We woke up to sunny skies on day two of our cruise, which was a sea day. We didn’t have a lot planned, just checking out the ship and seeing some of the shows. And of course, eating.

Breakfast in the buffet

We decided to try the buffet for breakfast. I don’t know that it was a good choice. The food was good but the selection was very limited. We haven’t had a lot of problems finding seats in the buffet, at least. I ended up with some potatoes, bacon, and a waffle. The potatoes and bacon were good, but the waffle was cold. They do have sugar free syrup, at least. But it’s not like I’m avoiding sugar very well this cruise so far. For breakfast, I would recommend either going to the Sea Day brunch on sea days, or the dining room breakfast if you’re at port. You do have to make reservations before you go, but it’s easy. Just be sure to download the HUB app. The app gives you the menus too.

Hub App

So, what is the Hub app? Like the rest of the cruise lines out there these days, Carnival has the Hub app. On it you can see the daily schedule and menus, and like I said above, make your dining reservations. It even has your table number if you forget it. You can download it before you cruise and it will give you your days to cruise countdown.

Shore excursions show

I walked around a while and got a free Mimosa in the jewelry store near the Mikado theater, then went into the morning show with the cruise director and Fun Staff. We usually like to go to the shore excursions show, which was right after the morning show, because we’ve won prizes in them before. I love free shore excursions! This one was the same show as usual, the Cruise Director will tell you about the various shore excursions available. We didn’t win this time though. Just make sure to get a raffle ticket when you go into the show (one per cabin).

More exploring and lunch

I wanted to check out some more of the ship before lunch, so I went my own way. For the life of me, I cannot figure out how to get into the gym. I need to get some pictures of it. And maybe use it. It’s behind the Spa area but I haven’t been there when someone can direct me to it.

After the lackluster breakfast, we decided to get Guy’s Burgers for lunch. In my opinion, Guys is one of the best burgers at sea. I always get the Ringer without a bun. They come with Carnival Fries too. You can’t go wrong with Guys! I’m sure I’ll get one again before the cruise is over.

Roaming around, hiding ducks, and line dancing

I then went to discover more of the ship. She’s a small ship, but there are a lot of nooks and crannies to explore. And I brought ducks to hide, so I needed to find a few more hiding places. If you’ve never heard of cruising ducks, people put labels on rubber ducks, and hide them around the ship for others to find. You can find Facebook pages for them. I brought tiny ducks this time and put my website address on the labels. And I found a finch flying around on board. Pretty hardy little bird because he was keeping up with the ship.

And then I went to the Lido deck for line dancing. I love to dance, and I’ve been learning a couple of line dances, including the Cupid Shuffle and Electric Slide, so I decided to give it a go this time. The Cupid Shuffle went pretty well, but I think that everyone of us was doing something different for the Electric Slide. Fun anyway! I do refuse to do the wobble though.

Getting ready for Elegant night

I decided to work on my blog in the room. The internet has been okay. It goes on and off a bit, but it’s not too bad. I even managed to download a short onto YouTube. And then it was time to get ready for Elegant night. It’s a night where you can dress up a bit if you want. Not everyone does, but a lot do. Anything from elegant dresses to dress pants/dressy blouse for women, and nice pants and shirt to suits for men. The nice thing is that you can get professional pictures done all over the ship, and you only buy what you want.

We had told the Maitre’ d’, Haris, that we’d love a table with other people so we could meet other cruisers. And once we got to the dining room at 6 pm, we discovered that he’d found us a new table. We were escorted to a table for ten, and our new wait staff introduced themselves. Nyoman was our waiter, along with his staff. They are a very friendly bunch! Hengky the Assistant Maitre’d’ came over to talk for a minute. And there were six others at the table for us to meet.

I had garlic shrimp for dinner instead of my usual Elegant night meal of Prime Rib. And it was delicious! The sauce and vegetables with it were so good that I think it will be my new go to Elegant night dinner. My appetizer was fried oysters, which were good, and my dessert was a no sugar added coffee cream cake, which was light and yummy.

Our entertainment for the night was Alex, a waiter, singing the cruise necessity, Sweet Caroline. And the audience, of course, participated in the singing. It was an enjoyable meal with nice people.

Two shows before bedtime!

The first show that we went to was called Heart of Soul. Carnival does rerun it’s shows on a lot of its ships, but if I’ve seen this one, I don’t remember it. The performers are very good and energetic, and they sang the Soul classics wonderfully. It’s nice to see the performers up and dancing again, instead of sitting on benches and singing, like they’ve done on our last couple of Carnival cruises. I do recommend this show.

After that we went to see the Captain and the top crew of the ship. I taped the entire thing and somehow lost it. And then we ran down to the Punchliner Comedy Club to see the night’s comedian. I believe his name was Al Romera, and he was funny. He was born in Cuba, and has written a book called Revolution, a novel about Cuba’s revolution. We’ve been to Cuba, and it was all interesting to me.

First Impressions of the Elation

The Elation is a small ship with a large heart. I’ve found the crew to be exceptionally friendly and nice. We weren’t fond of the breakfast in the buffet, but otherwise, the food has been very good. And for the price we paid for the cruise, we can’t complain. The shows have been better than on some of the recent Carnival cruises we’ve been on.

The cabins are small but well kept. I like that there are several USB ports in the cabin, instead of just plugs. Our cabin has been fairly quiet, except when docking. When you are docking at a port, you may as well forget sleeping very late. There’s a lot of noise and vibration, at least on the sixth deck.

This ship can be a bit confusing to navigate. You can only get from one end of the ship to the other on certain upper decks. Otherwise you need to walk through the cabin hallways to get there.