2026 B2B Day 7: Turn Around Day at San Pedro

 Wednesday, March 4, 2026 (end of leg 1, start of leg 2) 

Cruise Compass

Even though we're staying onboard for the next cruise we're still subject to the timelines followed by those who have to go home today, so we were up at 715A in order to shower and head down to Windjammer at 8A for breakfast. We, however, did not have to pack up our gear or clear out of our stateroom. Instead, we headed to the Music Hall, which served as a waiting lounge for B2B passengers, of which there were probably about 60 or so people. They checked us off a list, asked us if we were staying onboard or going ashore, assigned us to groups 41-43, and handed us an envelope with our new SeaPass cards plus a small card saying something like “In-Transit Passenger", which I think only mattered for those planning to go ashore.

We waited in the MH through all the various announcements about which luggage tags were being called to exit the ship. At 9A they had announced all luggage tags, but they didn't issue a final call until 930A. At about 940A we were all escorted by Royal folks and exited the ship (scanning out and having our old SeaPass cards confiscated) walked down through the luggage warehouse (where we saw one set of unclaimed luggage, so clearly we were held back until all other folks had left Customs), and processed through the Customs face-scanners within minutes. We then all turned around to be escorted back onboard, scanning in with our new SeaPass cards. By 10A we were back onboard and had the ship to ourselves!

We decided to continue lounging in the Music Hall, listening to announcements to the crew that everyone should be at their embarkation stations by 1015A because they were going to start boarding new passengers at 1030A. A few crew (likely dancers) came by and grabbed a couple of life jackets from a closest behind me before manning their station just outside the MH entry. We stayed (pretty much completely alone) until heading down to the MDR (Chic dining room) where B2B cruisers were being given lunch. The Key folks were all lined up at the neighboring Grande room for their lunch. We sat at a table on a port-side window and enjoyed lunch before heading up to The Library to play The Crew.

As we came up the stairs inside two70 leading to The Library we took some time to consider what constituted “backstage" for this venue. We decided that there were a couple of enclosed spaces L and R of the stage that clearly had to have hidden entries in the sections that were cordoned off from public access that contained stairways both up to the over-stage entries and down to the under stage areas where the lifts could be loaded and actors could crossover to the other side. Whether there was enough space on the level of the assumed doorways to do quick changes is unknown. They probably have to do quick changes on the stairs or under the stage. (We would turn out to be wrong re: location of the stairways. Turned out that they were at either side of US and fully visible during the shows. Either they had been covered when I did my exploration or I was just so focused on looking for non-existent doors that I completely overlooked giant down staircases!)

Anyway, we played The Crew until 330P and then it was time to go grab some finger foods at Café Promenade (for E) and pizza at Sorrento’s (for me). Eileen carried those up to the room while I went over to Boleros to get my sail away Hand Crafted Margarita and E's Mai Tai. The balcony was a few degrees cooler than it had been for the prior week's departure, so E hung out just inside the cabin while I lounged outside, but once underway we both moved inside while I got caught up on these notes.

We officially updated our MTD time to 630P last night. On Quantum they apparently now have 3 “official" seatings: 5P, 630P, and 8P – and since a 630 start puts less stress on trying to make events that start at 8P we were happy to move from 645P.

Given that this cruise is going to basically be the same as the last cruise as far as events go, we're anticipating that our evenings this time might be more music oriented since we didn't take in many of the acts onboard during the past leg. With that in mind, our post-dinner activities were 8P at Boleros to listen to The Latin Town, and 9P at the Music Hall to listen to their rock/dance band, Puslo. The Latin Town was a female lead singer on bongos, another woman on keyboard and backing vocals, a male drummer/vocalist, and a male bass player. They were fine – and we answered our question of whether or not the Boleros dance floor got used. It was heavily trafficked during their set. Over in the Music Hall we were sitting out of sight of Pulso, but I did confirm it was a typical 3-player band plus female vocalist. They were quite good – but the lead singer of the Brilliance band was better. I can see us potentially seeking them out on future nights.

As we passed by the Pub on our way back to our stateroom I can see why our intentions to go listen to the guitarist keeps remaining unfulfilled. The Pub on all cruises is crowded, noisy, and generally has uncomfortable wooden chairs. So our desire to listen to different music is generally trumped by our desire to sit in comfort.                  

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2026 B2B Day 6: Sea Day #2 (Cruise #1: 5N Mexican Riviera)

Tuesday, March 3, 2026 

Cruise Compass

We gained back our lost hour of time and slept in until about 8A, so took our time and got down to breakfast at 9A. There's no escaping the staff dancing, as the WJ crew were “happy" to snake their way through the dining room so we could “appreciate" their hard work. Fortunately, our small area was spared all but about 30 seconds of the revelry. We finished up eating and headed over to Schooner to work through our tablet games while waiting for the 10A general trivia.

