Deen on Deck. It's a travel blog.

Let me start by saying I’ve never really met a cruise I didn’t like. So I may be a bit biased here on the side of forgiving the shortcomings of this smalli-sh, humble, elder-stateswoman (1998 – refurb in 2018) of cruise ships. With only 10 decks, Paradise is small enough to be able to sail out of Port Tampa and make it under the Sunshine Skyway bridge, which is a huge plus. Since, well, I do live very close to Tampa and I’m quite lazy about going far to a port — advantage Paradise.

If you’re looking for a very old-school cruising experience with a late-80’s, early 90’s aesthetic (feel targeted, Rex nightclub?), then you’ll probably be fine with this ship. It’s the vibe I feel like Donald Trump goes for when he imagines “this is how the truly wealthy live… toilets of GOLD” – No, actually, I’m being mean. It’s a few levels less tacky then that.

But yeah, it’s a bit oddly layed out (we were still getting lost on day 4), it’s a bit dated, and the food service had some… issues. Let’s just say that the Elation Dining Room had NOT quite gotten the hang of My Time Dining yet (45-minute wait for a table, 50 minutes more to get a morsel of bread – after begging our waiter 3 times).

You definitely won’t find any rollercoasters or Go-kart tracks on the Paradise, or even a Flow-rider. There’s only one pool and I think a total of four hot tubs (of which the two on the Lido were always in heavy use by the youngins’, and the adults-only one on Serenity deck boiled us like lobsters, where as the other, for whatever reason, was a perfectly reasonable temperature).

Now, to be fair, this was Paradise’s first sailing after the Pandemic, so of course there will be some kinks to work out. On the upside, the ship was clean. Like SO clean. Spotless. Crew, you are killing it there. The food and service in the DESTINY dining room (we switched to early dining after the first night’s… adventure ) was great (Destiny MDR… NOT Elation… we don’t go in there… bad things happen in Elation) – but I will elaborate much more in an upcoming post about the food (with menus!).

Oh, and the show. The show was actually really good — Epic Rock. Definitely worth your half hour of cruise time, if for no other reason than they let some designer go REALLY nuts with the costumes (we got couture, we got steampunk, we got elven…leaf…outfits…and yeahhhhhh, I’m freaking living for it. But that also sounds like another blog post.

So, I’ll leave you with this… yes it’s small and dated (mahhble columns, for sure) — BUT this was also the cruise I paid less than $250 for. Five days of friends, awesome food (NOT in Elation though… never forget), two different countries (one in which I HELD A SLOTH), and a cool show – still a bargain. And the fact that it’s small, gave me one of my favorite cruising moments EVER — passing under the Sunshine Skyway. 🙂