My Very First Cruising Experience

I have always wanted to try cruising and the day had finally arrived!  I was set to port out of Galveston, TX on a sunny Saturday afternoon on the Carnival Freedom.  Seeing as this was my very first cruise, and although I had heard that Carnival may not be ranked amongst some of the top cruise lines, I had nothing to compare it to.

The check-in process was relatively seamless, but it did take us a good 30 minutes or so before we finally arrived on board.  There weren’t even that many people around, as we had chosen to check in at 2:00pm, so I can only imagine how hectic it would have been if we had checked in around noon.

Like most people, the first thing we did was drop off our stuff in our rooms and then we headed straight up to the buffet for a late lunch.  Although it was way past 3:00pm at this point, the buffet was still busy as ever.

Exploring the ship and all of the entertainment areas was fantastic.  This cruise was taken during the off season so it didn’t seem like there were as many people as there normally would be.  Normally there would be 4 buffet lines but half the time they only opened 2 of them, so that goes to show how slow it was.

We were booked into a cabin with a balcony and I’m quite happy that we decided to do that.  The balcony provided a great deal of sunlight and we were able to watch the sun set from our balcony every night.

Of course, cruise stewards are known to leave cute towel animals in your rooms each night:

Food on a cruiseship has to be good.  If it wasn’t, it wouldn’t be able to retain their thousands and thousands of customers every year.  The Carnival Freedom is unique in that it also has a Guy’s Burger Joint on the ship, along with the buffet and restaurants.

The ship itself wasn’t the largest and if you walked non-stop from one end of the Promenade Deck to the other end, I don’t think it would take more than 2- 3 minutes to walk through the whole ship.

I believe the Freedom is known as a mid-range ship and most people that we met that had been on some of Carnival’s higher end ships all agreed that this ship isn’t quite as good as some of the others (ie. the Magic or Dream).  It is a smaller ship so it doesn’t offer as much in terms of entertainment or choices.  However, this being my very first cruise, I had absolutely nothing to compare it to and I felt that there was always something going on to keep us busy.  And when we didn’t want to partake in any of the activities, it was great to be able to sit down by the pool to just enjoy and read a book or watch a show.

For more photos, please see my Photo Gallery of the Carnival Freedom.