Carnival Legend - Tampa

Tampa

Our Tampa plans are to stay at the Holiday Inn Express Rocky Point…primarily because they offer a free shuttle from the airport to the hotel, from the hotel to the ship, and after the cruise from the ship to the airport. My sister from St. Louis was joining us on the cruise and her flight arrived at almost the same time as ours. A quick call to the HI Express and the shuttle is there in 10 minutes!

Our tummies are rumbling so we do a quick check in and head next door to the Bahama Breeze restaurant. (The ONLY restaurant within walking distance.) At 2 o’clock in the afternoon the place is pretty deserted. Later that evening there was live music and it was really hopping!

I was having trouble trying to get my reading glasses on with my sunglasses perched on my head. The kids were in "make fun of Mom mode" and started piling on everyone else's sunglasses as well. No problem...I was still able to fill out the credit card thingy and pay the bill.

Being frugal (ie cheap) I had booked 2 rooms for the 8 of us. My sister, Bob and I shared a regular room and the 5 “kids” were booked in a suite. It wasn’t a true suite in that it was just a single room…but it did have a fold out couch and a small kitchenette area. The suite was only $10 more and was definitely worth it for the extra space. From the time I made the reservation the price dropped twice (I caught this by looking at the hotel web page online) and each time they honored the new price. We ended up paying $84 for the regular room and $94 for the suite (before taxes.) Knowing how much we would have spent for taxis for 8 people I think this was an excellent deal! Unfortunately I didn’t take any photos of the rooms.

The rest of the afternoon was spent “playing” in the hotel pool.

While we were swimming the fire alarm in the hotel started going off. A firetruck arrived with a lot of good looking firemen who spent over an hour running in and out of the hotel.

From what we could gather, a pipe leading to the emergency sprinklers had burst and water was pouring out of a storage room at the back of the hotel. There was also some strange smell in the lobby…so not sure what that was about. We just continued to have fun in the pool and by the time we were done all was back to normal.

The hotel shuttle is also available for free for trips within 4 miles of the hotel. The kids made a trip to a nearby mall, but the 3 old folks ordered pizza and relaxed.

This last photo looks weird I know. With Matt in chiropractic school we always try and get some sort of “free treatments” when we are together. It looks like he is trying to poke out Zach’s eye with a pen…but I think he was trying to teach Bob a method to ease headaches…and he in turn was practicing on Erica.