Carnival Cruise Ship Stirs Up Excitement

For folks in places like Miami, Florida or New York City, the sight of a cruise ship pulling into their port isn’t really all that big a deal. After all, ships pull up to their respective piers hundreds of times a year, meaning residents are pretty accustomed to seeing giant ships like the Carnival Vista or the Norwegian Escape on their daily commutes. But even a smaller ship — comparatively speaking — can cause a bit of a stir when it arrives in someplace like Portland, Oregon. And that’s what’s happened as the Carnival Legend pulled in this week for a two-week long dry dock.

“It Was Quite Amazing!”

The local media had a field day as people stopped to gawk at the arriving ship. “It was quite amazing,” David LaFranchise told one local media outlet of watching the ship pass beneath the St. Johns Bridge. “It just barely cleared the bridge, so if the water was up a few more feet, we may not have had the boat come in!”

In this day of megaships, it was almost quaint to see folks so excited about the arrival of a ship that would be considered mid-sized by modern standards. The media outlet described the Legend as “massive” and “impossible to miss” before going on to elaborate that it’s 963 feet long and carries around 2,124 guests while weighing in at 88,500 gross tons.

Compare this to, say, the newly launched Carnival Horizon, which is 1,055 feet long, weighs over 133,000 gross tons and carries nearly 4,000 passengers. Or Royal Caribbean’s Symphony of the Seas, which currently holds the title “biggest cruise ship in the world” which weighs an astonishing 228,000 gross tons and can ferry over 6,600 passengers!

New Venues Coming To The Ship

During her two-week stay at Portland’s Vigor Marine Shipyard, some pretty significant upgrades will be made to the Carnival Legend (which will also undergo routine maintenance at the same time). The ship will at last get a Guy’s Burger Joint, as well as poolside BlueIguana Cantina and RedFrog Rum Bar. Another popular venue which has slowly been added to most of the ships in the Carnival fleet is the Alchemy Bar, one of our personal favorite hotspots!

READ MORE: 5 Reasons We Love The Alchemy Bar! 

It’s expected that during the 12 days the Carnival Legend stays in Portland, she’ll boost the local economy by over $40 million. Once her renovations are complete, she’ll sail to Seattle to spend the next few months doing sailings to Alaska.

The Carnival Legend is a Spirit-class ship which was introduced to the fleet in 2002 after being christened by no less than Dame Judi Dench herself. (Infamously, the christening did not go quite as planned, with it taking three tries before the bottle of champagne would actually break, at which point it splashed all over the actress!) The ship’s maiden voyage also happened to be Carnival’s first foray into the European market, a three-day voyage from Harwich (in Essex, England) to Amsterdam and back. The Legend was also the first ship in the Carnival fleet to offer diners options other than the Main Dining Room, and the first to have a wedding chapel!

Have you sailed on the Legend or one of her sister-class ships?