2025 London and TA Day 13: Cruise Day 7 - Sea Day #3

Friday, September 5, 2025

Cruise Compass
Dinner Menu: Giovanni’s Table  
(MDR Menu: A Taste of Royal History)
Today’s Weather
Location at Start of Day
Location at End of Day

A very relaxing day. We went to the Theater to hear from the Singers and Dancers as part of the ongoing Life@Sea series. This was an insight into their audition, casting, rehearsal, performance, and general production processes. Continued with the Life@Sea theme by heading to Colony Club to hear from Kat (Cruise Director) and the Hotel Manager (nominally her boss) as they handled Q&A from the audience.

At the Theater mid-day for another performance by Ekins, this time doing Moonlight Sonata, Clare de Lune, and the Warsaw Concerto from the 1942 movie “Dangerous Moonlight”, ham-fistedly renamed “Suicide Squadron” for its US release. All were very nice and the theater was a full as we’d see it all cruise.

Seas today were fast and a little choppy, but nothing like the first night. Winds were howling however, and when we walked past a door leading outside after the show we got a good blast of very cold air.

Dinner in Giovanni’s was nice – we both enjoyed it a lot.

The Headliner was ventriloquist Jerry Goodspeed. He was entertaining, although kind of “more of the same” when it comes to ventriloquists. His act was gentle, however, as opposed to vulgar, and that was nice. His finale has him controlling two of his dummies doing a duet with himself, including seeming to simultaneously having both dummies singing together!

At around 1130P Cruise Director Kat made a general announcement that folks reported Northern Lights were visible, but we were tired and decided not to get up. It isn’t clear whether lights were ACTUALLY visible to the naked eye. In talking with others during later days it sounds to me like what people saw was only through cameras, much like our outing in Reykjavik. So we don’t think we actually missed anything.

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2025 London and TA Day 12: Cruise Day 6 - Reykjavik, Iceland

Thursday, September 4, 2025

Location at End of Day

In March 2025 I booked us a bus tour (via Costco and ShoreExcursionsGroup.com) of Gullfoss, Geysir & Thingvellir.  I had to first check the excursions offered by Royal because ShoreExcursionsGroup showed us leaving Reykjavik at 11:59P while Royal said 5:00P, and I of course needed to be sure that we’d get back in time.  All of the Royal excursions seemed to arrive back at the ship no later than 4:00P, and since the 3^rd party excursion also came back at 4:00P I figured I didn’t need to worry about their incorrect sail away time.  Of course, by using a 3^rd party site I was able to save about $50 per person over Royal’s price.  Sadly, on May 20 I got a confusing email from the tour operator saying they had move the tour start time to 12:00P to “fit [our] ship’s itinerary”.  To me, that meant they either were shortening the trip to 4 hours (which I didn’t think was physically possible) or they were going to deliver us back to the dock two hours post-sailaway.  I felt like I had no choice but to cancel the trip due to their confounding communication.

Since we had no multi-hour bus trip, we were able to sleep until 10A following our early morning return to the ship.  We then grabbed a quick donut/bagel at the WJ before catching a shuttle to Harpa by 11A.  We decided it was too complicated to deal with using city buses to get to Perlan, so instead we walked over to the Museum of Photography and saw a really interesting retrospective spanning 50 years of work by photojournalist Gunnar V. Andrésson.

From there we decided to head back over to the downtown area to see if we could find lunch.  We ended up at a place called Icelandic Street Food, which served up soups.  It was a mixed bag.  I had the Spicy Tomato while W got the Fisherman’s Special, which we both thought would be a seafood soup but instead turned out to be more like a bowl of fish paste.  We combined the two and made the 2^nd better, but still not great.

We then wandered over to Rainbow Street and got some photos, but my phone’s battery was exhausted by the end of this so no more pictures of Reykjavik after this.  That’s OK, because we were ready to head back to the ship anyway – particularly since we couldn’t find any ice cream in the area. 