For trivia, we were invited to form a team by the folks near us and, having no reason to say no, found ourselves a group of five. The questions ranged from hard to obscure (including questions like “how many diver sculptures are in the Solarium?” and “how many red lanterns are outside Splashaway Café?”). Although we only got 10/20, that was actually good enough for 2nd place, behind the winners who had 16/20.

We stayed in Schooner, playing both Dingbats (15/20) and Phobias (10/20) while filling in down time with reading, as well as watching others who were learning the art of napkin folding. Ironically, on Dingbats we recognized one that we’d been stumped by during our Brilliance cruise – and we remained stumped by it this time, too! Finally, at 1245P we headed to WJ for lunch. While hardly a new thing, the contrast between the abundant variety of food available during our 1st cruise in 2014 vs the very limited offerings of the last several years in huge.

Found outside our door (when we left for breakfast, actually) was the letter outlining how we were to handle ourselves as B2B cruisers. Essentially, at 845A tomorrow we're to meet at the Music Hall with our boarding passes and passports and we'll be issued new SeaPass cards, then escorted off-ship to go through Customs before being escorted back on the ship to do as we wish. If we wanted to do some kind of LA-based activity we could do so, as long as we reboarded after 11A and before All Aboard at 230P. We're also being hosted for lunch at the Chic section of the MDR (Deck 5). Curious to see how many people are doing B2B.

Post-lunch we decided that none of the trivia-based activities interested us (things like Game of Thrones, NTT Taylor Swift, and more Harry Potter), so we headed once again to the Library behind two70 to play more missions of our 2-player The Crew game. They appeared to be doing some tech rehearsing for tonight's Starwater, for which a new cast is apparently debuting. So we're apparently going to see the 1st on-ship performance done by this particular group of performers. Opening Night! Anyway, mid-afternoon it looks like they were rehearsing a few scenes that involved various apparatus. We saw one performer suspended about 10’ above the stage wearing a “dress" ala the nightmare scene in Fiddler. We're planning to let Veronica (our MDR waiter) know that we want to push through dinner so we can leave the MDR no later than 730P in order to stake out good seats for our 8P show.

As has been our custom, we came back to our stateroom around 315P for snacks, relaxation, and naps. E's cough is definitely getting better, but it is still hanging around and fatiguing her. My scratchy throat tapered off and was essentially gone in 36 hours and I currently have a VERY mild cold – hardly noticeable and definitely not tiring for me, fortunately. Hoping that this good fortune continues throughout the 2nd leg.

We did go down to Schooner for Afternoon Trivia – I think. Either I didn’t record the score, or we didn’t actually go but I wrote it down ahead of time and forgot to delete if from the “Actual” plan column of the spreadsheet.

At the start of dinner we let Veronica know that we wanted to be out of the MDR by 730P and she and Kadek pushed us through dinner in about 25 minutes(!), so we were out by about 715P. (Having figured out that they opened up MTD starting at 630P we had already started appearing at the MDR at the earlier time rather than at 645P.) We made a quick stop at the podium on our way out to ask that they officially change our 2nd leg reservation to 630P at Veronica's table and then walked over to two70 where they scanned E's SeaPass card to ensure that we had reservations. Sadly, all the seats in the center (of both decks) were reserved for Star Class and higher, so we ended up on the first level, house left, in the semi-uncomfortable stadium seating – which actually turned out to be a great place to view from.

Starwater is an interesting show. It starts pretty slow, with several minutes of “artful wanderings" from the cast, broken up about every 60 seconds with about 45 seconds of Madonna's “Vogue", before finally finding its footing. What follows is a combo of singing, dance, gymnastics (two guys on flying apparatus who perform aerial stunts), and finally ending with an incredible tango followed almost immediately by a super high energy dance number that has the cast pouring buckets of sweat. Overall, a very enjoyable show and one that we decided we'd see again on the 2nd leg, probably from the same general location but hopefully slightly more comfy seats.

Our night (and 1st leg) ended in the Theater with comedian JR McCollum’s adult show (in which the row in front of us had two children under 8 years of age…). I'm almost certain we saw JR on another cruise at some point. He was described as a “Royal Caribbean favorite", so I assume he books a lot of time with them. He was fine – although at the end of a cruise everyone is a bit lower energy than at the start so the room seemed to enjoy him but no one seemed to be howling with laughter. Guessing that he'll have better energy tomorrow, as he kicks off the next leg of the cruise as the opening show in the Theater for a new, more awake crowd.

