Day 2: Friday, February 27, 2026

The day started earlier than we would have hoped as E was awake at 430A with a massive coughing attack, the result of a cold she caught just after we got back from our Bodega trip the prior week.  Perfect timing!  Although mine might be better – I might be getting the cold on boarding day.  We'll see.

Breakfast at Hampton was better than last time, but that's damning with faint praise, at best.  Anyway, with that ordeal over we killed an hour in our room until checking out and calling a Lyft.  Our driver arrived in about 60 seconds and we were on our way to the port.  The driver was …umm…aggressive in his driving and I think he managed to shave about 3 minutes off our projected 34 minute trip.  We arrived at the port, where both Quantum and Navigator were docked at 1025A and were checked in by 1030A.  Unfortunately, they weren't boarding the ship yet and we had to sit and wait in the terminal until finally walking onboard around 1055A.  

Figure 2: Waiting at the LGB cruise terminal to board

So, ironically, if we’d arrived at our “official” boarding time we likely wouldn’t have had to wait at all. 

We immediately made a beeline for our muster station to take care of things and then stopped quickly at Boleros to make a reservation for the Starwater production show that takes place at two70.  I had been trying to get online with our Voom account first, but kept failing because – it turned out – I had booked it under E's name rather than mine but kept trying to login as dstein.  D'oh!  Took me a visit to the Voom help team around 215P to resolve this.

We walked around the two main social decks (4 and 5), checking out the various bars and restaurants, until heading up to WJ for lunch at 1130A.  After that we cruised the pool deck (it was a hot 92 degrees outside so we had no desire to stay outside) and then chilled at two70 until the staterooms opened at 1P.  I found our bags down the hall so we were unpacked and relaxing by 130P in our room.  I messed around a bit trying to get HDMI source switching working on our TV so I could use Samsung DEX, but when I disconnected the network cable (necessary to allow the remote's source button to work, according to posters on CruiseCritic – which it did) I confused the TV.  It took a bit of doing to restore normal service, at which point I decided to abandon my attempts and the rest of vacation was spent recording stuff on the tablet via Blutooth keyboard.  Oh well!  (Early into the 2^nd leg I noticed that the “Live TV” menu node had an “HDMI 1” selection along with all the other channels, so I probably could have leveraged this – but I didn’t want to mess around with it by that time.) 

Around 2P room service knocked on the door and delivered a plate of chocolate-covered strawberries, a gift courtesy of our travel agent (Kim Royer).  That was a nice surprise – although another $50 in OBC would have been more welcome! :-)

Our shared response to what we've seen of the ship so far is “Meh".  There's no “wow factor".  It is not as sterile as Freedom was, but there's no question that we're in love with the Centrum of Radiance class ships, which is lacking here.  We also note that several of the specialty restaurants are “open air" and include some tables directly neighboring the public walking paths, next to all the passing passengers.  We do like the look of two70, and we think it likely that this is where we'll go when we want to play The Crew (which we brought again).  Schooner Bar, in particular, seems particularly soulless compared to other ships. 

Another thing that's immediately obvious is that the “completed" onboard schedule was anything BUT complete.  In the last 24 hours so much has changed that much of my meticulous pre-planning was largely for naught.  Some changes are simply that they've changed performers – but I think others might be a bit more fundamental like moving time slots.

I don't recall when we first met our stateroom attendant (John) on Brilliance, but we finally met Joseph as we were leaving that stateroom at 330P to go get our sail away drinks.  We grabbed a Hand-Crafted Marg (D) and Cozumel (E) from Bolero's, which is just below us on deck 4.  We're a hump cabin one door removed from the elevator lobby, so access to other decks is SUPER easy!  While we both liked the concept of also adding a snack to our drinks, the reality was that we didn't actually want food at this time, so we returned to our balcony with drinks (only) in hand.  One very nice thing: unlike Brilliance, the orange juice in use is back to the quality we expect.  Drinks that include OJ are back in play, baby!

The J3 Junior Suite on Quantum is different.  The most obvious thing is that there are two bathrooms, one on either side of the front door.  One holds toilet + sink, while the other has glassed-in shower, separate tub, and another sink.  There's a large closet with a ton of hangers and a 6-drawer dresser under the TV.  Finally, there's a storage closet (with one large shelf – which I think is probably supposed to be two shelves) with room safe on my side of the bed.  There's not a lot of “small drawer" storage, however, nor is there any “high" storage, so we had to find alternate places for stuff we're used to placing in the “missing" spaces.  Décor is modern, and we have a full glass wall for the balcony – both a full sliding door as well as flanking rounded full-height windows.  Lots of floor space.  The two seat couch is rock hard, however.  We'll survive.