 So at 2P we re-boarded and dipped into the stockpiled chocolate from the Clermont minibar and E’s remaining Gingerbread Oreos before heading down to Schooner for the afternoon.  This was the first time we got the Handcrafted Margs and actually enjoyed our cocktails sans terrible OJ.

Tonight’s Headliner was pianist John Paul Ekins presenting music built around VERY earnest stories.  Technically and musically good, but a bit pretentious!  Played Chopin, March of the Tin Soldiers, Rhapsody in Blue, and ended with Hey Jude/Give Peace a Chance.  Before going to bed we set the clocks back another hour.

 

 

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2025 London and TA Day 11: Cruise Day 5 - Reykjavik, Iceland

Wednesday, September 3, 2025

Dinner Menu: Taste of the Mediterranean
Today’s Weather
Location at Start of Day (failed to record it)
Location at End of Day

In April 2025 someone on the CC Roll Call for our cruise mentioned the Perlan Museum, which I hadn’t previously heard of. It actually sounded quite interesting, so I began to look into the logistics of trying to get there on arrival day. The basic options seemed to be the (fee-based) HOHO bus, a taxi, or city buses. The HOHO was quickly ruled out given our noon arrival, the route’s 1.5-2.0 hour round trip timing, and HOHO’s last boarding time of 4:30P. Logistically, that was simply cutting things too tight. Taxis were do-able, but wait times of up to one hour post-arrival sounded nasty.

City bus actually seemed pretty reasonable. There was a stop at the port that we could walk to in under 10 minutes, and the Perlan stop was (no more then) 15 minutes away from the museum – so a one-way trip would take around 40-45 minutes point-to-point, cost us about $5.25pp each way, and the buses ran until at least 7P – so we could potentially exit the ship at 1P, spend 2-3 hours at Perlan, and still be back onboard by around 5:30P in time for both dinner and a rest before our planned 10:00P excursion to see the Northern Lights! I was very confused regarding whether or not you could do a contactless credit card payment onboard or not. So many sites said that, within the city limits of Reykajavik, you had to use their app on-board. I finally discovered that contactless payment had officially debuted in December 2024 so there was no need to get the app. We could just scan our credit cards when boarding and all would be good!

The more I looked the more I was intrigued. Turns out that The Icelandic Phallological Museum (aka The Penis Museum) was right along the bus route we’d be taking to/from the Perlan. Given that TripAdvisor suggested that the Perlan was around a 2 hour event and the Phal was about an hour, it seemed likely that we could do BOTH during the afternoon of Day 11 of our trip. I figured that the gift shop of the Phal would be more than worth the effort to add a stop. 😊

I had hesitated to take the phone out of airplane mode due to dire warnings about the expense of roaming in Iceland. However, since reliable location services required this – and I also had added international phone service – I finally did this and discovered our Verizon plan included 250 minutes of phone/text plus 20GB of data, so I kept mine running for the rest of the trip as I expected it would last us just fine.







We didn’t get clearance to debark until early afternoon, so we had lunch at WJ first, then made our way to the gangway. Shuttle service from the pier was running at a faster pace during the initial hours after the gangway went down. Despite a long line, shuttles were arriving about every 6 minutes and we were able to board the 3rd bus to arrive and were taken to Harpa within about 5 minutes. Harpa is a very striking building and I took several pictures.









From there, we walked over to the Penis Museum (to think: had things gone as originally planned we could have visited the Vagina AND Penis Museums!) but, finding that there was a collection of free artwork (mostly cartoons) in the entryway and the giftshop was also free, we decided not to pay for admission. Instead, we grabbed a free city guide on our way out (having failed to grab the free lit available when we exited the pier) and Google Map’ed our way to some souvenir shops in hopes to find things for the kids as well as a Christmas ornament for ourselves. We eventually (on about the 3rd try) found what we were looking for and made some purchases.





We stopped at a nearby park to get pictures of the iconic statue of Ingólfr Arnarson and, while there, I realized I’d failed to check around for geocaches. So I pulled out c:geo and started investigating.