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2026 B2B Day 5: Cabo San Lucas #2 (Cruise #1: 5N Mexican Riviera)

Monday, March 2, 2026 

Cruise Compass

Slept late. LONG crew drill this morning, running from about 930A-1030A. A typical WJ breakfast. One “entertaining” moment came in the bacon line. I watched a woman grab tongs and put her hands all over them (including far down the handle) and then proceed to leave them (touching all the bacon) badly balanced on top of the heap rather than placing them on the resting plate provided for that purpose. Of course, the tongs fell and clattered to the floor as she wandered off completely obliviously. The funny thing was the eyeroll by the staffer inside the serving island. He didn’t see any of this happen, but he heard the noise and was rolling his eyes and shaking his head as he immediately walked over to the cabinet where they stored extra serving tongs.

Post-food, read for a bit in semi-comfy chairs between the Bionic Bar and Schooners, then True/False trivia in Schooner (13/20 – far back in the pack). I think the Bionic Bar was a good idea that probably didn’t pan out. It is in operation for limited hours, requires a staffer to be present to baby sit things, seems to take a long time to make a drink (compared to a human), and – fatally – measures everything precisely, so you’re never going to have the accidental – or intentional - “heavy pour”. The fact that they stopped building them – and are potentially pulling them out of other ships – is not surprising.

We wanted to return to our stateroom to drop off our stuff before heading to the Music Hall for Th Royal Mystery game at noon. I had a vague memory of moving all around the room when we'd done this game on Mariner, and didn't want to risk leaving our bag unattended. So we left Schooner and actually (finally) walked out onto the outside of Deck 4. This is the lifeboat deck, so there's actually little to be seen, but at least we confirmed that there IS outside decking around all these enclosed spaces!

Then to Music Hall for Royal Mystery, which was really fun. As people entered the host directed you to form or join an existing group until each team had 7-8 people on it. We were with a dad + three 20s-something sons (on a dad and son cruise) plus a young married couple. All of us were definitely “gamers". In fact, the sons were carrying D&D books plus a couple of card games, and the other couple had done dinner murder mysteries before. Our team was one of 3 (out of 11-12 teams) to solve the puzzle. From what E and I can recall of the game we played years ago on Mariner, this game might have been a reskinning of what we already played. We certainly recognized that the “connections" puzzle formed a picture of a bunny, and there was a footprint puzzle that tied into the alphabet. So we had a little meta knowledge, but unlike last time (where I was the leader and therefore had a better overview of the entire puzzle) we each worked on one of the sub-puzzles and neither one of us knew what was happening around us. We submitted our answer with about 5 minutes to spare. Not sure if we were first to solve or not. No prizes, but we all felt good about ourselves. The family was slated to undertake the Royal Puzzle Society challenge later in the day, which motivated us to book it for the next leg of the cruise. Turns out that we could have had our stuff with us – at least one of us was always at the couch where our team gathered. In retrospect, I think that on Mariner we had been younger than our teammates and therefore did a lot more of the “running". In today's game we were the oldest team members and we happily let the youngsters run back and forth.

After the Mystery, we went to the Pub and each ordered a Pub Burger and shared the Pulled Pork Nachos. The nachos were nothing special – soggy chips topped with pulled pork, BBQ sauce, cheese, and onions. Taste was fine – just a bit too soggy/messy to eat. The burgers were each made of two thick 4 ounce patties (8 ounces total) with lettuce, tomato, pickles, onion, some kind of mild green pepper, and garlic aioli and ketchup on the side, along with steak fries. Burgers were pretty good – for a ship, they were excellent. I paired with a specialty gin and tonic while E had Strongbow Cider. Nice! Downside: they give you little 4” square cocktail napkins to eat greasy food. They need bigger napkins!

We then returned to our stateroom to pick up our tablets. We took a path that allowed us to walk through the hallways of our deck and look at the art on the corridor walls. Compared to other ships the corridors were pretty sparse, and most of the stuff on our floor were aspirational affirmations rather than art or photos. Kind of a letdown. We were surprised at the number of cabins that had decorated their doors. Didn't count, but I'm guessing that it was at least 25-35% of doors sporting something on the outside.

Tablets in hand, we decided to try and find the “best" chairs where we could relax and read. We looked at the deck plans and decided to try The Library, located on Deck 6, tucked up behind two70. Turned out to be the perfect choice. Comfy padded chairs inside a quiet room protected from direct sunlight but not so isolated as to make you feel lost. Spent close to two hours reading and relaxing there before deciding it was nap time and coming back to the cabin once again around 345P.

