Fifteen days out and the Golden Crew is fully unraveling. Tom is convinced Trevor and Jen are colluding against him, Jen discovers her Status Progress says "Red," and Trevor sets a 10:50 PM alarm for the first time in his adult life just to be first through online check-in.

The new Carnival Rewards program went live and the internet lost its mind — Platinum members logging in to find zero points and a "Status Progress: Gold" banner, Diamonds wondering if they'd been demoted, and the crew works through what the screen actually means (spoiler: almost everyone is reading it wrong). What genuinely did go away: the loyalty gift and the past guest reunion party. On the plus side, the Carnival Mastercard now earns three points per dollar on most onboard purchases, credited at the end of each sailing — which Trevor calculates will make Megan Diamond entirely through spa treatments.

In the news: Carnival Breeze traded some paint with the pier in Cozumel, leaving a dent, a dramatic video, and a narrator making it sound considerably worse than it was. Carnival Encounter dropped its Cairns call after the channel got too shallow to transit, affecting sailings in early September. And Carnival Dream is shuffling between piers 25 and 28 in Galveston due to port construction — worth knowing if you're parking.

Also: a social post of someone taking a Carnival shot glass into a Royal Caribbean embarkation, which the crew agrees is a branding problem and also a doing-56-miles-an-hour problem; Java Blue's free breakfast sandwiches; a full referendum on the maple bacon donut; whether Faster to the Fun is worth $250; the peg-leg-and-rubber-ducky plan for a Talk Like a Pirate Day embarkation; and Trevor's cautionary tale about Pizza Ranch fried chicken and the 17 gas stations between Kansas and Oklahoma City.

FRGC5 is officially on Royal Caribbean's Allure of the Seas.

15 days to FRGC4. 365 days to FRGC5. 116 days to the Panama Canal.

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