Carnival Cruises – A tour of Valor and excitement building

As we look forward to our Carnival cruise on the Carnival Vista in August we jumped at the opportunity to actually get on to one of their ships and have a look around. When in Florida we took a drive over to Cape Canaveral to enjoy a few hours on the Carnival Vista ship before it left on its cruise.

The Carnival Valor is obviously older and smaller than the Carnival Vista will be but we had a good look around at all the facilities including the variety of restaurants, bars and even the childrens areas.

Gaming Daddy of Two loved the look of the gym whereas the spa was certainly somewhere I could imagine spending my time.

The thing we were most looking forward to was to check out the pools and the water slide which we really enjoyed.The Carnival Vista has been designed to be a lot more family-friendly than the other ships and it will have some special features that the kids will love. There will be a waterworks area that features slides and a large splash area for the kids to enjoy which looks fantastic and a Skyride cycling track, ropes course, mini-golf area as well as a fabulous clubhouse which will house a mini-bowling alley and more. In fact, knowing about all the amazing things on the Vista almost made me disappointed with the Valors boring looking swimming pools although that wasn’t going to stop us having fun in them.

Although we were only on the ship for a few hours it really did help to give us a feel for just how much fun you can pack into a cruise and with all the special additions that will come on the Carnival Vista such as the Imax cinema and 3D thrill theatre we know that every moment will be full of fun and we more than likely won’t be able to fit everything into the 8 days that we are on the ship.Whilst onboard we had the opportunity to grab lunch in the buffet-style restaurant, there were lots of different areas to choose from including Mexican, Mongolian, grill and a salad bar as well as a huge selection of puddings, soft drinks and ice cream. As well as the buffet restaurants there are restaurants throughout the ships which you can also choose to dine in and we are looking forward to trying out quite a few of the options when we are sailing.

Our few hours on the Carnival Valor has certainly whet my appetite for our cruise and over the next few months, we will be planning our shore excursions and sharing with you some of the news from the shipyard as the finishing touches are put to the Vista.For now, we will be reading up on all of our Dr Seuss books in preparation for meeting some of the fantastic characters onboard and we will be looking forward to snuggling together in the Dr Seuss bookville library and seeing if we can find some new favourites within the shelves.