Coming to you live from the Carnival Freedom!

Carnival Freedom day one
Carnivals Freedom is a very nice ship and we are sailing with 3000 of our closest friends.
We got on board yesterday around noon and dropped our luggage off at our balcony cabin. Since we were hungry we headed up to the Lido deck for a quick lunch before taking a short tour of the ship. The public space on board is very open and very well decorated; the atrium has been decorated for Christmas and looks very festive.
Food on the Lido deck was very tasty and with a great variety of choices of food from Asian to just a nice salad. Ice cream machines are plentiful with a choice of cones or dish. The staff on the Lido deck is very helpful and friendly.

We have the late seating so dinner was at 8:15 PM. We were directed to our table by the dinning room staff we were pleasantly surprised to find that we were in a very quiet area of the dinning room. We were the first to arrive at our table for six, followed shortly by the Huffines from Greely CO. We were soon chatting like old friend and enjoying a very good meal. We also discovered that this was their very first cruise and that they were very impressed. When we were presented with the desert menu Tanner Huffines, a young college student traveling with his parents and a friend, saw that there was a warm Chocolate Melting Cake with ice cream. After his first spoon full of this dessert the words out of his mouth were ‘Where have you been all my life’ We convinced him that he could have seconds of this mouth watering dessert.

Port of Call: Key West Florida

We woke to a beautiful sunrise as we sailed into Key West Florida at7 AM. This port of call is very different from any other that we will be at on this cruise because it still part of the United States. The shopping is very expensive but some of the shops will lower the price a little bit just to make the sale. We have been to the port many times in the past and can get our shopping and site seeing accomplished in about 2 hours including a stop at Sloppy Joes bar, a must for people watching. This trip we bought a Harley Davidson T-shirt for Tim and lots of Key Lime products for Diane. At one Key Lime store we asked how much it would cost to ship a fresh Key Lime pie. The price? $63 to send one overnight. We said no thank you.

This is the beautiful sight that greeted us this morning as we headed into Key West.

Our home for the rest of the week.