Wednesday 19 and Thursday 20 September - Day 29 and 30 - at sea

Nothing really to say about the last couple of sea days - we used them to totally chill out.  We blew some money at the casino, I went to a couple of "Enrichment Lectures", ate too much, all the usual things we do on a cruise  :-)

I've been gathering my thoughts about the whole cruise, and I'm posting them here mostly for my own reference later.

Embarking and Disembarking.  Bottom line - based on this one experience, the way Royal Caribbean deals with embarking is organised a whole lot better than on Princess or P&O.  However, disembarking was a completely different story.  It started off fine - we were organised in groups and were allowed to stay in our cabin until it was time to go and wait for departure.  However, they called our group to leave the ship *far* too early, and we got caught up with a crew drill of all things.  It took us more than an hour to get off the ship, and by then some tempers were fraying.

Food.  My standards are pretty low - just the fact that someone cooks the food and cleans up afterwards is heaven as far as I'm concerned  :-)
However, I found the food to be quite good, both in the Windjammer Buffet and in the dining room.  The only thing we learned to avoid is breakfast in the dining room - it's not so well organised, so unless you want to sit around for an hour or so you're better off at the buffet.
Like a lot of cruise lines now, as well as the old-fashioned set dining times, Royal Caribbean has a concept called 'My Time Dining' where you just show up in the dining room whenever you like and they seat you at random with other people.  They also recognise that some people like the idea of eating whenever the urge takes them, but also don't necessarily want to eat with other people, so they keep a stock of 'tables for two'.  Funny thing is though, for most of the cruise, we ended up getting a table for two, but then eating with the same three or four couples - all the others were Americans and we all ended up quite happily chatting each day anyway.  Thinking about it, we probably drove the wait-staff  nuts, as the 'tables for two' are in fairly high demand, usually by people who really don't want to talk to anyone except each other :-)


Cabin.  Our cabin is a "Superior Ocean View Cabin with Private Balcony" - basically at the higher end price-wise of the balcony cabins.  We have been in similar cabins on Princess and P&O, and this one compares quite favourably - it seems to be a little larger than most of our previous cabins, and it's set out quite well.  The balcony is a reasonable size - big enough for two comfortable chairs and a small table.  Nowhere near as big as the lovely Caribe deck ones on Princess, but also nowhere near as small as the tiny excuses for a balcony on for example the Pacific Jewel.  Also a three-seat sofa, as far as we can remember we've never had a sofa in a balcony cabin before (we did in the mini-suite on the Pacific Dawn).  And, even little things are just a bit better - eg the safe is actually big enough to put a couple of laptops in (not that we'd ever bother).


Wifi internet access - almost all of their documentation says that it's available everywhere, but it isn't. This is fairly important for us - not just because we're internet addicts but being away from home for so long we really need to be able to access the internet for banking etc.  There are a few hotspots around the ship but most of them are hopeless.  They're either in really inappropriate places such as the Windjammer Buffet (always crowded, so if you sit down and log on you're depriving someone of a place to have their meal!!) and the solarium (always humid / wet - there's a pool in the middle of it), and places where there are no seats - eg the library where there's only about 6 seats and they're invariably full, or Stargazers which has plenty of seats but is often closed for private functions. Apparently at the next refurbishment the wifi will be extended so that it's accessible in all cabins, but that's not until next year sometime.    Of course the actual access is still "cruise ship" standard which is roughly equivalent to dial-up!


Smoking.  Obviously we are far too accustomed to the 'no smoking inside' rules at home.  However, it's ridiculous to claim that 'some areas' in the Casino are smoking areas because all you need is one person to be smoking and the whole place stinks of it.  And, it's rarely more than one person (and quite often that one person isn't gaming at all, they're just smoking!!) - really with that sort of a minority RCI really need to reconsider just whose 'rights' they should be sticking up for. On the other hand, we were lucky with nearby cabins - apparently it's acceptable to smoke on the balcony, but no-one near to us did (not that we had a lot of days where the balcony was all that useful!)


Entertainment - we don't usually go to shows on cruises, and this one has been no exception.  The only organised events I have attended have been some 'Enrichment' lectures, and I've definitely been to worse ones.  The thing about going to a lecture on a cruise ship is that if the speaker is boring, the gentle rocking of the ship can so easily send you off to sleep, specially if you're drugged up on seasickness tablets.  Not a problem with any of these lectures - although the speaker was a little disorganised, the subject matter (Forensics and Criminal Investigations) was interesting to me, and as a former member of the DA office in Los Angeles he has a lot of inside knowledge about a lot of interesting cases.


Overall - I have to admit that it was somewhat of a disappointment, not because of the cruise line but because of the weather.  I'd never have dreamed that a cruise across the North Atlantic could be disrupted by a hurricane!  The real disappointment is of course that we missed seeing both the Faroe Islands and Newfoundland - it doesn't seem likely that we'll ever get to see either of them now.