Tag: vacation

MSC Seaside: The Naming Ceremony!

It’s 4 am on the morning of day 2 here aboard the Seaside, and with a little insomnia setting in, it seemed like a good time for a look at the Seaside’s naming ceremony we were fortunate to be able to attended last night.

First, I have to say, I’m loving this so far. It’s our first inaugural sailing, and things have gone pretty well in my opinion. Boarding was a little slow, but that’s to be expected, as everyone (media and travel industry) pretty much showed up at the same time, so check in took a little longer than it would for a normal sailing. The crew have been outstanding, the ship is beautiful, and we’re having a blast! I think my only true complaint was the gala dinner. Being that everyone had the same seating time, they served a set menu, one that really didn’t fit my eating habits. Very seafood heavy, with veal as the only non-fishy option for the entree:

(click the little arrow on the right side to move to the menu pic)

With it not really fitting our tastes, we ended up skipping out a little early and hitting the buffet, which gave me a second opportunity to have a slice of that awesome MSC pizza :).

Aside from the tiny dinner menu hiccup, things have been awesome so far. The naming ceremony itself was fun, with a number of speakers from MSC and the local community. Mario Lopez hosted:

Throughout the night he brought out a number of people, including Miami Dolphins legend Dan Marino:

The night also included performances by Andrea Bocelli with Voices of Haiti, and was capped off with a short concert by Ricky Martin! I haven’t had a chance to upload any of Andrea Bocelli’s performance yet, so keep an eye on our social media pages. Here’s a portion of Ricky Martin’s performance, with another short clip also available on our Instagram:

Following the speakers, the music, and all the fun, it was time to get down to business. One last thing needed to happen to make this all official, the ribbon cutting!

All in all it was a great ceremony, and we were happy to have been a part of it. I know I’m not doing it justice, and I’m going to blame the early morning hour/lack of sleep for that, but if you want to see the entire thing, head on over to MSC’s Youtube channel and check out the whole show!

The evening was capped off with some fun in the atrium with the entertainment team. Definitely saw some familiar faces out there, and can’t wait for the normal event schedule to start Saturday!

Well, that’s all for now, I’m going to try and get a little more sleep before we get up and explore the ship some more today. Maybe I’ll dream of that amazing gelato we had so much of yesterday :). They make some delicious flavors, and I have to say, the gelato bars are incredible. I could eat those as a meal. We’d never had one on the Divina (do they even have them?), but I grabbed a dark chocolate one after dinner and WOW. I can’t wait to try some of the other flavors!

Be sure to follow up on social media to see more of the ship over the next 9 days! This thing is awesome!

Instagram / Facebook / Twitter

 

Good Eats on Harmony of the Seas!

Harmony of the Seas is a huge ship, but I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know. One of the things that comes with that size is a plethora of eating options. You can always stick to the included choices, like the main dining rooms or Windjamer buffet, but where’s the fun in that? We’ve come to enjoy trying some of the specialty options on ships, and this trip would be no exception. After evaluating our options before the cruise, we ended up booking two ahead of time, and spontaneously stopped at another for lunch the last day on board. So where all did we eat? Were we happy with our choices? Read on!

First stop, Wonderland! While I was excited to try something new, I admit to being a little concerned about my food options. I’m a very picky eater, and extremely picky when it comes to anything seafood. Picky like I generally don’t eat any. Our trip to Norway this past March was the first time I’d really eaten any fish in over 20 years, and while I did enjoy that, the items I was seeing on the Wonderland menu had me a bit concerned. Once again, the concerns were unfounded, as everything I had was excellent, even the seafood!

Once you’re seated, your waiter brings you menus, which is to say a picture frame with an empty menu and a paint brush. After dipping your brush in the “paint” (water), you slowly drag it across the blank paper, which in turn reveals your menu:

Once it’s fully visible, your waiter explains the process to you and begins to ask you questions around food preference. Once he or she has all the information they need, they tell you that they’ll use that to pick out items from the menu they think you will like the most. In my case, that was a lot of “trust me, I promise you’ll enjoy this”, and he wasn’t wrong! List of items we ate prior to dessert:

  • Buffalo Chicken Eggs
  • Shrimp Kataifi
  • Crispy Crab Cones
  • Sashimi of Red and White Tuna
  • Liquid Lobster
  • Terroir Beef
  • Berkshire Pork Belly

The only thing I didn’t eat, much to Jen’s delight, was the Sashimi. I’m definitely not a raw fish fan, so I let her have all of that, which she really enjoyed. Honestly, everything I listed above was amazing. My favorites were probably the buffalo chicken eggs and pork belly, but I’d eat it all again. Also, the presentation on a couple of things is pretty cool too, starting with buffalo chicken eggs:

Another nice thing about the food, you don’t end up stuffed before dessert. The only portions that were big were the pork and beef, but everything before it consisted of small enough portions to not fill us up.