Figure 3: Our J3 Junior Suite as seen from the door (and before we started messing it up)

Figure 4: As seen from standing in front of the balcony door.  The reflective panel on my side of the bed turns on when you turn on the shower room light.  Seems kinda dumb.

Figure 5: The shower room.  There's a full-size showere with rainfall shower head plus handheld shower on the right.

Figure 6: The toilet room across from the shower room.  Strange use of space and felt like "form over function" to us.

We also have a doorbell.  Which some kid has already used to play Doorbell Ditch.  Oh, joy!  We assume this is spring break for a lot of families because we've seen a lot of kids onboard already.

At 330P the CD (Tami) came on announcing (we think) that we were finally at All Aboard – and maybe saying that everyone had completed muster drill?  Anyway, she must have called for everyone to cheer because we could hear some shouts through our cabin door.  Being a low-priority announcement it didn't play in the cabin.  That's been reserved for earlier announcements to check into muster stations plus the captain's announcement that they were just about to sound the VERY loud emergency signal, as per regulations.

As is our usual, we spent the sail away on our balcony, enjoying our drinks.  Around 445P we went back down to Boleros where I got another drink (a Hemingway Daiquiri, which was not worth repeating) and we settled in to listen to our first live music, this courtesy of the Diamond Duo, a couple playing violin and guitar.  They were OK, but not “appointment listening”, so we didn’t seek them out later.

Figure 7: The Diamond Duo in action.  She often sounded like she was out of tune.  Made us appreciate the Violin/Piano twins from Brilliance.  Also, as usual, after a few first day photos this was basically the last significant photo I took until we were onshore.

I realized with a bit of horror that I had NOT pre-booked our MTD timeslot for our desired 645P timeslot.  Not sure how I let that one get away from me!  So at 630P we headed down to the MDR to stand in the “MTD w/o Reservations” line which, surprisingly, was already moving at a nice pace.  (We’d later determine that Quantum officially has a 630P seating, so they’d begun processing the line 10-15 minutes prior to our arrival.)  In fact, we ended up getting seated right about 645P anyway.  Unlike Navigator, MTD seemed really well organized on Quantum.  I didn't see folks confused as to where to go, nor did I see anyone trying to jump the line because of some inflated sense of self-importance.

We ended up getting seated in the American Icon Grille portion of the MDR (as opposed to Silk, also on Deck 4).  As we sat down, we were greeted by our table neighbors, Travis (construction project manager from Los Angeles) and Adria (travel agent from San Diego) who were, as far as we could tell, romantically linked despite the geographical separation.  Travis, in particular, was very outgoing, and never met a food he wouldn't eat.  His typical dinner was three (and once, four) appetizers followed by an entrée and then 1-2 desserts!  Plus usually at least one cocktail, one wine, iced tea, and water.  We enjoyed interactions with them.  Our table was served by Veronica (South Africa) and Kadek (Bali).  She was nowhere near as familiar with us as Keyshellie had been on Brilliance (which is totally OK with us – we really do not want to be best friends with our servers).  Upon exiting the first dinner I set us up to retain the same timeslot and section.  It turns out that Veronica might NOT be in the same section next cruise, so we might have a new team in a few days.  We'll see.  This was our first indication that servers move around each cruise.

Post-dinner we went and sat in the Music Hall overlooking the stage while the folks below played “Rock the Room”.  The room is divided into two teams and the host starts giving factoids about the song to be named before playing it.  Someone from each team rushes to a team chair in the center of the room, with the first arrival given the first opportunity to name the song.  It was a pretty dominant performance by one side over the other.  One of the few people on the losing side who seemed like they knew what was going on was using a walker, so even when he knew an answer he basically couldn’t get there in time.  (It was also the most feminine looking man – we both thought he was a middle-aged woman.)  The best contestant on the losing side was the younger dad who absolutely FLEW into the chair ahead of the other side when he realized – after 1 note – that it was “Let it Go” or, as he put it “from my daughter’s favorite movie”.

We ended the night at the Theater, where Cruise Director Tami (Tami Salto) from Brazil did the normal “who here is from Canada, etc?” survey and the “You're not here to sleep, you're here to PARTY!” speech before introducing the comic, JR McCollum, who was actually pretty good.  A guy a couple of rows behind us certainly thought so, because he was laughing at EVERYTHING like he'd never heard a joke in his life before.