Breakfast was a choice between the main dining room with table service or a buffet on one of the top decks. There was also a separate steakhouse that had superb steaks cooked any way you wanted them and the main dining room had the option of fixed dining times or dine any time we wanted.
We also had a small suite, but it consisted of three separate rooms with full walls and doors that allowed the sleeping area to be completely separate from the rest of the cabin. All rooms were small, but it was like a little apartment.
Lastly for your amusement and relating to your Titanic comment, we were on another cruise line one time that stopped in Halifax and part of the land tour was of the cemetery where the unclaimed and unidentified Titanic bodies were buried with the tombstones in the shape of the bow of the ship with a gap where it hit the iceberg. Now how is that for a cruise tour!
Well, for all the millions upon millions of dollars they take, I'm glad that SOMEONE has had a good time on a Carnival tub! ;-)
I believe that the main dining rooms were available for breakfast if you wanted to go during your scheduled “seating.” But it was the same food, and it WAS NOT GOOD. Imagine army food during wartime, but not nearly so tasty or elegant.
That was part of the difficulty - these “seating” times. Very inflexible. If you missed your seating, you had to go eat in the lounge, which, except for breakfast, had this substance marked as pizza, the frozen yogurt - your choice of two flavors - and the stuff marked “pudding.”
We continued to get advertising in the mail from them for years, and I remember at some point they announced with fanfare the ability to go to the dining room without having to abide by the seating schedule.
A steakhouse! Wow. Cook to order? Wow. That was a big part of the problem. With the whole scheduled seating thingy, everyone would shuffle in at, say, 6:30 pm and take their assigned seats. The waiters would come by, take massive numbers of orders in a short period of time. Then, out would come massive numbers of salads and things, all pushed out on these huge multi-level carts, then a little later, all the entrees would come out all at once, in those little covered-dish thingies they use in cafeterias.
It took me a couple of nights to put two and two together (like I said, I can be slow), but the night that my nephew came late and ordered manicotti, and it came out burned at the edges, but only on the top - unlike manicotti that came out just fifteen minutes earlier - I figured out that they cooked up all the food right before and during the first part of the “seating,” without regard to who ordered what, and then just dished out what was already cooked as folks ordered it. Because he came a little late, my nephew's manicotti had been warming under a heat lamp. It wasn't prepared to order. Yech. Disgusting.
Our suite had, I think, two “sections,” with a sliding partition to turn it into two “rooms.” Which was pretty uncomfortable, as the whole thing was only something over 300 sq ft - about the size of my family room. With a double bed, a couch, a couple of chairs and a crib. And dressers. Very cheap dressers made out of very thin particle board.
And the colors were so garish on the ship! Loud pinks and purples! Florescent greens. It was so damned ugly.
Unclaimed Titanic victims - Yikes! LOL! I wonder who thought that would be a treat. Maybe it would be on one’s fourth or tenth cruise.
Oh well. I live near Annapolis, and we go out on short boat tours a few times a year - very enjoyable. But it may be a decade or two (or three) before we're over our Adventure of ‘99 and we try another cruise.
sitetest