I found out that there was one nearby called Þjóðleikhúsið, which translates to “National Theatre”. That seemed quite appropriate to be our Icelandic cache so we walked over to look for. Just as we got to GZ and I looked down to my phone a voice behind us said “hey, are you looking for a geocache?” Turned around and met fellow-shipmates Laura and Graham Lan, retirees who are living a semi-nomadic existence. We found the cache together and then enjoyed chatting with them for about 40 minutes before returning to the ship around 335P. Grabbed a couple drinks from the Pool Bar and then enjoyed some beautiful balcony time in our cabin.

The evening activity was the Northern Lights tour, led by Christian, a former Australian/German banker who has since become an Icelandic “aurora chaser”. He became unhappy with the way various aurora prediction websites presented info and created his own site, https://emeraldskies.is (and also https://emerarlskies.au). During our bus ride down to near Keflakik (pronounced “Keplavik”) International Airport he gave us a great explanation of the fundamentals of both aurora science as well as prediction model science so we could understand how to read the data. We had ideal darkness and clear skies, but the sun’s activity wasn’t ideal and, as such, we never had significant activity visible to the naked eye. Cameras picked up varying evidence, ranging from average photos from my Samsung S21 to pretty good shots from various iPhones to amazing shots from Christian’s expensive SLR with wide-angle lens. However, to the naked eye what we saw could have just as easily been urban light pollution. Kind of looked like clouds lit by moonlight, except there weren’t any clouds. We left the viewing location about 2A and were back onboard by 3A. While we didn’t get the results we wanted we still had a good time, made so by Christian’s commentary.

My camera:



Christian’s camera:

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2025 London and TA Day 10: Cruise Day 4 - Sea Day #2

Tuesday, September 2, 2025

Cruise Compass
Dinner Menu: Izumi    (MDR Menu: Taste of Mexico)
Today’s Weather
Location at Start of Day
Location at End of Day

Captain’s Corner was hampered a bit by the occasional mis-understanding of questions by the captain (Captain Juan).

New desserts tried at lunch: Pistachio Apricot Cake (not bad, just a bit one-note, not enough apricot) and Praline Chocolate Crème Puffs (ditto) and Churros (good).

We started playing a new campaign of The Crew using the special JARVIS 3^rd player rules.  We would ultimately complete all 50 missions during the cruise in 83 attempts, as the game is much simpler with only 2 players.  It did, however, still manage to “feel” like a perfectly cromulent playthrough, so we were very pleased we’d brought it along.

I tried one of Schooner’s specialty drinks: Peanut Butter Tropic.  Would not normally order a whiskey-based drink, but the novelty won me over.  I had spoken yesterday to a woman at the bar who’d asked the bartender to make it for her, but “make it more like a PB&J”.  The bartender had apparently added something like strawberry puree and Frangelico and created a winner.

I was incorrect about our trivia performance: we actually tied for 1^st today on one of the puzzle games where you had to come up with two-word phrases starting the “R” and “C” that matched the clues given.  We tied with 25/30…but didn’t try to assert our claim on another keychain.

Dinner at Izumi was disappointing.  There’s just not enough choices to satisfy E, so unless/until we find a Izumi Hibachi/teppanyaki there’s no point in going again.  We didn’t know the optimal pathway to Izumi (via a staircase in the Windjammer) so had made the mistake of going up to Deck 13 and having to work our way aft in blustery, wet winds.  When we left we did find the stairs down to WJ and had intended to get our dessert there, but the options were uninspiring so we went dessert-less this night.

The Headliner tonight, comedy juggler Steve Rawlings, was excellent.  His act was quite funny and he did some unique skills we’d not seen before.

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2025 London and TA Day 9: Cruise Day 3 - Greenock, Scotland

Monday, September 1, 2025

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

When first thinking about the trip I had assembled a lot of self-led walking tours of various ports because, with the exception of our Alaska trip, we’ve generally avoided official shore excursions and I expected we’d follow the same approach this trip.  However, as we got into 2025 I started to have a change of heart, and Greenock was the first port where I proposed a sponsored excursion.  Specifically, I found an option to take a bus trip in order to see Stirling Castle. This was an “official” RCCL shore excursion, so we finally got to experience their process for ship-sponsored tours.  The excursion was 4:40 in length, departing at 9:00A, which suggested that we’ll only have about 2 hours at Stirling itself – but we’d see how it went!