After all of that was cleared away, the real fun began. Our waiter brought us two desserts:

  • Forbidden apple: Raspberry cremeux, brown butter crumble, yogurt ice cream
  • The World: Peanut butter ganache, Valrhona chocolate mousse, salted caramel ice cream

The first one was fine, presented as a sliced apple with filling inside, but was easily overshadowed by The World:

The video doesn’t even come close to doing it justice, but yes, that’s hot caramel being poured over the chocolate, which then melts around the peanut butter ganache. Awesome presentation, amazing taste. Frankly, I could have gone back every night for that alone!

We had an awesome time at Wonderland, enjoyed everything we ate, and had outstanding service start to finish. The only gripe, if you can call it that, is that we were never really given a chance to request a specific item or two off the menu, but that’s a pretty small issue and didn’t detract from the experience. If you get the chance, I’d highly recommend giving this place a try!

Next up, Izumi! We love a good Japanese steakhouse, and weren’t going to miss the opportunity to try one on Harmony. Going in to this, my gold standard for ship-board restaurants of this style was Teppanyaki aboard the Norwegian Escape, as we absolutely loved our meal there two years ago. Great food, great service, what more can you ask for?

From start to finish, the service in Izumi was excellent. Our waiter did an awesome job keeping up with the table, was fun to talk to, and even took slow-mo video of people while the chef was tossing food in our direction. The chef was excellent as well, putting on a fun show for us while cooking everything up perfectly. I went with the filet mignon, as I usually do, and every bite tasted amazing. Unlike many of the Japanese steakhouses in the US, they didn’t have what many refer to as Japanese ketchup (aka Yum Yum sauce), which was a bit disconcerting to me at first, as I admittedly love that stuff. No matter, once I started eating, I completely forgot about that due to how good everything tasted!

We left quite happy with this choice as well, another I’d highly recommend trying if you’re sailing Harmony!

Finally, Johnny Rockets! We’d eaten here on the Oasis last year, and while I love a good greasy burger, we’d gone in to this cruise not really planning to eat here this trip, mainly due to our schedule. That changed, however, when we realized that Boardwalk Balcony rooms include a credit for 4 meals here, so we figured why not! We did find it hard to carve out time with all of the stuff we had going on, but finally managed to squeeze it in for lunch on our last sea day. The downside of a conference at sea with set session schedules is that you suddenly have around 1000 agents heading to lunch at the same time, so we hurried over as soon as our general session got out and managed to get a table before the crowd hit!

My only gripe is that service here can be hit or miss. Our server was very friendly, but just seemed overworked a bit, so things like refills were a bit slow, but still, it’s Johnny Rockets at sea, and having a Rocket Double sitting in front of me, along with some tasty bacon cheese fries kept a smile on my face 🙂

We did indulge in shakes as well. We were originally going to split one, but were kindly reminded by our server that Crown and Anchor members have BOGO shake credits on their SeaPass cards, so why not get two! I was pretty glad we ended up finding time to get here, I do love a good Rocket Double, and it was a nice change of pace from the MDR’s lunch food, which is all we’d had time for up to that point.

That about covers our specialty restaurant adventures on the Harmony of the Seas. As you can tell, we have no regrets on any of it! Royal Caribbean’s food rarely disappoints!

 

Good Times on Harmony of the Seas!

Another year, another national conference in the books! As I’ve mentioned in the past, our parent company holds our national conference at sea each year, and we were fortunate to attend for the 3rd year in a row, with this one being the Halloween sailing on Royal Caribbean’s Harmony of the Seas. Being that we were busy with sessions and other business-related events most of the week, we didn’t get to enjoy everything the ship has to offer, but it was still an awesome cruise nonetheless! If you happened to catch my Oasis of the Seas series last year, you might have noticed that I was a little disappointed in aspects of that sailing. Going in to this trip, that experience was forefront in my mind, but I’m happy to say that this trip exceeded my expectations in just about every area.

