2025 London and TA Day 20: Cruise Day 14 - Halifax, Nova Scotia

Friday, September 12, 2025

Cruise Compass
Dinner Menu: Custom Menu #2
Today’s Weather
Location at Start of Day
View From the Port Webcam                       
View From Another Webcam
Location at End of Day

E’s cough is pretty bad today. She did take a Mucinex and that seemed to help a lot. My cold is being totally handled by DayQuil, although my nose is running more. (By tomorrow night we’ll have emptied our stateroom’s box of tissue and be left with only toilet paper.)

Today is the best day of weather on the cruise. It is GORGEOUS out – finally short sleeve weather for our time in Halifax, which seems like a really lively town. We meandered our way along the Boardwalk, passing by several interesting statues, memorials, and the like.

We finally ended up at o the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic which had some interesting displays, but we mistakenly visited before lunch when we were both pretty fatigued, so we didn’t even make it to the 2nd floor where the Titanic-related stuff was. The artifacts from the 1917 port explosion were pretty incredible, however.

Lunch was at a small (and very busy) café inside an office tower. Nothing special, but quick and the sandwiches are just what we needed. Post-lunch found another Earthcache as well as a fun Traditional cache.

In the MDR tonight our normal table was still occupied by the first seating diners who showed up an hour late, so we were instead placed at an unused table nearby. In fact, it was in the same part of the MDR as our family table on Radience had been. This allowed us to be served by our normal team, including the returned James. We said our goodbyes (since we’re at Giovanni’s tomorrow for the final dinner).

The Production show tonight was a vanity piece put together by singers Thaddeus and Kelia. Thaddeus led off and it was quickly clear that this was going to be a self-indulgent POS. We had enjoyed his singing during the prior shows but tonight was simply bad. We ducked out before Kelia came on, not willing to risk continued narcissism. Perhaps she was great, but I suspect it was another “look at how wonderful I am” kind of thing.

Read More

2025 London and TA Day 19: Cruise Day 13 - Sydney, Nova Scotia

Thursday, September 11, 2025

Cruise Compass
Dinner Menu: A Taste of the USA
Today’s Weather
Location at Start of Day
View From the Port Webcam
Location at End of Day

I dragged my heels until May 2025 when it came to seriously looking at Sydney and Halifax options. I knew that the pure sightseeing options (“let’s take a drive on the Cabot Trail”) probably weren’t our thing, nor did I think we’d want to make big bus trips to see cultural re-enactment attractions – but there wasn’t a ton of stuff to do right at the port, either. In the end, we decided that the next day at Halifax was going to offer enough self-tour options to potentially make for a busy day and we’d simply wander around the waterfront area at Halifax, likely combining geocaching with other local attractions. We DID consider a trip over to Fort Louisbourg to have hot chocolate and see some re-enactment stuff, but the $62 per person price tag – CHEAP, as shore excursions go – kind of put us off.

We spent about 3 hours onshore, following (this time successfully) a Geocaching Adventure while also trying to find (unsuccessfully) a couple of traditional caches. Fortunately, a picture of The Big Fiddle outside the cruise terminal allowed me to log a Virtual Cache, so got a Sydney cache.









We checked out the Arts & Craps market at the terminal hoping to find a suitable Christmas ornament but didn’t like the choices. We figure we can find something tomorrow in Halifax.

In the Schooner, Jose, one of the waiters, knew our drink order and we chatted with him for a while. He confirmed that they’d changed the OJ. It is now apparently mixed directly at the bar gun now (severely diluting it) rather than being poured from a premixed jug.

James is MIA from the MDR again.

At 8P they had a (somewhat gratuitous) moment of silence across the ship to commemorate 9/11/2001.

The Headliner tonight is a 3-tenor rock vocal group called REBEL. All were former Broadway performers. They do pieces from the 60s-90s. They were OK, but I’m guessing they were more interesting pre-Covid, when they numbered five guys. We still enjoyed the performance, however.

Read More

2025 London and TA Day 18: Cruise Day 12 - Sea Day #6

Wednesday, September 10, 2025

Cruise Compass
Dinner Menu: The Royal Night
Today’s Weather
Location at Start of Day
Location at End of Day

We completed our campaign of The Crew today. At one point in the Schooner a fellow pax stopped as he passed our table to ask if we were familiar with the sequel.

In the MDR our assistant waiter (James) is MIA as he’s sick. Keysheilee is working alone (assisted ad hoc by other staff) but the pace definitely suffers as a result. For the next couple of nights dinner will actually take about 15 minutes longer than our usual 45 minutes.

The Production Show tonight was “Tango Buenos Aires”, which I personally thought was the best of the three Production shows. Turns out Tango BA is a 3rd party show that has contracted out to Royal for years, being one of their most popular shows. Tonight’s show was the last one on Brilliance this time around. I did wonder how many times during rehearsal the female dancer had kicked her partner in the Oompah Loompahs – there were a LOT of flailing legs between the crotch.

