Precious Memories: Two Sea Days on Carnival Splendor

7/22/2008 & 7/23/2008 -- Two Sea Days on board the Carnival Splendor

After the intense four days visiting Helsinki, St. Petersburg, and Tallinn, it was great to have two sea days to relax and unwind. Mind you that the loud banging noise that bothered us in the first part of this Baltic cruise was still there, except that we didn't hear it as much maybe because we were on land and that the ship was not moving that much. Now that we are sailing all day long, suppose to be relaxing and enjoying the ship, the loud banging noise returned and it was quite irritating. We finally got the staff at the purser's desk to come up and listen to it for themselves. "Yep, definitely loud noise" was the verdict. She then called the engineering people to come up and see what the problem was. Two big guys came and they told the purser to move us to another cabin. They said it was the metal inside the wall that is warping back and forth that made the loud noise. Usuallly it would happen to older ships and they were very surprised that a brand new ship like the Splendor would have this problem. They would have to take the wall down to fix it and no one should be staying in this cabin for the time being.

The purser asked if it was OK to move us to another cabin. With two days left, we felt that it was kind of troublesome to pack and move but she said she will send people to help. So we followed her to our new cabin on deck 7, a balcony cabin. This turned out to be very nice as we sailed in and out of Amsterdam in the next couple of days.

Here is John Heald, a popular cruise director. We were invited to this private meeting with John who answered many of our questions about cruising and Carnival.