Nick’s First Vacation: Boarding The Fantasy (Part 4)
While we waited for mom to come back we unpacked our backpacks and the diapers (our luggage hadn’t arrived yet) and explored our room. Nick was having the best time crawling all around the room and playing with his ball. He also had a blast playing in our porthole (ours was extra big and included a seat). He liked having us lift him up and letting him slide down the sides (while we continued to hold onto him), and he liked standing in the porthole and looking at the Carnival ship across from us.
When mom returned we showed her around our stateroom and then we went down the hall to check out the room she was sharing with my grandparents (her parents). They had gotten a Navigators Verandah Stateroom (a stateroom with a verandah, but it has a slightly obstructed view). I had been a little sad over not having a verandah ourselves (although with a little one I think a huge porthole was much better), but it was nice to know that we could go down to their room and enjoy their verandah just about any time we wanted.
Eventually we put Nick into his stroller and went off to explore the ship. The Small World Nursery had open house hours that day, and even though we figured we wouldn’t use them (remember Nick’s terrible separation anxiety), we thought it would be good to check it out just in case. When we arrived at the Nursery though it was just about 3:00 and we were told that they were closing down so the cast members could prepare for the emergency drill at 4:00. We were a bit bummed, but there wasn’t anything we could do about it. Instead we went upstairs to the pool deck to check that area out.
Eventually we headed back to our rooms to wait until we had to leave for the drill. When we got back we saw that our luggage had arrived, so we took it into the room to start unloading. Nick wasn’t happy about leaving Nana again, and he was no help unpacking, so mom took him with her back to her stateroom so Jason and I could focus on getting everything put away. We didn’t have enough time to unpack everything before 4:00 came though, but we made a really good dent.
A little before 4:00 we headed down to mom’s stateroom and we all waited for the signal that the drill was starting. This was my sixth cruise, but it was the first time that we haven’t had to take the life jackets with us (and wearing them no less) to the drill. A very good change I must say. Wearing those things made me claustrophobic. We started to head out for the drill when we realized that none of us had paid attention to where we were supposed to go. We’ve all been on so many cruises, and we always stay in the same rooms, so on the other ships we could have walked to our drill location with our eyes closed. Luckily my friend’s husband Chris (my friend and her family were traveling with us as well) had paid attention and told us we were station M (it’s actually on your room card, and I had noticed the big M on it, but I thought it meant main dining, oops).
Our meeting station was outside on the lifeboat deck. Once they had checked every stateroom in our station leader started giving us instructions. She first asked us if we could guess what Disney character the “m” stood for. Pretty much everyone said either Mickey or Minnie. Then our station leader said, “That’s right, Mufasa!” That got a lot of people chuckling because we knew that no one had guessed Mufasa. Once all of the stations leaders had given their information out an instructional announcement came on the speakers. The announcement had been prerecorded by one of the original cruise directors which was cool for us to hear because he had been our cruise director for a few of our past cruises.
Once the announcement had ended the drill was over and we were all free to leave. Our group headed upstairs to get Nick’s stroller because it was time to go to the sail away party!
To Be Continued…