                 

Read More

2025 London and TA Day 17: Cruise Day 11 - Sea Day #5

Tuesday, September 9, 2025

Cruise Compass
Dinner Menu: Chops    (MDR Menu: A Taste of Italy)
Today’s Weather
Location at Start of Day
Location at End of Day

A solid night’s sleep. Bruised from the fall yesterday…and feel like a chest cold may be coming on. (It did. It was minor.) Spent next several days on DayQuil + Bendryl at night.

Minor crisis at Chop’s: a waiter dropped his tray cocktails and got a guest wet. Oh, horrors. For us, Chops was excellent. My ribeye was perfect, and really enjoyed the Pork Belly appetizer. They messed up our Baked Potato order (making it fully loaded), but there was no reason to mention it – we had too much food already.

The Headliner show were husband and wife magician team of Kyle and Mistie Knight. Very polished and slick, and Kyle’s sleight of hand involving 4 coins on a black velvet table on his lap that morphed into 16 coins was VERY good. However, in the end, it was kind of sterile.

Clocks went back another hour again tonight. At 1245A we got a bing bong from Kat that someone reported the Northern Lights again, this time off the starboard side of the ship near the back. This time we chose to get dressed in hopes of seeing something, so trooped up to deck 12 down my Izumi and found shelter against a raging wind for about 30 minutes, hoping to see something more than a halo with the naked eye. While the camera picked up a lot of green there was nothing otherwise visible – and too much cloud cover. Upon return to the cabin we both slept poorly.

                                 

Read More

2025 London and TA Day 16: Cruise Day 10 - Nuuk, Greenland

Monday, September 8, 2025

Cruise Compass
Dinner Menu: A Taste of Asia
Today’s Weather
Location at Start of Day
View From the Port Webcam
Location at End of Day

One of the biggest challenges of trying to figure out a plan in Nuuk turned out to be the total inscrutability of the bus system, which seemed to be the only viable self-service option for getting out of the cruise port (outside of walking). The bus system website offered maps and schedules that were close to useless. After hours of work I managed to find the actual location of several bus stops – but the majority didn’t show up on Google Maps or street-view (where most photos were from 2014, at a time when it seems like most of Nuuk was undergoing massive road construction). From that I got an idea of where bus route #1, which was the route generally mentioned online as being the right one for cruise passengers to use, could be accessed – but even that was filled with a lot of what-ifs. Finally, as it seemed like the only way to pay for the bus was to have local currency, that idea went out the window!

In April 2025 I tried to find us a bus-based tour, but the only one I could find that could accept both of us started at 7:45AM and that was earlier than I wanted. So that really left us only with walking our way through town, which looked like it would be in the neighborhood of 2 ½ to 3 miles roundtrip. Clearly, whether we did something at this port was going to be a game-time decision. While it would be nice to say that we “saw” Nuuk, I’m wasn’t sold on the idea that there was really much of great interest to see there – so if we DIDN’T get onshore it wouldn’t be the worst thing. I did manage to find a couple of potential geocaches that would involve very little walking, so there was the possibility of just a “quick walkabout” if that’s what we decided.

Neither of us had a great night’s sleep last night. We had purchased tickets to the 1015A shuttle, which was comprised of a number of city buses Royal had chartered. We were delivered to the Cultural Center by 1030A and took a leisurely walk to the National Museum of Greenland, where they have a lot of clothing (animal furs), kayaks, and small artifacts spread over 3 buildings, which occupied us for about an hour.

We then walked across the street to Kittat, a place where they use native techniques to create clothing/costumes. Amusingly, we’d gotten a PM on Facebook from Hallie Feldman, saying she had a penpal in Nuuk(!) who she’d been communicating with for about 20 years, but she’d never met and hoped we could meet up with. Well, we did meet with Louise Ottosen at Kittat. She had a number of native tattoos and we had a nice visit.

Given that Louise had tattoos that evoked the imagery of the mythic Mother of Sea (something discussed in the museum) it was quite appropriate to try for the Earthcache Mother of the Sea. On the way down rain-slicked rocks to get closer my feet went out from under me and I took a hard fall, catching my back, elbow and shoulder and giving myself a good scare. Fortunately just bruised. But this prevented me from getting as close as I hoped, and I logged the find without answering the questions since I never got close enough. It appears the cache owner allowed my claim based on my selfie, however.



