Carnival Pride Europe Cruise Review: Day 10 – Vigofeatured

Day six of our cruise brought us into Vigo, a coastal city on the northwest coast of Spain. We were hitting the halfway point of our cruise, with one sea day and four port days down and one sea day and five more ports to go.

Nine ports in 12 days. Man, we must have been drinking some optimism syrup when we booked this one!

Vigo is a small city compared to the likes of Barcelona or Madrid. Nestled in the Galicia region of Spain, it has a population of just under half a million people who call the 43 square miles of the city home. Many people transit through Vigo on their way to Santiago de Compostela, best known for the Camino de Santiago (which you can actually visit as an excursion via the ship!). We had initially planned on booking a tour to Santiago but when he forecast showed a yellow alert for high rain and strong storms, we decided we’d be better off playing the day by ear and having a low-key port day instead of heading off into an outdoor excursion in a storm.

So naturally, it was bright and sunny when we woke up. Thanks, Accuweather.

((To be fair, we did get some rain and a couple of gnarly thunderstorms — just not until the afternoon!))

We had intended on going to the dining room for breakfast, only to find out that they had closed their breakfast service at 8:30 AM. The limited service hours were something we struggled with this cruise — the dining room’s hours were so much more limited than we were used to and it didn’t stop there. Even the shops were open on limited hours, usually just for two or three hours in the late evening, remaining closed for hours after we left port. Since the dining room was out of the question, we just headed up to the Lido deck for breakfast. Despite the fact that we docked early and were hours into our port time, the Lido marketplace was packed. We’d grown frustrated by the long lines, but thankfully, the Blue Iguana Cantina never had a line. Their made to order breakfast burritos always came out perfect and, bonus, they have the most delicious arepas during breakfast hours. So we grabbed some breakfast burritos and arepas and began plotting out our day.

The cruise ship terminal was perfectly located, at the nexus of the main city and the old town. The old town, much like Lisbon and Porto, was filled with steep inclines that can make touring by foot difficult. We found a helpful hack, though — the ship docks right outside a shopping mall. If you go to the third floor of that shopping mall, there’s a bridge that will take you to the entrance of the old town. You’ll still find more sloping streets and stairs as you traverse the old town, but the bridge will get you the first three stories up.

After we got off the ship and crossed the bridge into the old town, we spent most of the morning doing what we do best: getting lost. We picked streets on a whim. We turned down corners just to see what was there. We weren’t looking for anything, we just wanted to see everything. The old town of Vigo is quite charming, a little like Porto, a little like Madrid, a little like Florence even. Flowers adorned windowsills, tiles studded facades and there were these gorgeous central squares where people would just gather. We sat on a bench and watched families come together for breakfast and friends meet up for coffee. I’m so fascinated by how people interact in different cities and cultures and between the beautiful buildings and facades and the people watching, I was enthralled.

I needed some caffeine, so we settled down at a nearby cafe for some cappuccinos. If you’ve never dined on a patio at a European cafe before, you just sit down at an empty table and a server will eventually find you. You can order a full meal or, like we did, just coffee. At some point, they’ll drop your check off at the table and if you’re paying by cash, you just leave it there before you leave. It’s a casual process, but that’s part of what I love about it. There’s something so mindless and fascinating about sitting in a piazza, sipping a foamy cappuccino and just watching the world unfold in front of you.

We kept wandering after our caffeine session. We meandered down more streets. We found a charcuteria and I yolo’ed myself into buying a €25 bottle of vinegar because I liked the bottle and when would I ever find myself back in Vigo anyways if I regretted not buying it? We wandered through gorgeous parks and saw the dinosaur topiaries. And then when it looked like the storm clouds were ready to burst through and disrupt our beautiful day, we headed back to the ship.

Since most folks were still ashore, we took the opportunity to do some laundry. We were at the halfway point of our trip which just sounds insane — it felt like this trip had existed across a lifetime already — but a week and a half into it with the touring schedule we had left us with a metric ton of laundry. We’re Platinum and we get free laundry on the ship, but the Pride has self-service laundromats and it was easy and cheap enough to just do our own laundry. Well, easy enough — one of the washing machines was broken and the laundromat was teeny tiny with a lot of people trying to wash or dry or fold or iron. But we got it done and had fresh clothes for the second half of our trip.

While our clothes were in the wash, we popped upstairs to the Lido deck for lunch. While we were on the fence about the dining options on the boat in general, there are two things that never let us down: the Blue Iguana Cantina and the Asian food line. We got some made to order tacos, some veggie spring rolls, some wonton soup — we basically created our own menu inspired by one of our favorite Jose Andres restaurants, China Poblano.

The rain really stared coming in around 2:00 and we were relieved that we didn’t push ourselves into an excursion during a rainstorm. We finished our laundry and put it all away, we watched some of the Queen’s Jubilee footage on the BBC. We sat on the balcony and watched the storm clouds roll over us.

Back onboard fell at 4:30 for a 5:00 PM sailaway and we decided to enjoy it from our balcony. Vigo is so beautiful, like houses were painted onto these beautiful green hills. Our next door neighbor, however, thought it would be fun to feed the seagulls and started throwing chunks of bread into the water and onto the lifeboats. You know what that meant — dozens…DOZENS…of seagulls started flooding the ship looking for food. Please don’t throw food overboard to feed birds. One, they aren’t meant to eat human food. Two, we’ve already had a bird stuck on our balcony. A big one. A falcon. It was very stressful for both me and the bird. Just don’t do it.

We headed down to deck 3 to watch the Pride sail off into the open waters towards our next stop in La Coruña, and we headed off to the main dining room for dinner. The food was fine, nothing remarkable. The service was slow but accurate. The servers were friendly but aloof. This was very different from the Carnival experience we were used to, but cruising was different than what we had been used to pre-pandemic, too.

After dinner, we headed down to the Taj Mahal for the second production show we’d be treated to onboard: 80’s Pop to the Max. I think we’ve seen this one before. Maybe not. Either way, we loved the high-energy set list and this playlist cast was just SO talented. We loved it so much we came back to see it again for the second showing.

There was still light on the horizon when we left the theater around 10:15 PM. The late sunsets were messing with my internal clock, but we forced ourselves to settle in for the night so that we’d be rested and ready for our day in La Coruña!