It actually went quite well.  Our received our tickets in our stateroom upon arrival, and then reported to the Theater around 830A where we were giving an excursion number label that we adhered to our clothing.  When called, we were escorted down to the gangway and onto our bus, which drove us over to Stirling.  We had a driver and a separate guide who narrated the bus ride to describe what sights we were passing by and gave us history and factoids about Scotland.  He also called ahead to pre-arrange entry tickets to the castle so we didn’t have to wait in the ticket line.

Upon arrival at the castle most of our bus (including us) opted for the guided tour.  Our guide, Joni, was a bundle of energy and gave us a great (mostly outdoor) tour of about 55 minutes, ending about 2 minute before heavy rain hit.  That gave us the excuse to buy some snacks and eat under shelter before we took in a couple of quick exhibits and returned to the bus around 1215P for the trip back, arriving at the ship around 210P. 

 

After a quick WJ snack, we went down to Schooner where we met Christine, a travel agent from AZ, who we’d see several more times on the trip.

Tonight’s show was the RC Singers and Dancers.  The usual hit-and-miss with the singers, while the dancers seemed pretty good.  Only 8 dancers on this ship, so a smaller complement than usual.  There was an “oops” moment where one of the male dancers almost dropped his partner on a lift, but not a major spill.

We had our first onboard time change tonight, with clocks being set back one hour at bedtime.

 

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2025 London and TA Day 8: Cruise Day 2 - Sea Day #1

Sunday, August 31, 2025

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

Internet speed was very consistent throughout the whole cruise:

The seas were quite rough overnight – lots of wind and wave motion. We both ended up taking anti-seasickness meds to help us sleep. E was still feeling queasy during the morning and we ended up back in the cabin at 1015A in order for her to nap. We knew that our schedule would likely prevent us from attending all the Progressive Trivia events, but this put a fork in it from the start, as we missed session #1 right away. Our first official trivia wouldn’t be until 345P’s Simpsons, where we placed 2nd with 12 (winner had 13). At 430P General Knowledge we got 16/20 while the winners had 19/20. Although we’d do well enough on trivia during this cruise we never had a 1st place finish. This seems to be because there were so many more experienced cruisers aboard who, frankly, had heard a lot of these questions before.

Our mascot through the trip:



We also tried our 2nd Park Café snack, this time an Italian Deli Sandwich with Olive Tapenade along with a Pork Jerk Wrap. We’d anticipated that we’d be hitting up Park Café every day, but it turned out that the 2nd visit was our last. We didn’t have any issues with Park Café – we just found that we don’t have the same appetites we had in prior years!

The “Rock the Room” event in Centrum wasn’t as advertised. Instead, it was the Cruise Director (Kat) introducing the senior hotel staff and then hosting a few minutes of chatting and…autographs! Yes, there’s a type of cruiser who really wants to collect staff autographs. Go figure.



The Headliner tonight was “The Barricade Boys”, a vocal group composed of guys who’ve all appeared in various Les Mis productions on Broadway or the West End. They were very good – one of the better Headline acts we’ve seen. Some Les Mis, Frankie Valli, R&B, and Queen.



In the category of “new stuff we tried for this cruise”, I purchased a pair of motion-sensitive nightlights that worked our really nicely. From their low profile (which makes it easy to squeeze into small spaces in the luggage) to variable colors and intensity to USB charging and magnetic mounting, these provided handy bathroom light as well as path lighting just outside the bathroom without being too obtrusive. We thought that this was one of our better purchases.

