Busy DREAMin'!!

March 20^th, 2013

Hey all… I’m trying to be better about writing more often and I’ve been given a great opportunity so I’m trying my best to take advantage of it. It is unfortunate the circumstances that it has come about, but I’m enjoying it that’s for sure.

Last time I wrote, Auntie and Uncle were going cruising and we were going to meet up in Cozumel. Well, that has happened and it was an absolute wonderful day. Couldn’t have asked for a better day! After my ship docked, I finished up what I needed to do and headed over to the RC (Royal Caribbean) pier. Our piers are the two closest to each other out of the three total piers in Cozumel. So it took me about 15 minutes, if that, to walk to where we said we would meet up. We then headed to do a little shopping (Shocker!) at some of the local shops. Since Auntie and Uncle cruised on Royal, I had to bring them to spend some money at the Carnival pier! Haha I made sure they got all the good deals though! Then we headed to a restaurant called Three Amigos and ate lunch with a couple of my friends from the Dream, Ben & Rachel. After lunch we headed down town and just walked around a little bit more. Got some sweet new sunglasses for Auntie and I!! After a while we headed back to the ships because their back on board time was earlier than mine. It was awesome to see them though!! Definitely what I needed being a bit homesick still.

Well, the next few weeks were relatively normal until I was host on duty again! We lost two hosts on the 9^th, but we also got two new hosts. It was sad to see Mr. B and Ben go, but excited to see what the two new hosts would bring. We have Jase and Mitch now. I’ve worked with Mitch before while I was on the Freedom last contract so that was nice to see another familiar face. We also had our new musical director sign on, Bryan. I’ve worked with him before too. It’s amazing how many people I know from all the moving around I did last contract!! Well from my last contract I mentioned that there would always be something that would go wrong during my time as HOD (host on duty), whether it was big or small. This time is was big!! If you haven’t seen the news lately, that could be a good thing, but you have probably heard that a few Carnival ships have been having some issues. Well, my ship was one of those. I am currently on the Carnival Dream. We were docked in St. Maarten on Wednesday and experienced an issue while doing some regular testing of our emergency back-up generators. Apparently a fuse was singed and that got repaired but that caused something else to go wrong. Without our emergency generators functioning properly we cannot set sail with guests on board. That caused us to sit in port over night seeing if they could fix the issue, but it was not fixed. Thursday night Carnival had started arranging flights for all the guests to fly out of St. Maarten and they had the CareTeam as well as our debarkation shoreside team from Port Canaveral fly in to help us debark all the guests. We had about 20-25 chartered flights out of St. Maarten, some guests were booked on commercial flights as well. We had about 30 passengers that couldn’t fly so they got booked on other cruise lines that were coming into St. Maarten. As unfortunate as the Triumph situation was, it helped make our process a bit smoother. A lot of people that came to help us also went to help the Triumph. The only difference was that we had one day to organize things and the Triumph had 3 days before the ship got back into port.

It was quite a process to get all the guests off the ship. Guests were required to provide us with information of when their flights out of Orlando were, or if they were driving. From that information the CareTeam booked guests on appropriate flights, but of course nothing could be that easy. Many guests were not booked with their friends that they wanted to fly with or other situations like that. Eventually everyone got off the ship though. It was a long three-day debarkation process. I was up every morning at 3:30 or 4:00am. We were on the gangway all day unless we were up doing an activity. We were rotating all the activities, but if you weren’t on an activity you were down on the gangway guiding and saying good-bye to guests.

We still had our normal plus some special entertainment in the evenings. We got a special surprise and Jon Secada came and performed for us! It was pretty awesome! We were all running around trying to get everything set up for his performance. I had the pleasure of meeting the local guy we hired to come tune the piano for him. I brought him up to lido for some dinner, then we walked around the ship and I learned more about the island of St. Maarten. It was very interesting. Then we had Marcus Anthony the next night. He is an awesome performer as well. He is always around on one of our ships.

The neatest part about this entire experience the past week has been the guests. They have all been so positive about the entire situation. We have never had things be like they said on the news. There was only one toilet that over flowed and that was quickly cleaned up, and one elevator that has been out for weeks already. The guests actually didn’t want to get off the ship! They were loving the fact that they got three days in St. Maarten! The other plus for me was that we got to be in port with the Valor! I got to see Harrison, from my host college and Cassie who was also on the Paradise while I was there. It was a little reunion!

We are now safe and sound back in Port Canaveral. They are working on the issue and we are supposed to sail again on Saturday. I hope everyone is doing well! Baseball season is finally here and March Madness is starting!! Hope everyone enjoys it and I will be watching as much as I can! Hope to talk to you all soon, feel free to contact me whenever you like and I will get back to you as soon as possible.

Smiles for all!

Xoxox

-A