Ryan and I enjoyed our babymoon so much, that less than a month after we got home from it we went ahead and booked our next cruise! We knew we'd have an 8 month old at the time of sailing, and kept that in mind with our booking. We live in Houston, so we purposefully booked a cruise out of Galveston to make traveling with a baby as easy as possible. We were a little adventurous when we booked a 7 night cruise with a baby, but it worked out just fine!
Related post: All about cruising with an 8 month old
We really enjoyed our cruise, and I'm so glad my daughter was able to come with us! She had the time of her life and is already a VIFP member. Cruising as a parent is definitely a lot more hands-on then cruising as a kid who is just going with the flow. Ryan and I were grateful that we both had cruising experience so that we weren't having to learn all the cruise things for the first time with a kid, because traveling with a baby is a little more stressful than normal. Eventually, our daughter (and future kid) will be old enough to go play at the kids club all day and we will be able to hang out in the adults-only section in peace.
Carnival Vista Review
The Vista was one of the smaller ships I've been on in a while, it holds about 4,000 passengers. A smaller ship was nice in our circumstance because it didn't feel overcrowded and we didn't feel like we were getting turned around all the time. It was a little weird seeing the main bar and shopping in the middle of the ship be so much less than what I'm used to, but what they had was still nice. The Red Frog Pub actually had a mini brewery on board which was cool to see, and the live music that they had was great.
The rooms on Carnival Vista
We got a balcony room again, and it was perfect with a baby. We brought a non-wifi baby monitor and could sit outside with our drinks and watch downloaded Netflix shows on our iPad without waking her. The balcony was actually really big! I brought a baby pool and set it up on the balcony, and there was room for the pool and the chairs and patio table to all fit pretty well. Carnival lets you bring one bottle of wine per person, so I just made sure to bring wine bottles that had screw-top lids instead of cork to easily open without a corkscrew, and I brought silicone wine glasses for us. It was nice just to relax and sip my sangria to the sound of the ocean in the evenings.
Having a baby on board did make the room feel a lot smaller than normal, so I was glad that we went with a balcony room because those tend to be bigger than Oceanview rooms and definitely bigger than inside cabins. I tried to stay on top of organization for this trip and I think it helped our room not seem like a tornado had just came through. We stashed a pop-up hamper in one of the closets and I found that really helped with not having the floors covered with dirty clothes, and we didn't have to sacrifice what few drawer space we had as a dirty clothes drawer. I also did the cruise hack where you put a shoe organizer on the wall with metal hooks (since the walls are magnetic). Unfortunately, the magnetic hooks I bought weren't big enough to fit the loop of the shoe organizer, so it wasn't set up right and couldn't hold much weight. Once we got home, I immediately got longer hooks for next time.
I did the water package and wi-fi package again, and recommend both. The bottled water is really cheap on Carnival, and it tastes so much better than sink water. There is a "cooler" in your fridge that will keep the water (and my wine) cool, but it's not quite as cold as a fridge. The wi-fi is decently priced, we just pre-downloaded Spotify playlists, Netflix shows, and Ms. Rachel on YouTube (if you know, you know) and did just fine. It wasn't the greatest at downloading longer videos on Instagram or TikTok, but it worked for us.
Eating on Carnival Vista
We did the Your Time dining on this trip after loving it on our last cruise. Our thought was that this would be perfect with a baby because we could eat when she was hungry. That didn't work out so well this time. While on the Sunrise in 2022 we could check in to dining on the app as we were leaving our room and a table would be ready for us by the time we got to the dining room, on the Vista in 2023 it was a disappointing experience.
On formal night, we checked in a little after 7, and didn't get seated until 8:30 and didn't get our entrees until 9. We wanted our daughter to experience the "formal" dinner and got great family photos of us all dressed up, but she was miserable and we skipped the 2nd formal night (because it was a longer cruise, there were 2 formal nights) and did the buffet instead. It seemed that every time we tried to have dinner (or even breakfast on our last sea day) in the dining room, the service was incredibly slow. I'm used to servers taking your order pretty quickly and getting your food out not long after that, but that definitely didn't happen this trip.