I’m still not a fan of the layout of the port itself, as we decided to park right at the ship and had to wait in a rather long line of cars to get in to the lot due to some pretty poor traffic management, but once we were in, everything else was cake. Embarkation went even faster than last time! Once we got past security, we headed up to the desk to check in. With no line, we got up there immediately and were checked in pretty quickly. Walking up to the waiting area, we found that they were already boarding, and had no wait here either. We basically walked in to the building, checked in, and headed right on to the ship. Start to finish, everything took maybe 15 minutes after we parked. It always amazes me how fast they are able to board a ship of this size!

Royal Caribbean set the bar really high all week in how they treated our group, and day 1 was no exception. They blocked off the Silk dining room for us to grab food after boarding, knowing that we needed to eat pretty quickly so we could drop our stuff in our rooms and head to our first general session. Frankly, they took good care of us all week, especially at the parties they hosted for us. Take the first night, for example. We were in the skating rink, Studio B, and they laid out an amazing spread of food, drink and ice sculptures!

They went all out on our Halloween party, too. I feel kinda bad for the rest of the passengers, as Royal closed the boardwalk that night for a few hours to host our party, and once again, it was well catered and an absolute blast. Oh, and yes, we brought our costumes! Frankly, I was surprised at how many people on the ship brought theirs, too. We walked through the promenade a few times after our party, and there were a lot of people dressed for the occasion! It was fun walking through in costume, too, we had a number of people stop us for pictures and selfies, which was really fun!

Royal also hosted a beach party on Labadee’s Adrenaline Beach for us too, which was awesome. Free Labadoozies, fun competitions, and beach time, what could be better? Oh, right, a trip down Dragons’ Breath Flight Line! That last one we paid for, but having done it on our Oasis trip, Jen and I both were excited to try it again! Last time we did this I had my GoPro with me and got some decent (but shaky) video, but this time around I had my new toy, a Garmin Virb 360. I like this footage a lot more than the GoPro, as you can use a VR headset or something simple like Google Cardboard to watch it in a VR-like mode and fully immerse yourself in it. Don’t have those? Well not to worry, you can still watch it on YouTube in a normal way and drag around the video to see it from every angle! It’s also now a featured video on one of the major VR platforms, Veer VR! Check it out, and be sure to move around and see all of the action around me, not just the forward view!

Moving on, let’s talk about our room. We again had a boardwalk balcony, which I wasn’t a huge fan of last time, as I found the balcony fairly useless outside of aqua shows, due to the boardwalk acting as a trap for the heat and humidity during the time of our sailing (mid-May). This time around we did find it more useful, as it wasn’t quite as hot outside on this sailing. I used it a few times, including once where I hung out there in my wolf mask for a little bit just to mess with people :). The room itself had plenty of space for us and was very comfortable, and this time around came with a couple of really nice boardwalk balcony amenities: The Royal Refreshment soda package, and a 4-person credit to Johnny Rockets. Those are definitely nice additions to the room category!

Moving on to the internet speed, I was pleasantly surprised. On last year’s sailing, I was pretty disappointed in the overall speed and reliability of the Voom offering, and wasn’t sure what to expect this time around, since they had given all conference attendees the fastest package, which meant that in addition to the regular passengers that would be using the internet, there were 1,000 for sure that had would be on it constantly too. Outside of a couple of small outages (WiFi hotspots totally disappeared from device view), it was pretty reliable and fairly quick. I also really like the unlimited packages, as I hate having to worry about the amount of time I use. It’s not so bad when uploading pictures, but when attempting to upload video, you have to hope things are moving quickly, otherwise you burn a bunch of time off your plan. Not on Voom, however! I ran a couple of speed tests during the week just to see how it looked, so here’s one taken around noon on a sea day, which should have represented a peak time:

20171029_142959000_iOS

One of the other cool things we got to take advantage of on this sailing is their huge dry slide, the Ultimate Abyss. This was new to us, as Oasis doesn’t have it, and is exactly what it sounds like, a long dry slide at the back of the ship that starts on deck 16 and takes you down to the boardwalk on deck 6. We did this pretty early in the sailing, and while we enjoyed it, didn’t really feel the need to do it again. Note that you really do need to pay attention to their instructions, as you can easily turn the wrong way, lift a leg wrong, etc, and end up rubbing some skin off on the way down. I chatted with another agent that took some skin off one leg that way, and he’d seen a kid on the ship who had taken some skin off an arm by hitting the side on the way down. It’s fun, just follow their instructions and you’ll be fine! Since you’re not allowed to take GoPros on this (or the water slides, both of which were pretty disappointing) I don’t have any video, but here are a couple of pics of the Abyss instead. In the second one, you can see the two slides spiral down near the back of the ship:

Even though we were there for work, we did catch as many shows as possible. Frankly, Royal’s really stepped up their entertainment game over the years, and have some of the best shows available at sea in my opinion. We caught 1887, Columbus, The Fine Line, and Jen caught Grease, and every one of them were amazing. I really enjoyed Columbus and The Fine Line. The latter is one of the shows held in the Aqua Theater, and incorporates a lot more in the way of artsy visual elements than the traditional aqua show we’d seen on Oasis. I can’t recommend it enough!

Let’s end this by covering a few of the negatives I called out last year in my final Oasis post, as well as one or two other things called out in various posts from that sailing:

Windjammer: Maybe I’m completely mis-remembering the Oasis, but I swear that Harmony’s buffet area is bigger. We ate there a few times and it never felt as crowded as it did on Oasis. I do really like their buffet food too, some of the best of the lines we’ve sailed.

Coke Freestyle machines: I think we had an issue once all week. Last time they were constantly down/being repaired, but this time around we had no major issues with them.

Lack of water slides: We were a little disappointed last year that Oasis had none, but happy to see that had been rectified on Harmony. We both tried them after getting back on the ship in port one day and had a blast. They’ve got two slides dedicated to racing each other, which are pretty standard (but fast) waterslides, and then next to those is The Perfect Storm, a slide with several clear sections that ends up dumping you into a large bowl near the end. Fun stuff, I just wish they allowed you to take a GoPro to film it!

Overall, we had a really great week, and were treated very well by the Harmony’s crew. Next year’s conference is aboard the Norwegian Bliss out of Long Beach, and I have to say, Royal set a very high bar as a conference host, so I hope NCL was paying attention!

I do have one more post in this series covering the food we enjoyed aboard the Harmony, which I hope to have up in a few days. Thank you for following along!

MSC Divina: Debark and Final Thoughts!

Debark on our fourth sailing of the Divina went pretty smoothly. Returning on a Saturday has its advantages, and in this case, it meant we didn’t really have to rush to get off the ship right away, as we had all day Sunday to relax from the long drive home before returning to work. This meant we could stay on the ship longer, waiting until our group was actually called vs taking our luggage off ourselves as soon as they started letting passengers off the ship. We ended up with a later debar time, I forget exactly what, but we stayed in our rooms until just before 8am, then headed to the dining room for a quick breakfast.

Like previous ships we’ve been on, that last breakfast in the MDR is from a pre-set menu with a few key items they can quickly put together. They’re pretty efficient about it, but everything on my plate above was nice and warm, so no complaints here!

After eating, we headed to the main lobby to wait for our debark group to be called. We ended up hanging out in the Divina Bar for a while, and during that time only heard one or two groups called. After seeing a good chunk of the crowd clear out, we finally decided to head for the exits after 9am. There wasn’t much of a line to get off the ship by that point, and frankly getting our bags and getting through customs was pretty quick too. It wasn’t quite the escorted exit of our past stays in Yacht Club, but it was pretty painless nonetheless!

After another fun sailing on the Divina, there really isn’t too much to say that I haven’t said already. We had a great week, enjoyed the food, ship and staff, and saw a very noticeable improvement in the service. When I originally wrote my “Is the MSC Divina right for you?” post, my only real negative was the dining room experience, but this time around, our table staff were excellent, and things didn’t feel as crowded as it did on our first sailing. I’ve happily updated that older post accordingly.