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2025 London and TA Day 7: Boarding Day at Southampton

Saturday, August 30, 2025

Cruise Compass
Dinner Menu: Welcome Aboard
Today’s Weather
Location at Start of Day
Location at Sail Away
View from Port Webcam
Location at End of Day (not recorded)

 Early in planning I had to figure out the answer to the question “how do you get from your London hotel to Southampton?” The site https://londontoolkit.com came to the rescue here and I learned that, in the range of options, these made the most sense for us:

• Cruise line-sponsored shuttles that (maybe?) picked you up from your specific hotel…although I never got around to confirming this. Cost was apparently GBP89 per person.
• Shuttle van service that (definitely) picked up at 3 specific London hotels and (maybe?) could be scheduled to pickup at YOUR hotel. Tasks about 2.5 hours and is designed to get you to Southampton around 11:30A. Cost was $124 per person and (maybe) $180 per person for custom pickup.
• Train service from Waterloo Station to Southampton Station. This takes about 1:20 plus about 10 minutes to get to the station from our hotel. Costs were about $20 per person for standard class. Advance sale tickets opened up about 4 months before date of travel. If you looked online prior to this you would see ridiculous prices (along the lines of $150 per person), which initially threw me for a loop until I understood that you couldn’t ACTUALLY purchase a ticket. Once at the SOU station it is either a 15 minute walk or 10 minute taxi ride (GBP 10) to the cruise terminal.
• National Express Coach (bus) service from London’s Victoria Station to the National Express terminal in Southampton. This was the least expensive option (although pretty close to the same price as the train), taking about 2 hours from London, and being subject to any and all possible road delays. I believe the main attraction of the bus was that luggage handling was easier than the train. The bus had guaranteed storage spaces in the luggage compartment, whereas the train essentially has NO provisions for full-size luggage beyond “get it on the train, try to find a home for it, and keep an eye on it.”

Because of the potential for traffic gridlock related to beach-bound traffic, as well as the general principle of strategically trading money to buy speed and/or comfort, I decided early on to use the train service and then grab a taxi to the port. I did put out a question on CruiseCritic regarding the reliability of this service and received a fantastic answer that set my mind at ease about taking the train on morning of embarkation as well as well as receiving guidance that any kind of train strike would almost definitely NOT impact this particular route.

Doing a bit more research on buying train tickets led to the discovery that online purchases direct from the South Western Railway website would fail for non-UK users, as the site requires users to create accounts, and won’t accept non-UK addresses. However, the solution appears to be to use another National Rail company, as they can all book tickets for each other with no additional fees, and the LNER site, in particular, was called out as a good choice. It appears that the privatization of the railroads has led to differing user experiences depending on the company you use! A UK resident pointed out that SWR runs routes that are much more oriented to UK natives, while LNER visits (more) places that tourists would go, which is why their ticket-buying experience is more considerate of non-residents. Another CC user helped clarify that, when purchasing on LNER’s website, we’d receive the message that no reserved seats were available and that we might have to stand during the trip. This is apparently an artifact of the fact that SWR doesn’t sell reserved seats on that train and everything is first-come/first-served. So the warning could/should be ignored as being unhelpful!

I did do some test lookups in May 2024 for train tickets for August 2024 (equivalent to what I’d be doing in May 2025 to actually buy tickets for August 2025). I did note that the limited number of 1st Class tickets were booked pretty quickly. On May 1, 2024 I could check (Saturday) August 17 – and for all the trains that arrived at SOU prior to noon – which approximates what we’d be doing in 2025 – there were typically only 3-5 seats left. So looked like I needed to setup a calendar reminder so I could ensure I bought tickets on the first available date in 2025. My tests on 6/1/24 suggested that I could purchase a ticket up to 82 days in advance, so I set an alert for 6/1/25 (90 days ahead of desired date) and started paying attention from there.

I also (very briefly) looked at the difference between First Class and Second Class on the train system and, frankly, couldn’t see any value in the more expensive tickets. In June 2025 someone on CC posted about their recent train trip and mentioned that they’d run across several cruise passengers who had bought FC tickets only to discover that these seats were regularly oversold and that they could find no open FC seating! Strangely, UK-based respondents not only confirmed this, but clarified that a ticket (on this “commuter train”) didn’t actually guarantee you a place on the train – there is apparently no limit to how many they might sell, and even with a ticket (and even with a specifically-timed ticket) you might find yourself with no room on a train! Finally, on June 18, 2025 I purchased two tickets on the LNER website for the 935A train. Total cost at time of purchase was about USD 37 for both tickets.

