Cruises are one of my favorite forms of travel for many reasons. The forced disconnect is perhaps the biggest one- to be separated from the world at large for several days, allowing me to save up ideas and return to life as usual with renewed energy and strategy. A close second is how many opportunities for competitive challenges there are on cruise ships.
Carnival is my favorite cruise line for a simple reason I’m shocked other cruise lines haven’t matched- if you win an event aboard the ship, you get a prize specific to the ship you were on. For most Carnival ships, the prize is a small “ship on a stick” trophy, although the Venezia, one of the newest ships, just gave away medallions. Both sets of prizes include the ship name, making them the perfect mementos, better than my generic Celebrity Cruises coffee mug, or my generic Norwegian decks of playing cards. Note that if any cruise line starts giving away coffee mugs with the ship’s name on it as a prize, that would instantly leapfrog Carnival!
My journey to a Carnival Magic trophy was a bit more difficult than previous trips. I typically get a trophy early on in the trip, but this time, every trivia had someone declaring a perfect score. I was doing well, but there’s always an absurdly specific question about the year something happened, or a detail like knowing that Timex watch ads always display the time as 10:39 and 36 seconds.
Three days into the trip, I had nothing. Even the brainteaser challenge, completely up my alley, was a loss – I missed the following:
“You go to the woods to find it. You leave with it in your hand. You search again and again but can’t find it any more.”
The answer was “splinter.” It’s strangely phrased – I don’t know who goes to the woods to find a splinter!
The biggest risk about the trivia challenges is that they’re self-reported. That puts players at the mercy at what someone else things is “close enough” – like in the aforementioned Timex question, if someone gives themselves credit for saying “10.” There’s also a risk for how people count the score when playing as a group, i.e. counting the total questions at least one member of the group got right rather than tallying scores individually, or if the answer rings a bell after you hear it.
Halfway through the cruise, I started to doubt that i was going to win a trivia challenge. Thankfully, there was one trivia challenge that circumvented the above risks- Mobile Trivia, where players buzz in on their phones as quickly as possible with the answer. I played this type of trivia before on the Carnival Venezia and had done well on it there.
Mobile Trivia didn’t let me down. The questions weren’t that hard, but my ability to read quickly paid off and kept me at the top of the leaderboard wire to wire. After the first round, Christina was in 3rd place, and she doubled down her efforts and eventually got 2nd. We won a trophy, a medallion, and a T-shirt for our wins, and we could relax for the rest of the trip. We eventually won five more trophies, giving most of them away.
Regarding the cruise itself, I’ve been really impressed by the ports. Nassau is a cruise staple, but it’s always nice and the new port boardwalk is a fun space to explore. Amber Cove (Dominican Republic) really impressed me, too. From the ship, we couldn’t see much, but ashore we found a fun selection of shops and vistas to explore. Our favorite shop was the chocolate shop, where we tried a few varieties of chocolate, including some interesting novelties (chocolate tea!) and picked up souvenirs. Grand Turk had nice beaches, and we found a Mercury 7 monument there which tied in extremely well with our earlier visit to Kennedy Space Center on the same trip.
I’m enjoying the trip but looking forward to getting back to things that matter. Disconnecting from the world for a few days allows me to come back with renewed vigor. I just need to hurry to get my next cruise on the calendar so I can look forward to another one of these.
Leave a Reply