My husband and I decided to take a cruise for our honeymoon. We were first time cruisers and relied on the vacation specialists at Carnival to help us get the best out of our experience. Carnival provided us with our very own vacation planning specialist. He was very pleasant and helpful and answered all of our questions and helped make the process easy.
My husband has ALS/Lou Gehrigs's Disease and is 99% wheelchair bound.in speaking with our vacation specialist I stressed the need for a wheelchair accessible room with handicap bathroom. He stated it was no problem. He actually told us that for a little more, he could upgrade us to a balcony suite. I asked him over and over again about the wheelchair accessibility and handicapped accessibility for this room, and he stated it would be the same, the room itself would just be bigger. We thought this sounded good and booked it. We were really excited about our trip.
We got the the ship, check in was a breeze. We got to our room and the wheelchair could not fit through the door. There were no rooms available. The ship was full. My husband is six feet tall 260 pounds. I am five foot three inches. To get him in the room, I had to help lift him out of the chair, help him balance and have him lean on my shoulders to walk him over to the bed to sit down. I then checked the bathroom. The was about a foot step up into the bathroom. This was going to be another problem. It was. For the next four days, It would take us a half an hour to just get my husband into the bathroom to take a shower. Then another 20 minutes to get him out. He needs assistance using the restroom and so every time he needed to go, we had to go back to our room. I had to lift him from his chair take him to the bed so he could use the urinal we brought so he wouldn't have to try to get up into the bathroom.
Overall we had a good time, we didn't let these things ruin our honeymoon, it just made it a little harder to enjoy. I now know a little more about cruising will never let this happen again.
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