Having decided to take the train, the next task was figuring out how to get from our hotel to the Waterloo train station. The initial two main options were to take the Underground or take a bus. In this case, the bus was the hands-down winner, as it avoided the use (and endless stairs) of Charing Cross Underground station and replaced it instead with a short 500’ walk from the hotel to the bus stop for a bus that arrived every 3 to 8 minutes. In the end, we went with option #3(!) – we just grabbed a cab outside the hotel at the Charing Cross station taxi stand and were at Waterloo Station in about 6 minutes – no muss, no fuss, no bus! Cost was just under GBP10, but we were happy to trade cash for convenience in this case. No need to walk our luggage down the street and onto a bus.

As for boarding in Southampton itself, the main questions to be answered were:

a) What were the options for getting from the SOU train station to the cruise terminal, and

b) How strictly were boarding times enforced? For this one, it seemed that boarding was extremely efficient and Royal was NOT really paying attention to whether you are arriving in your assigned time slot or not.

As for a), I found several videos online that discussed various options. Essentially, the two most viable were to take a 6-8 minute taxi ride from the taxi queue just outside the train station to the terminal for about GBP 10, or to make a 10-15 minute walk between same. The walk is along mostly level sidewalks and seemed quite doable, particularly if the weather cooperated. I thought we were still spry enough to do this if we wanted to. FWIW, the walk also took you past a pretty good wine shop with decent prices, so we could potentially stop and pick up two bottles of wine if we wanted. OTOH, there was a giant CC thread where EVERY current Royal cocktail recipe was being posted, and we spent the intervening months before the cruise trying a LOT of them and finding a LOT of them we liked, so we figured to be much more aggressive with cocktails this cruise and wine seemed like it might be superfluous! Probably going to be a last minute decision. (Our March 2025 cruise on Navigator proved that we were OK to forgo wine drinking in favor of cocktails!)

Another thing I like to do is locate webcams for all the various ports we’d be using. There’s not a lot to learn from these, but occasional visits during times when ships were arriving or departing were sometimes entertaining. Although I couldn’t find a webcam specific to the pier used by RCCL in Southampton, there were still 5 different cameras available that could be used sequentially to get a good long look at various arrivals and departures.

Finally, in June 2025 I decided to cash in 30,000 B of A credit card points in return for $300 OBC. This would go a long way to covering our cocktail expenses onboard.

Right around August 10 I happened to check the Royal app on my phone and noticed that they’d started to populate the Cruise Compass with (some) of the activities planned. I started a new tab on the Spreadsheet of Fun with the intention of jotting down certain classes of events (such as Headliners and other special shows, game shows, trivia, lectures, etc) so I could begin to try to find a nice mix of stuff that didn’t all collide with one another. Both trivia and music acts were very slow to populate – a week later those events were still missing – and I noticed that the headliner schedule was re-arranged a few times, so I probably started this exercise too early. However, it ultimately was helpful because we were able to strategically time our theater attendance and ended up attending things that we might otherwise have missed in other venues. We also ensured that we caught as many of the different musical acts as possible. By the time we flew out all Cruise Planner data was present except for the music schedule from cruise day 9+. That fully populated during our days in London.

At that same time that the activities calendar was published, the MDR menus were posted, too. This was VERY handy for me, as I was able to go through each night’s menu and pre-plan my meals. This way I ensured I got a nice variety and avoided repetition that might have otherwise resulted from not knowing what was coming in future days. I also discovered that a couple of the MDR menus were “difficult” to select options from, and that caused us to spend time after boarding on this first day adjusting our dining plans. We moved a couple of our specialty reservations to coincide with the nights of poor MDR choices. By the time of the actual cruise, a couple of the menus had swapped positions for reasons unknown.