The rest of the day was the usual mix of Schooner time and post-dinner live music, followed by the ship’s Production Show by the RC Singers and Dancers. There were several “interesting” moments in the show, including

1. I believe that one of the male leads was sick and they had male #2 sing his solo number while he mostly marked his group numbers.
2. Male #2 was late for a solo entrance – sang a couple of lines offstage, or perhaps they were stabbing buttons to get his vocal track running?
3. One male dancer took a spill on a move;
4. Obvious “someone’s behind that curtain” moment breaking an illusion; and
5. An actual show stop – about 16 minutes - due to tech issues. While 2x female singers were starting an ABBA number in front of curtain, there was obvious noise behind curtain – sounded like a set piece had hit the floor. They kept singing, but at the point where they would have opened the curtain recorded voice told us they had to stop the show. Band stopped and women immediately exited US through curtain – with mics still live. So we heard whispers of “I heard that out there” and other confusion before the board op killed their mics. We heard lots of squeaking, etc US of the curtain before they finally brought the orchestra pit back up (having dropped the band below eyesight about 8 minutes into the stop) and then they finally restarted by playing the instrumentals of the duet again, and then opening the curtain to reveal things and allowing the vocalists to pick up from where they’d left off. My best guess is that one of the rolling stairways they had had lost a caster and they needed to fix it to make the stairs safe again. (Later during the cruise the CD confirmed that a flying element had come out of its track, making an unsafe situation. In correcting the problem it sounds like they may have bumped another element out of its track!)

Anyway, the show continued – and turned out that this was the finale number anyway. Interesting experience! From theater we were tired, so went back to cabin to veg for about 60 minutes before bed. Turned the clock back another hour again.

Tonight’s Taste of Aisa MDR menu was excellent – perhaps the best menu we’ve experienced in the MDR.

Read More

2025 London and TA Day 15: Cruise Day 9 - Sea Day #4

Sunday, September 7, 2025

Cruise Compass
Dinner Menu: A Taste of the World
Today’s Weather
Location at Start of Day
Location at End of Day

A lazy day. We reached Mission 30 in our game of The Crew. We spent time in Colony Club (while a tango class was going on) in anticipation of attending the 230P Love and Marriage show…but at 245P realized the show was happening in the Theater! Oh well. (Did see the rebroadcast on in-room TV and it was fine that we’d missed it.)

We started seeing a number of icebergs during transit today, but were on the wrong side to see “the biggest iceberg we were going to pass”, as per the captain.

Read More

2025 London and TA Day 14: Cruise Day 8 - Qaqartoq, Greenland

Saturday, September 6, 2025

Cruise Compass
Dinner Menu: A Taste of the Caribbean
Today’s Weather
Location at Start of Day
View From the Port Webcam
Location at End of Day

One thing I had learned while researching Greenland was that Greenland, despite being a Danish protectorate, is not part of the EU. What that translates to is that international cell phone plans that work in the EU do NOT work in Greenland. Costs to use your cell phone are about $3.15/min to make a call, $1.90/min to receive a call, $0.50/text, over $6.00/MEGAbyte for data. So the moral of this was to put our phones into airplane mode and confirm that data is off when not connected to the ship’s wireless!

The (reasonable) activity at this port appeared to be simply to walk around. As this is something we can do ourselves I didn’t bother trying to find any kind of organized excursion. Instead, I found a nicely photo-documented walking route that would take us up to a scenic overlook of the port. Whether or not we would have the energy to complete the route was TBD.

As per the Cruise Director, this port is apparently pronounced “Cocker-Talk”) Royal was giving out come-first tender tickets starting at 830A. If you were debarking after 1P you could simply show up and wait for a tender. I arrived at 845A and got tickets for tender #16. We reported to MDR Deck 5 at 1045A when our number was called and were actually boarded and onshore by 1130A.

Before that, however, while standing in line to get my water bottle filled at Caffe Latte around 1030A, it turned out that CD Kat was just in front of me in line, so I chatted with her a bit and got clarification on the scope of responsibility of an Activities Director vs Cruise Director. She also confirmed that they’d had about 60 minutes of Northern Lights “activity” last night but, again, I don’t think it was visible to the naked eye.

Once ashore, tried to follow a Geocaching Adventure for the first time, but the one for Qaqortoq appeared to be misconfigured so instead had to complete the Earthcache Stone & Man. We did attempt to follow the walk up the hill, but only made it halfway before deciding to turn around. We stopped by the town’s small/only grocery to look around. It was perhaps 2x the size of Diekman’s.

The town has several stone carvings on a ridge fronting the road by the pier.

We saw a cruise schedule on the door of the gift shop at the pier listing all the ships that were in that season. Brilliance, listed as having about 2200 pax, was by far the largest ship visiting this 3000-person town. The 5-6 taxis we saw were driving quite aggressively, suggesting that while they love the business they may not love all the people!

Tonight’s Headliner was John Paul Ekins (again) but this time paired with a violinist from the Royal College of Music (London), Lucilla Rose Mariotti. Their combined show was the best of the three.

 

Read More