon as the all clear announcement was made, we hustled off the ship and practically ran to the taxi stand so we could make the 4pm wedding. It was a tight squeeze and our taxi driver nearly plowed into the back of another truck and mowed down a small child at a school crosswalk (for real), but we arrived safely.
Taxi rates from Freeport Harbour as of January 2018
The wedding was really nice and we were able to spend some time with everyone at the cocktail hour between the ceremony and the reception.
By the time we got back to the ship, it was dark out so we got to see the ship at night as we boarded.
Dinner tonight was Cruise Elegant, which happened to work out nicely since we were already in our wedding wear. This was the first cruise for us without a set dining time, either early or late. We tested out Your Time Dining (YTD) and didn’t really have any expectations going into it. One thing we’d heard/read from other passengers is that the wait time can be long, almost like going to a sit down restaurant where you put your name on a waiting list and then you get a buzzer. We weren’t deterred by this since we figured we could go to the lido buffet for dinner if the line was too long.
Far and away, Your Time Dining worked out great for us. We could eat dinner anytime between the hours of 5:45pm and 9:30pm. Tonight we got to the dining room around 7:30pm and there was no line. Your Time Dining was nice because we were able to plan our day however we wanted and we didn’t have to schedule any activities around a specific dinner time. Once we were ready for dinner, we would go to the dining room and give our room number to the hostess. The hostess would confirm that there would be three of us dining. The first two nights we were asked if we preferred sitting with other guests or by ourselves, and by the third night of the cruise we weren’t asked this anymore.
Tonight’s appetizer menu
Minestrone Milanese
Caesar Salad
Tonight’s dinner menu
Chicken Breast (from the grill)
Pork Chop (from the grill) with these delicious little slices of deep fried baked potato
Oven Baked Japanese Sea Bass
Tonight’s dessert menu
Carnival Chocolate Melting Cake
Malted Chocolate Hazelnut Cake
After dinner, we walked out to the atrium where Kevin was hosting 70’s music trivia. This was quite entertaining to watch from a higher deck… people were really getting into it and we saw some crazy dance moves.
Once that was over, we made our way to the Mikado Lounge to see Epic Rock.
We ended the night at Pizza Pirate. Somehow we timed it just right – there were a bunch of fresh pizzas coming out of the oven shortly after we arrived. The crust was thicker than we remembered which was awesome and more filling than the thin crust pizzas.
Several different pizza options
Our first towel animal of the trip
After our pizza we went back to the cabin to get things ready for our shore excursion the next day to see the stingrays and the beach!
Up Next: Day 3 Nassau