The buffet on the Vista was great. They had little tables with umbrellas set up inside to make it feel like you were at a beachfront restaurant inside, which was a cute touch. We also ate at Guy's Pig & Anchor BBQ and that was really good food. We had planned on trying out the JiJi Asian kitchen on a sea day, but we never had time for it. Overall, the food was good, but the dining experience just wasn't up to cruise standards.
What to do on Carnival Vista
For a smaller ship, there seemed to be a lot we could do, even with a baby! We took her to Deal or No Deal and she did just fine for one round of that before she got bored. There was a putt-putt course that we did with her, and Ryan just wore her in the Tushbaby and golfed with one hand. On the last day at sea, we took turns holding her while the other went down the water slides, which were great even for adults. Outside of the RedFrog pub were some picnic benches that were attached to the table as one big gliding swing. It was a really unique place to hang out during the day.
There was also a kids club onboard. We went to a Dr. Seuss reading, which honestly was just okay because it was so quick. But it was cute that they gave each kid the same book so you could follow along with the story. There was actually a whole Dr. Seuss library for the kids right outside of the kids club that I thought was cute. It was a big room with a toy box of baby toys, so although our daughter was too young for the kids club, it was still a safe place for her to practice crawling. There were activities planned on sea days where babies could come, but the parents needed to stay with them. We forgot about this on the first sea day, and were disappointed that we were the only ones who showed up on the second sea day. The staff was still great and let my daughter have the kids club all to herself, and they gave her a whole bag of ball-pit balls to play with.
Exotic Western Caribbean cruise
Roatan, Honduras
I've been to Roatan on a prior cruise, and it was my favorite cruise destination. Happy to report back, that it still is! My last trip to Roatan was through Royal Caribbean, and Carnival stopped at a differ part of the port. I think I like the Carnival stop even better! The water in Roatan is beautifully clear, there's lots of small fish that will swim with you even in shallow parts of the water, I've never seen a seaweed/seagrass infestation, and the water is the perfect temp.
The "excursion" we booked for this stop was just a clamshell, which essentially just guarantees you 2 beach chairs that are fully shaded. The staff at this port was AMAZING! We had to navigate finding where to give our tickets once we were off the ship, and the staff not only helped us get to the right person, they helped us find a clamshell that was near a tree for extra shade for our baby, and was near the sidewalk so we didn't have to carry our stroller far. Later, when our daughter fell asleep in Ryan's arms, the staff came over and propped a table under the clamshell to angle it down more to better shade us since the sun had moved.
There was a huge bar/restaurant right behind the beach so you could easily get food and top off your drinks. They offered souvenir drinks that had a lid with a straw and a foam koozie to keep your drink cold, and refills were at a discounted price. We saved our cups and fully intend to bring them back the next time we stop here.
As for the stop itself, what I love about it is that you don't have to do an excursion (more on that later in Belize), so you can walk right off the ship and onto a beautiful beach in a couple minutes, and spend $0 the entire stop if you bring snacks and water with you and don't drink any alcohol. There is a chair lift like at an amusement park that can take you to the beach faster and save you the walk while giving you a unique view, but I don't think there were many other options that I'd consider.
Belize City, Belize
Maybe Roatan set my expectations up too high, because Belize City was my least favorite stop I've ever made on a cruise. If you like adventure and everyone in your party is at least teenage level or older, then you might like this stop. None of the excursions offered were suitable for a baby, because they were all snorkeling, or river tubing through a cave, or taking an hour-long tour around the city. Since I couldn't book an excursion, I figured we'd just get off the boat and park it on a beach like Roatan. That was a mistake. There are no beaches near the port where you can play in the water, as they all are rocky shores.
