Carnival Cruise to the Bahamas: Beaches, Tiramisu, and Gangnam Style

The first island we docked at after taking off from Florida was Half Moon Cay.  And OH MY GOOD GOLLY GRACIOUS ME – you have not seen blue water until you’ve seen the blue water of the beach at Half Moon Cay.  You know how brochures for hotels and resorts and other places of that sort always have these perfect, clean, crisp pictures that make it look like heaven?  And then when you get there it’s like a slap in the face because the rooms are dark and damp smelling and the beds are nowhere near as comfy and cloud-like as they appeared in the brochures?  Well let me tell you, if there’s a brochure out there for Half Moon Cay and the beaches look like paradise, they ain’t kidding.

The day before we docked at the first island, we spent the entire day at sea.  So there was nothing to do but explore the ship.  They have restaurants, shops, a library, game rooms, and even an art gallery, where I spotted something that sparked my interest:
I loved Disney growing up, and still do.  Years and years ago, when I was a kid, I received a large stuffed…dwarf…for my birthday.  You guessed right.  It was a life-size Dopey, which, by the way, I still have.  So this art piece caught the interest of the little kid in me =)

As I mentioned in my last post, every night, the crew member assigned to our cabin comes in to make our beds for the night and crafts an animal made out of towels for us.  This night it was an elephant!

On to the first day on land.  As our ship (the Carnival Ecstasy) is giguntus, and there’s only a little  sliver of water that leads to the docking area, we had to board a smaller boat to get us to the island. 
See that little tiny blob on the bottom right side of the ship?  Yeah, that’s the boat.  Can you imagine how massive the Ecstasy is?
As blue as the water looks in these photos, I think it was even more beautiful in person.  I had never seen water so blue and so clear in my life.  It put beaches where I’m from to shame.  Another thing that these beaches have over all other beaches I’ve been to is the sand.  Usually the sand on the beaches I’ve been to have rocks, and shells and whatnot – still clean, but I mean I kind of have to be careful walking barefoot.  The sand at Half Moon Cay was like walking on a cloud.  It was super soft and void of any rocks or shell remnants. 

Later that night, we decided to have dinner at one of the restaurants on board, instead of at the Lido Restaurant.  OH BOY was that fun.  First of all, my dessert was delicious: tiramisu!  Yum!
And second, while I was eating this fabulous dessert, the lights suddenly dimmed.  Then we heard a kind of deep booming sound.  And then suddenly music was blasting and all the waiters marched out from the kitchen area in single file, dancing and swinging their napkins in the air.  Once they’d circled the restaurant in single file, they divided themselves up, so that each area of the restaurant had some waiters, and they broke out in dance to Psy’s Gangnam Style!  It was hilariously entertaining.  I tell you, the staff there really know how to get a restaurant full of quiet diners, clinking glass and metal forks riled up.  And I thought it was funny that after the dance was over, they all got back into character and returned to serving food, like nothing out of the ordinary just happened.

After all the excitement we returned to our room to greet this new guy:
We named him Fred.

Thanks so much for reading!  If you’d like to see my first post on the trip, you can check it out here.