If you’ve followed my entire series for this sailing, our only real issue was the embarkation experience, due more to how the contractor on the land side was handling the lines. It was a reletively small issue in the grand scheme, and aside from that, we had another amazing time on the Divina, and are really looking forward to sailing on the Seaside over Christmas!

Next up on our cruise list before that, however, is the Harmony of the Seas over Halloween! Follow us on social media, I’ll be working with a new camera and hope to do some cool things with it on this trip!

 

 

MSC Divina: The Ports!

Okay, it’s time to catch up on blog posts, and next on the list is a rundown on our port activity while sailing on the Divina this summer! Our previous three trips on the ship were all on the other itinerary, and while we’ve stopped at all of these before, it was a nice change of pace.

Ocho Rios, Jamaica

This was the first of our four stops, and prior to sailing we’d picked up day passes for Sandals Ochi Beach Resort. We’ve utilized day passes before and tend to enjoy the less crowded nature of them compared to the public beaches or beach excursions, and this trip did not disappoint. After arriving and checking in, we immediately headed for the beach. This location actually has two beaches, one on more calm water, then one a little further down the resort that’s sort of in the main outside area. In addition to the beach, there’s a pool area with a swim up bar, and a restaurant. That was the area we camped out at all day, and we found it pretty quiet the entire time we were there.

The last time we used a Sandals day pass was in late 2015 while on the Norwegian Escape, and it ended up being a bit of a bust. Not long after arriving at Sandals, the weather turned on us and it poured on the area. I think we stayed there for an hour, had maybe one drink and headed back to the ship. No fault of Sandals, obviously, just bad timing. This time, things were pretty awesome. Our day pass was all inclusive, so we enjoyed a number of drinks at our beach chairs, at the pool bar, and with lunch, and it was all excellent. While I did spend some time in the ocean just floating around, I’m pretty sure I spent more time hanging out in the pool enjoying the swim up bar. I have to say, I do enjoy the day passes at places like this. It’s definitely something to look at when you’re considering a beach day at one of your stops!

Georgetown, Grand Cayman

This is another stop we’ve been to a handful of times, and I’m pretty sure that we’ve gone to Stingray City each time whether it was the only thing we did, or as part of a larger tour. We actually went in to this stop with nothing scheduled, as the plan was to just get off the ship and look for a tour out to, you guessed it, Stingray City. We had Jen’s mom with us, as well as Bayley’s friend Wally (a member of the Divina’s entertainment team), and neither had been there before, so we thought that we be fun to head out to, and it didn’t disappoint (for the most part)!

After tendering over to port, Jen spotted a tour operator she felt good about using (Carson’s Stingray City Tours), so we walked over to the woman to inquire about their tours, and after a quick discussion decided to go for it. We hung out right there by the tender area for about another 20 minutes while they signed up a few others, then off to the bus it was. One warning here, like a lot of Caribbean tour companies, they’re all about filling up the bus. Every single jump seat or other flat place to sit was full, which I freely admit I’m not a huge fan of. After a bit of a ride, we finally arrived at the small pier where the boat picks you up. Now, one thing I should mention first is that for $35, we got a stop at Stingray City, a stop to snorkel, and time at 7 mile beach. We were pretty happy with the order they did it in, too.

The first stop was Stingray City. We got out there before it got busy, which was really nice. If you’ve ever visited Stingray City, it can get really packed with ships in town, and even though we were the only ones here that day, it did get a little crowded at the end. On arrival, they gave us some short instructions and let us jump in. Once in, there were plenty of stingrays swimming around to enjoy. The staff jumped in with food to entice the rays over and started the picture ritual. You obviously can take your own pictures, provided you have something waterproof, or you can buy theirs. We actually did both. At the time, the $40 for all of our pictures (all 5 of us included in that) seemed like a great deal, as we got some really good pictures from our guides last time, but after getting home and seeing the shots, I regret buying them. Not sure if it was a lens thing or transfer to CD thing, but the images came out pretty warped. Jen and Bayley had looked at them on his laptop on the ship and don’t remember seeing them like this, so I assumed something happened when they were burned to disk. They do give you an email address you can contact if you have issues, as they hold on to the originals for one month. I’d say I emailed them at least 10 times in that month, from multiple email addresses, and got zero response, so yea, if you use them, either look very closely at the pics before you buy them, or don’t buy them at all in my opinion. Thankfully we have all of my GoPro pictures and video to fall back on.