Back to the day of…

We were up at 730A for a light breakfast and then out of the Clemont to an available taxi (no waiting) and walking into the doors at Waterloo Station at 830A. The station is a wonderful mix of old-timey architecture with a thin layer of technology over it. We checked the schedule boards and waited for our train to come up on the list. The boards show active schedules for each of the 18 or so platforms, and then there’s another section showing upcoming trains – so you basically have to wait for your train to be promoted off the “upcoming” board to the “at the platform” board. Given the busy pace of the station our 830P train didn’t make it onto the “at the platform” board until around 810P. Upon boarding we discovered that the train wasn’t anywhere near as full as we had expected, so we took seats on either side of the aisle from each other and placed our bags on the seats next to us without any concerns.



Upon arrival at Southampton Central we stepped off the train, left the platform, exited the station, and walked barely ½ block to the head of the taxi queue, where there were already 5 taxis lined up and loading up at the same time. We got into the 5th cab (being 5th in line) and were on our way to the station. For such a short ride there was a surprising amount of traffic that had to be navigated, and the stop lights seemed strangely timed. There was a lot of sitting in traffic. While the taxi is supposed to be faster than walking I felt like, in the end, the timing was about the same.

Once we exited that taxi, however, things really moved fast. We had to cross a couple of drop-off lanes to get to the main sidewalk of the terminal, and before we were halfway across a porter came up and accepted our bags from us – so we were free of those before we knew it. Once in the doors of the terminal we showed our e-Passes and were directed to dude with tablets who took our pictures (click click) and dropped the rope behind him allowing us to head for the gangway. From taxi to standing on the ship was about 8 minutes, tops. Incredibly efficient!



We immediately went to our muster stations (B6) to check in,



then went over to Giovanni’s as I was hoping to change our 2nd reservation from night 13 to night 15, since the night 15 menu (Bon Voyage) seemed so bleak. They had no availability at the time, however, so left it as-is. We were able to pull off the rescheduling later in the cruise. With those administrative details out of the way we headed up to Windjammer for the (expected) blah lunch. We both had some variation of their carved beef.

I had made a pre-cruise commitment to myself to try a wider variety of foods, including desserts, so started with two new dessert choices: Apple Pound Cake (both thought it pretty good) and Crème Brule with Caramel (both thought OK but not perfect).

Post-lunch, we picked up E’s soda cup at the Pool Bar. We then lounged on a lounger until staterooms opened at 1P. Below are some photos I took of the surrounding area from the fantail area of the Windjammer. Both P&O and Princess were at neighboring docks. We were sailing out of the City Cruise Terminal.

We unpacked ourselves in the room (lots of storage space, and we did a surprisingly good job of keeping our cabin tidy throughout the whole cruise) and I had the Samsung DEX connection to the TV sorted by about 215P, so we made the first trip to our home-away from our home-away-from-home: Schooner Bar. We met Don and Cheryl, a couple from Kentucky, and chatted about 45 minutes with them. She was a retired finance type and he was a retired air traffic controller, so I was able to grill him on some topics that were of real interest to me.

Around 3P, we decided to sample Park Café’s snacks, so we returned to Deck 11 (home of Windjammer, the pool, and Park Café). At PC we picked up a couple of turkey wraps and then stopped at the Pool Bar to get our first drinks of the cruise. This drink (a mai tai) was our first hint that Royal has opted for an absolutely HORRIBLE OJ mix. It took us about 3 drink orders to recognize that any drink with OJ in it was unpleasant to drink. Once we figured that out we ended up drinking mostly nothing but Handcrafted Margaritas for the rest of the cruise. We took food and drink to a seating area on Centrum 9 and listened to a couple of the music groups for about 2 hours.

