I have gone on exactly one cruise and it was nothing like these massive floating resorts. It didnt even have heating, which was a bit of a problem in January.
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The Bamco Mario Kart is pretty legit
best waterpark I’ve ever done is probably volcano bay, if you have an extra day after you dock back in the US
I think you got Shanghaied!
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No, the boat left from Chongqing.
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oh yeah I was a at a conference in hangzhou back in 2011 and they took us out on the water for a bit which was nice
I briefly had like a very different and exciting life during the period 2010-2014 (and less so from 2015-2018) when canadian universities had a ton of funding to just have fun and go wherever and I am mostly glad that it presented itself as so discontinuous with the rest of my life that I at no point expected it to last and was preparing the whole time to do something else afterward, which is the one thing that universities will never overtly help you do
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Today saw us land at St Thomas. Our original shore excursion was unexpectedly cancelled—no steel drum band for me, after all—but we were able to rebook with a sunset tour on a catamaran. Random photos from today follow.
The elevator controls are a touch screen. Icons designate major ship features on relevant levels:
At one point, we encountered a parade-in-progress on the Promenade Deck. I was not fast enough with my camera:
Housekeeping has been changing up the towel animals they leave us with; first day was a dog, I think, but today we had a frog.
Here’s the view of St. Thomas from the pier where we docked; we basically only got off the ship long enough to immediately file onto our catamaran with 72 other passengers.
While I have a fair bit of experience sailing, I’ve never before had to sail while wearing shorts with wide pockets while sitting on a net over the ocean. I spent the entire excursion terrified I was going to lose my phone or my wallet or my passport in the ocean, so I didn’t try to snap any photos—other than this one of our ship as we returned to port.
We were pressed for time after getting back on board, so we just hit the buffet for dinner. The line for desserts was very long, and since I was willing to wait in it, @familyjules wanted to know what desserts were available, as her tastes are more discriminating than mine when it comes to sweets. I wasn’t exactly sure what everything was, so I just sent her this photo.
In addition to the water show and the singing show, the ship offers an ice show which we went to tonight. It was pretty good!
But as good as the ice show was, we still felt the water show was more impressive. So much so that we went to see it a second time from the balcony near our room:
Julie took more pictures than I have, so I’m hoping some more of those will show up in this thread tomorrow. Good night, select button.
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Man, a bunch of these pics came out real bad. I hope Julie had better luck than I did.
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We finally had our Icarus moment today: we are both officially sunburnt. We had been really slathering it on, but I guess the Sint Maarten ocean water is too much for SPF 50 to handle for as long as we chose to be submerged.
Energy levels are starting to flag, so I didn’t take many pictures today. Here’s a forbidden shot of the men’s room by the Solarium:
Our shore excursion today was a water taxi to the Philipsburg public beach where we had reclining chairs, an umbrella, and free Wi-Fi, though we spent most of the time in the water as mentioned above. They point out that St Maarten is the number one shopping port in the Caribbean, which also means a lot of street sellers and people coming to to sell scarves or massages or other random trinkets. It was a pretty port, but I found myself wishing we’d been better positioned to explore St Thomas when we’d had the opportunity and maybe spent less time here.
After we got back to the ship, we spent even more time trying to cool off in various pools. In the evening, we had a couple of shows:
Comedy jugglers are kind of a predictable racket, but I’m a sucker for anybody telling double entendres that the audience doesn’t seem to be getting. We laughed a lot.
Crazy Quest was… How do I describe this. It’s an audience participation game show? It took place in the ice rink, and it’s an adults only event because it’s the most heteronormative activity I’ve ever seen, and the gimmick is that the audience is divided into teams and the team captains are racing to collect the stuff the cruise director is calling out. They were laser-focused on skirting the line between “we’re implicitly encouraging participants to disrobe” and “you’re not gonna see anything vaguely inappropriate here”. I found it pretty easy to get caught up in the crowd enthusiasm§, though I made a point not to be positioned anywhere we’d be likely to be involved in audience-participation, and I think my choices paid off.
§ This might have been a function of drinking half a bottle of wine just before dinner.
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So Jason has made a passive aggressive comment about me not having posted since he tagged me the other day, so here we are.
As far as St Thomas, it would have been nice to walk around some but I was feeling pretty crappy which necessitated taking it easy before our sunset cruise.
