Southern Caribbean on the Carnival Horizon

First adventure of 2020, Miami-bound. See you later snow! Good-bye socks and jackets! Hello sandals! Uneventful travels. Mid-evening arrival in Miami, complete with entertaining taxi ride to the hotel with Steven – the human GPS. Nothing more was done than checking into the hotel (Holiday Inn Express Miami Airport Doral Area) and finding snacks.

The next morning, we popped into Granier Bakery in CityPlace Doral for some tasty breakfast and into The Fresh Market for some breakfast beers (you can read this as Greg and Lloyd had breakfast beers). The hotel wasn’t fancy, but the location wasn’t bad – there’s lots of restaurants etc near by.

Go time! Uber was less than 20 mins from the cruise terminal. From the time we arrived there, we were probably on the ship in less than 15 minutes. Easy peasy. We had an inside cabin as our digs for the cruise – we rarely choose anything more than that, since we don’t spend a lot of time in our cabin. Pics below were our digs (9453).

Afternoon was finding some lunch, having a few tasty beverages, muster drill, and watching sail-away. I love sailing out of Miami. I love seeing all the other ships. And I love the people watching. I like thinking about what the cruise means to them. Is it their first cruise? Are they traveling with their whole family? Maybe they’re getting married. Is this their trip of a lifetime? I’m easily entertained. I’m totally one of those people who makes up a backstory in my head for people at an airport.

Evening was supper (your time dining is a bit of a disaster on day one since the app wasn’t working, but it was mostly fine after that). And then we went to bed. I was sleep deprived coming into this trip, the hotel bed was super uncomfortable, the cruise bed was much more comfortable… and going to bed by 8pm was the best thing ever.

Sea day! We have a sea day routine when we cruise. We get up early, we go for a walk and watch the sun come up. We eat some breakfast. We get cleaned up, take our laptops for a walk to the coffee shop, we have some tasty hot drinks, and we catch up on stuff. So this is what we did. The coffee shop on the Horizon is in Ocean Plaza, where they also do events most of the day… so we watched some hard-core crafting happening first thing (Carnival has a partnership with Michaels). The rest of sea days go as a blur… we relaxed, ate, drank, played a little trivia, randomly ran into people we know, ate some more, and called it a day. Sea days are fun.

First stop on our itinerary was Grand Turk. Our voyage had been quite rocky (and windy) to this point (and throughout the whole cruise really) and we weren’t entirely sure we would dock here. The other ship scheduled to come in did not. We’ve been here a few times and it’s a stop I really like actually. It’s a small island and there’s not a ton to see (we rented a golf cart the first time we visited and saw quite a lot of it)… but the ship pretty much docks at the beach. I love the beach. A new beach bar has been built since we last visited it… so we decided to check it out… and then we stayed for a while… and then it was raining… so we stayed a while more. There’s lot of shops there if shopping is your thing. We had to be back on board here at 1:30. Had some eats, chilled out, played more trivia, supper, I think we went to the show (but then left the show because it wasn’t really our thing), listened to some live music, and that’s a wrap.

Next up, La Romana (Dominican Republic). This is a port where you want to have an excursion in place. We’ve been before, so we just got off to walk around the little shopping village for a bit… but then we decided to take the little train tour into the downtown. It is exactly what one would expect – they point out a few landmarks here and there, and it entertained the kiddo in our group… so all good. We may have gotten slightly wet in a torrential downpour, but no snow. The usual ship stuff to wrap up the day… eat, drink, wander around, chill out, etc.

Port day 3 brought us to Curacao, but not until afternoon… so we did our normal routine. I am in love with Curacao and its stunning landscapes and I wanted to see more of the island, so I hired a private guide for our group (Maartje and Peter from Back2Nature Private Jeep Tours) were excellent. They picked us up from the port and we were off to visit with some salt lake flamingos and super cool jelly fishes, before making our way to the stunning San Pedro area – rocky coastlines, huge crashing waves, cacti, and caves.

They came prepared with snacks for everyone (pastechi – it’s a filling inside pastry, not dissimilar to an empenada) and cold water to fuel us up before we headed into Kueba di Brua (a cool cave, with bats!). I love caves, and we had the place to ourselves to explore. We didn’t actually see any other cruisers at all while we were touring. More visiting with cacti and walking around a bit, and then we were off to wrap up our day at Kokomo beach club. After that, back to the ship.

One more port stop to round out the trip – Aruba. This is another island I like quite a lot that we keep coming back to, but I had one specific thing I wanted to see this time around… the street art murals in San Nicolas. We met up with our private guide from EL Tours (where we had a small bus for our group of eight people – plenty of room to spread out) and off we went to find the murals. They did not disappoint. See for yourself.

From there, we spent a few hours exploring various parts of the island – along the coast where the natural bridge used to be, and the old remains of the gold smelter area, through to Casibari rock formations, up to the church on the hill, to the lighthouse, and many spots in between. Our guide was Clifton and he is very passionate about his island and wanted to show us as much as possible during our tour. We had a couple of hours before we had to be back on board when we returned to the port, so we found some eats and drinks.

Two more sea days to round out our voyage as we made our way back to Miami. There was much chilling out, doing as little as possible, while eating and drinking. On the second sea day, a few of us also did a brewery tour (the Horizon is one of the two Carnival ships with a brewery on board). Great value – lots of samples, a free glass, interesting information from the on-board brew master, and another drink. Rob, the current brew master on the Horizon, is super entertaining (and knowledgeable).

Let’s explore the ship a bit before I sign off… currently, this is Carnival’s second newest ship. There’s plenty to do – IMAX theatre, SkyRide, ropes course, SportsSquare, Dr. Seuss Waterworks, basketball court, arcade, mini golf, kids clubs, spa, casino, and more. Lots of places to chill out, indoors or out. Bars, restaurants, shops… whatever you’re into. They did a great job of filling the days with activities (trivia, activities, shows, and more)… or you could do a whole lot of nothing. The Build-a-Bear activities and Dr. Seuss parade looked to be huge hits!

Disembarkation was a breeze. Got the worst taxi driver ever en route to our hotel in Miami. I’m not high maintenance, but I do have a few requirements for a taxi driver. If you don’t know where things are, you should own a GPS. You should likely know how to drive. Also, sobriety. We did finally make it to our hotel (Holiday Inn Miami – Doral Area, located on a major street, and not at all hard to find), once Lloyd told her how to get there and kept her on track. From there, it was Uber only.

It was Owen’s birthday the day we disembarked, so we had planned a very kid-friendly day of visiting Zoo Miami and having pizza for supper. Uber to the zoo from the hotel, spent a few hours walking around (the animatronic dinosaurs they have there on display right now are super cool), then Anthony’s Coal Fired Pizza for supper, and time to call it a day.

And the next morning, it was time to start the process of returning to the snow… breakfast at the Intercontinental hotel down the street (because even though our Holiday Inn had a restaurant, they did not want people to do anything but eat at the buffet and didn’t actually have the ingredients to make the things on the menu). Then off to the airport. First flight delayed, then eats in Toronto, next flight delayed, late landing in Montreal… where we would have been just in time to catch our last flight, had it not been delayed over 3 hours. Finally got home around 4am and that’s a wrap.

Ange out.