Somewhere in the Caribbean Sea.

In late January, we departed for Florida on a family cruise arranged by one of my nephews and his wife. They have been on a few Carnival cruises and put together the ship with an itinerary. We would find ourselves on the Carnival Magic headed for the eastern Caribbean ports at Amber Cove, Charlotte Amalie, San Juan, and Grand Turk. Lynn and I have also enjoyed cruises over the years and though we prefer Norwegian Cruise Lines, we found little to complain about on the Magic. The opening image features the Magic and a British cruiser docked at Grand Turk. The ship, however, never made it to Amber Cove. Unsettled weather and the Captain’s decision to avoid a storm led us to a somewhat rocky three days at sea before reaching St. Thomas. Nevertheless, our family cruisers sailed on, after all… what else could we do?

Our group met for dinner each evening and except for the occasional chance meetings, most of us set our own schedule, selected our own shore excursions, and generally did our own things. My wife, Lynn and I accompanied my sister and her boyfriend. Lynn is seated left of my empty seat, my sister, Veronica, to my right. In today’s post, I focus my lens on a tour of the ship and finish with a gallery of images captured shipboard during our 7-day journey. Over the next weeks, I’ll share photos from our island excursions. The Magic is the largest cruise ship upon which I have sailed. She holds around 3650 passengers and a crew of 1,380. The Dream class ship, among Carnival’s largest, launched in 2010 and was refurbished in 2016.

Departure day always features a party on deck. It was a bit cool for Florida, even in January, but music and dancing on the deck kept the passengers warm (or maybe it was the specials on liquor that was flowing freely in the special, high priced, souvenir plastic glasses.)

The ship’s beautifully designed lobby atrium featured live music at scheduled times throughout the cruise.  The spiral staircase behind the band is one of the pathways to dinner in the restaurant we chose to frequent. We found the wait staff attentive and we tried to ensure that we got the same staff each evening. Only once or twice we ended up with someone different. My preference is not to frequent the buffets, if only because I don’t want the option of going back for seconds, thirds and fourths, (though I know I could request multiple entrees in the restaurant and they would be supplied, it’s easier for me to resist once I put the menu away and can’t actually see the food on display, ready for me to eat.)

The photo above is a shot of one of their fabulous deserts, apple pie and ice cream. Oops, sorry, I missed the shot. I guess I should have used a faster lens. >grin<

Sunsets at sea can be a magical time. In the gallery, I included a couple of shots captured after the sun slipped slowly into the west. In most browsers, you can click on an image to enlarge it and to scroll through the gallery.

John Steiner

I promised a few Sundays of pictures from the Carnival Magic and our Eastern Caribbean cruise. Here’s a sunset at our six as we headed east toward our first stop. We didn’t know at this point that our first stop would be cancelled due to bad weather and the Captain’s choice to avoid the storm by going around our first port of call in the Dominican Republic.

These relatively calm seas were replaced by more active waters and we spent our first three days “rockin’ and rollin'” on the water. It wasn’t severe but we surely were rocked to sleep those first nights.

About the photo: Captured with my Samsung S6 at f/1.9, 1/620 sec. ISO-40. On the cruise, I put my S7 (which is really a Civil Air Patrol assigned work phone) away and got out my personal phone. If I was to accidently put charges on a phone in a foreign port, I didn’t want it to be my “work phone.” On most browsers, you can click on the image to view it in greater detail.

John Steiner