There were several music acts aboard, and even now I’m having troubles ID’ing two of them. The musicians were:

1. The house band, Cosmic Waves. This was 4 people: guitar/vocals, bass/limited backing vocals, drums, and female vocalist. For the first several days I thought this was Banda Certa, but later realized their true name. They were quite good and had a very wide music catalog and am not sure I ever heard a repeat. The only complaint (minor) is that the female vocalist’s Mexican accent made her lyrics a tiny bit mushy – but they were technical quite accomplished and we enjoyed their stuff many time.
2. Two different keyboardist + vocalist duos. One was called Banda Certa and the other the CBJ Duo. Even now I’m not sure which was which. Both featured a male keyboardist and a female vocalist. One of the keyboardists also had recording backing music to supplement the keyboard. One of the vocalists – I THINK it was CBJ – was more of a contralto and all their music was transposed down several steps from original keys. We preferred the duo who didn’t transpose, but neither one of these groups was of the quality of Cosmic Waves.
3. A piano+violin duo, the B-Twins. Twin sisters always wearing identical outfits playing a range of tunes from classical to pop. The violinist had a bit more finesse than the pianist, who just seemed to bang stuff out at max volume. However, they were pleasant enough to listen to and we heard them several times, mostly in the Schooner. There were a few repeats in their numbers, but they had a decent mix of tunes.
4. A solo guitarist, Beatriz. We only listened to her a few times, mostly in the Schooner. She didn’t seem to have a big repertoire, as we heard Classical Gas (among other things) several times. To us, she was mostly innocuous background music.
5. A guitarist/vocalist, Lee Simon. He played exclusively at the Pub, which we not only never set foot in but we never actually even passed by (other than once on Boarding Day, before the Casino had opened). The Pub was on Deck 6 (like Schooner), but was located between the Casino and the Theater. We never wanted to pass through the Casino when heading forward to the Theater, so we always did that passage via Deck 5.
6. A pianist/vocalist, Dave Carey. He played at the Schooner, but mostly late at night, past our bed time, so we never heard him play.
7. And, of course, the Brilliance of the Seas orchestra, who backed the Production shows as well as some of the Headliner acts, along with the Royal Caribbean singers. The four singers were pretty run-of-the-mill in terms of talent.

After a quick pre-dinner nap for E we went down to the MDR for our first meal. We were seated on Deck 4 next to a port-side window and served by our waiter, Keysheelie from the Philippines, and our assistant waiter, James from Bermuda. We instantly liked both of them and therefore took steps post-dinner to lock in table 622 as our permanent table for the rest of the cruise. The MTD experience on Brilliance seemed much less disorganized than it had on Navigator. Post-dinner we found ourselves sitting on Centrum 5, listing to Cosmic Waves, then ended at the Theater watching Duo Elegia, a married couple that did a rather mundane circus act including dance, hula hoop work, minor clowning, acrobatics, and aerial work.

Through the cruise we always attended the 2nd showing, typically at 9P. Our audiences were always appreciative, but were generally pretty subdued. A typical Sunday matinee audience, if you will. I believe that the 7P audiences were ALWAYS pretty subdued. This cruise definitely had a much older demographic than other cruises we’ve been on. In total I’m not sure we saw more than 8 kids, and at least 3 of those were babies. I wouldn’t be surprised if E and I were below the median age aboard.

At this point we were already settling into a pattern that would be repeated throughout the cruise for us. Basically, our days involved:

• Wake up and go to Windjammer for breakfast. Carry our tablets with us.
• Spend most of the morning sitting in Schooner Bar, playing our daily games, reading, and/or playing The Crew.
• Hit up Windjammer for lunch.
• Spend most of the afternoon sitting in Schooner (or Colony Club a few times).
• Head to the cabin around 530P or so for possible nap and then get ready for dinner
• Dinner (615P for specialty nighs, 645P for MDR nights)
• Head up to Centrum 6, 7, or 8 to sit and listen to live music playing on Centrum 5.
• At 830P, head over to the Theater and grab our preferred seats (balcony house right) and read until the 9P show.
• At 945P head back to (most commonly) Centrum 9 seating to listen to more live music.
• Bed time

As such, in subsequent nights of this narrative I’m going to dispense with blow-by-blow accounts and simply show the pre-cruise plans vs the actual things we did and, where appropriate, make comments about stuff that was unique.

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