John Heald’s Carnival Cruise Blog

I’ve never considered going on a Carnival Cruise until I read John Heald’s blog. He’s a cruise director of Carnival Freedom who seems to love his job, love people and love to travel. Plus, he has a creative and fun sense of humor. He writes part anecdote, part travel advice, and part travel guide info into a blend of passenger stories, anagrams and photographs of tourist sites. He also includes passenger notes and e-mails to him. He’s had more than 400,000 hits since the blog started three months ago.

One set of notes is from passengers offering to lend clothes to people who don’t have a change of clothes because the airline misplaced their luggage. One man packed 24 pair of socks so his wife wrote to Heald that the husband has some socks to spare.

I particularly enjoyed reading Heald’s recounting of what he does in a day and the decisions he makes based on the unpredictable events that happen on a cruise–like when the transformer he needed in order to show the movie Casino Royale blew up–or something. This is a blog that would be fun to check back on because each post if from a different place and there is always something new going on. It’s kind of like being on people’s vacation with them. Right now the ship is heading towards Rhodes, Greece.