Here is the netting he was paranoid about. One of the guys sitting near us had his phone resting in his flip flop that was sitting in that net. I thought Jason was going to lose it when i pointed that out.
The boat ride was nice even if the sunset wasn’t anything special. They were nice enough to fill up my big cup with rum punch that i was able to get back on board.
Today St Maarten was nice but yeah we are burned as fuck despite all the sunscreen. There were two other cruise ships docked alongside us and the size differences…
I’d be pretty interested to see the very first RC cruise ship next to ours to see just how much larger they have gotten.
Back on board we went to the adults on area to see the “king of the world” balconies that are only accessible when a ship is in port.
We discovered the clear fronted areas were plunge pools, not hot tubs, and spent a lot of time in there cooling our cooked skin.
Then we went to dinner, the juggler, and the scavenger hunt. Now I’m tired byeeeeee
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Oh hell no
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What’s wrong with the touch screens?
They also have plates on the floor of the elevators to tell you what day it is. We happened to get in an elevator right at midnight last night coming back from the scavenger hunt. It was clearly force recalled to the bottom deck, since it had shown as going up until it very much wasn’t, and an employee was waiting to switch out the day real quick. That was actually pretty interesting to get to see.
And the outer doors on the deck where the Alice in Wonderland themed restaurant is match the theme. (Plus some other pics from our dinner there on the first night)
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Machines that do not require computers should not have them
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That chair, omg
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Not many photos today, as we’re in the winding-down phase of the trip and spent almost the whole day chilling in the Solarium plunge pool. Let’s see what’s in the gallery:
I couldn’t tell if this thing on the horizon was another ship or an island, and zooming into max on my phone camera didn’t much help. I heard the neighbor say it was a container ship, though.
Current progress on our cruise:
St. Maarten was our last port, so we spent all of today and will spend all of tomorrow at sea returning to Port Canaveral.
If you noticed the weird little slides at the back of images of Wonder of the Sea, we rode those today. It was a pretty big let-down for being a ten-story slide. Just didn’t go fast even a little bit, even though you’re riding on a relatively slippery sled.
For dinner tonight, the premium lobster tail was available to everybody, but I’ve apparently been spoiled by Cajun crab, as this wasn’t doing it for me. However, the real highlight came when we got to talk with the head waiter for a while about the Global Suspension of Service during COVID and other details about his long years with the company. Afterwards, he brought over an invitation to a behind-the-scenes galley tour tomorrow morning. Looking forward to that!
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Highlight of this thread for me are the two very good pictures of you two standing betwixt two flamingos in a booth built for such, and of course the insane towel-frog, a shape I was not aware it was possible to fold a towel into.
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is a week long enough to explore the whole ship? like are things staying fresh and new/is there too much to see/is it getting repetitive
If we were trying to be exhaustive about the onboard activities and additional expenses, I think we could probably find things to feel like we were missing out on; there were at least six specialty restaurants we didn’t bother going to (Chops, Hooked Seafood, Giovanni’s, 150 Central Park, The Mason Jar, the Solarium Bistro) because any of those would have been a separate charge. We never went to the spa or the fitness center; we did probably less than half of the trivia and puzzle events or big gatherings like the parade and the 70s night dance. I think there were a bunch more events like the Crazy Quest gameshow and the red-theme nightclub that opened up in the same space afterwards that we never even bothered to look up.
So the 7-night itinerary has definitely kept us busy, and while I’ve had a good sense for what all the ship has to offer, it’s still an enormous space; I just remarked to Julie earlier that every time we’ve walked through the Promenade Deck, I feel like I see a storefront I’ve never noticed before. To be fair, though, this was the largest cruise ship in the world before Icon of the Seas launched. I could probably keep exploring for days and not feel bored, but I don’t regret that we’ve spent almost the whole day today just relaxing in our stateroom. (It helps that we finally got some stormy weather, so all the exterior pools are closed and the wi-fi went out for a while, plus we had to get everything packed since they’ll pick up our suitcase tonight for disembarkation tomorrow morning.)
If we’d gotten to sail on one of the older Celebrity ships like we’d originally planned, I think five days would have been perfect. For Wonder of the Seas, I’m glad we got seven. I had fun and I never got bored, and I see the appeal of cruising, but I’m looking forward to returning to our cats and our apartment and our more routine meals.
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