Saturday 8 September - Day 18 - boarding the Brilliance of the Seas

We checked out of the Cabinn hotel at about 10:45am.
Paul and I are in some disagreement about the Cabinn concept - I thought the room showed an ingenious use of a tiny amount of space, but Paul wasn't impressed at all.  I have to agree that I was surprised about their refusal to store his insulin in their refrigerator (of course, there wasn't one in the room) - that's the first time it has happened to us.
Here's a couple of pictures of the Cabinn, although they don't really show just how tiny it was:

 The bed is actually two singles side by side.  No sheets at all, effectively you sleep on a little doona, with another one over you. Some of the rooms have a third (bunk) bed.  You can't see the "air-conditioning" - it's a tiny door at the end of the bed that you can open to let the breeze in  :-)

 Enough hanging space for maybe 6 or 8 things

 Part of the desk - not huge but big enough for two chairs, and lots of power points - important for us!

The bathroom - definitely the tiniest one I've ever seen.  There's no separate shower - the shower head hangs from the ceiling and there's a circular shower curtain that takes up all of the available space -basically the entire floor gets wet when you take a shower.

Because of their lack of ability to help us with Paul's insulin, I was a little concerned that the Cabinn reception staff mightn't be willing / able to call us a taxi, but they did, and it arrived almost straight away.  We checked out of the hotel at 10:45 and we were at the dock ready to check in by 11am.   The official boarding time shown on one of our documents was 11:30 and another document said even later, so we assumed we'd have to wait, but they were already allowing passengers on board.
Got our cards and everything without a hitch, and went on-board to wait.  Royal Caribbean does this a bit differently from Princess - Princess won't let you on board until all the cabins are ready, but Royal Caribbean allows you on board straight away but stops you from getting to your stateroom until it's ready - which they seem to always promise will be 1:00pm.  I'm still using my crutches and we had a fair bit of carry-on luggage too, so we found a quiet lounge and dumped all our stuff - Paul did a bit of an exploration of the ship, but I just sat around and read my kindle.  Rooms were ready as promised at 1pm.  Ours is a fairly typical balcony cabin - quite nice, plenty of room to hang clothes.
Only two hitches so far.  First was that Paul's luggage arrived at our room by the time we were allowed in, and mine hadn't arrived before sail-away.  Around 5pm I got a phone call to go to the 'naughty room' - that's where they take all the bags that have been pulled up in the security xray checks.  Problem with mine was a small pocket knife I've carried with me on a number of cruises.  In the end they let me keep it since it's so small, as long as I promise not to carry it around or take it on shore.  I'm going to post it home from New York though, as we have another Royal Caribbean cruise to come, and I don't want to have to go to the naughty room again  :-)     The lady in front of me had her knife confiscated and she was a bit annoyed because she uses it to fix her glasses!
The suitcases in the naughty room were divided into two main sets - 'alcohol' and everything else.  It's completely forbidden to bring alcohol on board a Royal Caribbean ship, but lots of people try. There's even a company that makes soft plastic flasks - "Rumrunners" - that you fill with alcohol and that supposely are much more difficult for security to see. Paul actually had some alcohol in his suitcase, a tiny bottle of scotch that we bought in Edinburgh - we intended to drink it straight away but we just haven't gotten around to it yet. We're assuming it was either too small for them to see, or too small for them to care about.  
The 'other' stuff that's most likely to be confiscated, apart from knives and alcohol, is anything that creates heat - for example people try to bring electric irons or coffee making machines aboard.  Royal Caribbean  deems anything like that to be a real risk of fire - they all get confiscated and handed back at the end of the cruise.   I've also heard of them confiscating extension cords and power boards, but they let mine go through.
We were one of three cruise ships in the port - also there were the MSC Magnifica and the Costa Luminosa.  We left before them - no idea where they were going.

We got to our cabin and realised that Royal Caribbean has stretched the truth on a couple of things. They promise wi-fi internet access in every room, but when you get on board it's no such thing- you have to take your laptop to one of their hot-spots to log on.  They also promised a refrigerator in every room but again it's no such thing - it's basically a cooler (and not very cool either).  The steward offered to take Paul's insulin to a refrigerator somewhere, but that would be a real pain since Paul is currently having two insulin shots per day.  So, we got the steward to bring a bucket of ice and we put that into the cooler.  Seems to be working so far.
Apart from that, things are going fairly well.  We've checked out much of the ship and it all looks very nice. Dinner was pretty good for mass produced food.  I had a Spinach Salad for entree and Paul had a fruit basket, and for our main course we both had pork cutlets.  Most important issue is the coffee - all I can say is that people who complain about the coffee on Princess cruise ships musn't have tried Royal  Caribbean's!
Didn't do anything much after dinner - we've had a few long days and decided to have an early night.