As I mentioned, we got there before it got busy, which gave us a lot of space to work in and a lot of stingrays to see. As it got closer to the end of our time there, some of the ship and other private excursions showed up, and it got a lot more crowded, so we were pretty happy they got us out there first before the crowds. After we finished up here, we hopped back on the boat and headed to the snorkeling spot a short distance away. While the water around the stingrays was pretty calm, this spot was a little rougher, but not too bad. They have snorkeling gear available for people to use at no extra cost, so they brought out the masks, snorkels and life vests (for anyone that wanted one) and handed them out. They do have fins, and mentioned it more than once, but I was the only one to take them up on it. Frankly, it just made swimming there so much easier. There were plenty of small colorful fish around here too, so even though it was a short stop (like 30-45min if I recall), it was worth the time to me.

Our last stop was 7 mile beach. For those who didn’t want to go to the beach, they’d drop you back at the ship, but for those who did, they’d give you some time here and come back to get you at a pre-agreed on time. For our bus, that was 3pm, but the 5 of us didn’t plan to stay that long. We hung out until around 1-1:30 just relaxing a little and then grabbed a taxi back to the port at a cost of like $5 each. Wally needed to be back for his next shift, and frankly the rest of us were tired. We did walk around the shops a bit before heading over the tenders, which was a mistake. Bayley and Wally went right for the tenders when we got to port and said they had no line, but by the time we got there it was a pretty lengthy line. Fortunately MSC had a number of lifeboats running, and I don’t think we waited out in the sun for more than 10-15 minutes. This was also another point I missed being in Yacht Club, as there were butlers out there escorting YC guests straight to the tender boats. Another awesome perk of Yacht Club!

Outside of the issue with the pictures, we were pretty happy with the tour, especially for the price. If I were planning ahead, however, I’d probably go back to the ones we used the last time we were there, as our guides were awesome, and the pictures they took came out great. I really need to go back and figure out who that tour was with 🙂

Cozumel

This was another planned beach day for us, and with another day pass. This time we were headed to Nachi Cocum Beach Club. We’ve been to a few places along this stretch of beach before (Playa Mia, Ocean Beach club, etc), but never from the dock MSC uses. What’s normally a 10 minute ride was easily double that. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but just be warned, they dock further away from all of those places, so plan your time accordingly.

The only other ship in port here was the Carnival Triumph, so Nachi wasn’t full at all. I think we were told they sell 150 passes per day, and today had sold 60 of those. The place was incredibly relaxing all day, and we pretty much spent our time lounging in the water having drinks brought to us. Being an all-inclusive, drinks and food are free, but if you want any water toys (lounger type things), you do have to pay a little more. We didn’t end up getting any, so I can’t say what those cost unfortunately. Something else I should note here, if you have kids with you, I’d probably recommend something like Playa Mia, or one of the others that has a water park with all the inflatable toys in it, as Nachi has none of that. Even though kids are allowed, this just felt more adult oriented, which was perfect for us. We hung out in the water drinking all day with some of the people from the Triumph, and had a blast. So far, Nachi is probably my favorite of the beach stops we’ve done in Cozumel, and I wouldn’t hesitate to visit them again! Outstanding service all day, and while the food was just okay, it was nice to have it included in the price. Our only complaint here was shoddy wifi, which was basically useless the entire time. Just something to keep in mind if you absolutely need to stay connected while you’re here.

Nassau

The last few times we’ve stopped here, I’ve sworn I wasn’t getting off the ship, but every time, we’ve had a reason to go. Last time it was me needing shoes for Palo (on the Disney Dream), but this time I had absolutely no reason drawing me to shore, so I stuck to my guns and stayed on the ship with Bayley. Jen and her mom did get off so she could show her mom the straw market, but they weren’t gone long. It was really hot and humid, and if you’ve ever been there, walking the straw market in those conditions just isn’t fun. Our day in Nassau was basically a sea day for us, enjoying the (mostly empty) Divina, watching a pretty intense evacuation drill (see below, trust me, it’s worth it!), playing various games, and even getting in some time in the F1 simulator and on the water slide. Good stuff!

That pretty much covers our stops on this sailing. Next up, our debark and final thoughts on this trip aboard the MSC Divina!