The port itself is still getting built out. There was 1-2 restaurants that I remember seeing and then basically like a flea market where you can buy bad knock-off designer bags or crappy souvenirs and that's about it. We walked around for a while trying to figure out what to do when my husband finally found someone who told us they could take us to an "adventure park" where the price would be $20 per adult and the baby free. We agreed to try that and then he walked us up to a random cash register to check out and suddenly the price jumped to $80 a person real fast and Ryan and I recognized a bait-and-switch scam when we saw one and left. Not going to lie, this was a little stressful and I started to tell Ryan that I just wanted to get back on the ship at this point where I knew we were safe and could find something to do. But, Ryan has a sense of adventure so he walked out through the port to a whole bunch of taxis and haggled with a group of them to see who could take us to the adventure park on the cheap. Our driver was great and he took us to Kukumba Beach and figured out what time our ship left and planned to pick us up exactly an hour before it left so we wouldn't be rushing to make it to the ship on time, but he gave us his phone number so we could call him if we wanted to go back earlier.
Kukumba Beach actually worked out really well! You could get a bucket of beer for like $12 and there were several food options which were pretty cheap. The place itself is sandy, but it's not on a beach. It has a man made salt-water and sand pool that has a huge slide and floating trampolines to play on. Our daughter really liked playing in the sand and in the water. And it had free wi-fi! The one con was that the beach chairs were wooden, so they weren't exactly comfortable. I had packed a sandproof beach blanket with us, so I just laid that down and then a camping towel on top of it on the sand for our daughter to have a softer place to nap.
We were talking to a family that showed up about an hour after us, and turns out that they were on one of those city tour excursions and that this was a stop on their tour. They were really jealous that we got to go straight here and back, because they felt that the tour was just meh and would rather spend more time at the adventure park than taking the tour to get there and then more of a tour to get back to the ship. We also paid significantly less than they did to get there. If we were to go back to Belize again with small children, we'd probably just take a taxi back to Kukumba Beach again, because there's really not much else to do if you're not dong a more physically-demanding excursion. Hopefully the port is a little more updated the next time we go, because it definitely felt sketchy.
Cozumel, Mexico
Our last stop was in Cozumel, which my husband and I have both been to several times before on past cruises. It has a huge shopping center with nice stores, and that's basically what we did. There's several bars right when you get into the port, so Ryan grabbed us some drinks and we just walked around and shopped. Ryan was begging to get our daughter a sombrero because he has an obnoxiously giant one from a prior cruise, so I told him if he could find a baby-sized one then he could get it. Really, I thought it was a fool's errand, but of course the very next store had one! We also stopped into Cariloha and ordered some sheets. What's nice is that they ship your purchases to your home for free, so you don't have to worry about packing what you bought when you go home. This is exactly why I always throw a foldable backpack into my beach bag on port days, so that we have a way to carry all our port purchases back onto the ship.
Our daughter fell asleep in her stroller while we were shopping, so we stopped and had a long lunch at Fat Tuesdays while she had her nap. We ended up deciding that this was enough for one day, so we didn't go to the beach on this stop. I think part of it was knowing that we were going to be back in Mexico on the beach for a week in Puerto Vallarta in just a few months, so we didn't feel like we were missing out. But, if we come here again we'll probably just take a taxi to Paradise Beach on our own.
Overall thoughts of this cruise
We had a good cruise, and our 8-month-old really enjoyed her first cruise, but this was the cruise that made us consider going over to Royal Caribbean. Overall, I'd rate the cruise as a 7/10. It wasn't a bad cruise, but there was nothing really that stood out to make it a great cruise (other than Roatan).
Our next trip
Mexico just once a year isn't enough for our little world North America-traveling baby, so we're going back! Every year we take a big family vacation with my in-laws and after how outrageously expensive Hawaii was, this year we've decided to save some money and go to an all-inclusive in Puerto Vallarta!