Wonderland was our specialty dinner reservation and definitely fell into the “been there, done that" category. As usual, they asked about any potential food allergies and the certainly listened. E received several modified appetizers compared to what I got, highlighting a combination of how many food products MIGHT have been exposed to nuts during packaging and how terrified they are of possibly killing someone. For example, my “tomato water" test tube was garnished with ONE drop of Siracha, while E received none because, to our surprise, siracha might have nuts in it.

We each started with one of the specialty cocktails: a smoked Old Fashioned for me (novel but no better/worse than any other OF) while E tried Down the Rabbit Hole. Again, nothing to write home about.

Anyway, while the dishes might qualify as imaginative, almost none of them qualified as “good". One appetizer in particular had some kind of deep-fried potato cone which had been fried in VERY tired oil. I mentioned this – not as a complaint, but as an FYI, to our waiter. Surprisingly, there was effectively none of the above-and-beyond customer service I would have expected. I figured they'd bring us a 7th appetizer or something simple like that, but nope. Not that we'd likely have found enjoyment in another meh appetizer!

For appetizers, as first-timers our waiter brought us a curated “greatest hits" selection of 6 (out of 9) options. I personally enjoyed the shrimp with siracha aioli (E got Thai chile sauce instead, and she didn't get the potato(?) strings) and E most enjoyed their citrus salmon offering. The rest was just meh. For entrees, I got Snap Crackle Pork, which was mostly tasteless with a pork crackling that suffered the same “tired oil" problem as one of the appetizers. E got the chicken which was also mostly meh. We were offered two of the three desserts (#3 contained forbidden pistachio). The apple “thing" was mostly Royal's signature rubbery crème brule-like apple flavor with a center of raspberries – no bueno as per both of us. The other was their signature The World: peanut butter ice cream atop a caramel cream atop of chocolate fudge cake base, surrounded by a globe of dark chocolate that gets a hot caramel sauce poured on it, causing it to melt and reveal the ice cream/cake inside. Both technically and visually impressive – and quite tasty. Far and away the best food of the meal.

With dinner over we were early enough to try to catch Battle of the Sexes in the Music Hall. We arrived during the tail end of If You Know It, Sing It. It was pretty raucous and it was clear that seats that had a view of the stage floor weren't to be had, so we simply enjoyed the comfy chairs and read, while listening to the Battle as it happened.

We then made the short hop over to the Theater for their special Sonic Odyssey show, starring some dude who invented a strange instrument. As we sat down I spotted what seemed to be a line of small lighting instruments strung diagonally over the main seating area. Turns out they weren't lighting instruments but were actually the termination points of the strings of the instrument that was located DSR. Dude played the amplified strings by rubbing them while wearing gloves. He also did percussion stuff, including playing a musical jacket that made different drum noises depending on where he hit himself. Add in the usual vocalists and dancers and the show was certainly different. We enjoyed ourselves, but aren't certain we'd watch it again on the next leg (whereas we will certainly go see Sequins & Feathers again in a few days). Another case of someone mastering the weird instrument they invented.

The night ended with us turning our clocks back an hour to reflect our return to Pacific Time sometime while we slept. 

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2026 B2B Day 4: Cabo San Lucas #1 (Cruise #1: 5N Mexican Riviera)

Sunday, March 1, 2026 

Cruise Compass

Opinion of Quantum class: meh. The whole ship seems to be designed so you can't see you are on the ocean. The main public decks (4 and 5) might not have external decks. We haven't looked hard yet…BUT there's the only OBVIOUS door leading outside is on Deck 5 outside the theater. The only spaces where we've seen windows to the outside are the MDR, two70, and small windows in Boleros. Otherwise everything is just a bunch of enclosed spaces. It is still much better than the shopping mall feel of Freedom class, but there's just not anything that really stands out. The worst thing is that Schooner, in particular, feels more like a classroom than a comfy bar. Too many rows: a row of high tables with stools; another row of a single long high table with stools either side; 4 rows of 6-wide seating, etc. A big hunk of Bolero's has the same problem, although Bolero’s was a bit more comfy. The Music Hall comes closest to the right vibe, but it is too big a space overall to feel “warm".

Another complaint which we've heard echoed: the elevators. There are 2 banks for 5 elevators fore and mid. The midship set is literally 20’ feet (max) from our stateroom door – which is a HUGE win. But they take FOREVER to arrive, and once they arrive they close their doors really quickly. We'll see a couple of elevators apparently parked on 4th floor, unmoving for the 90-120 seconds we're waiting. We'll have elevators pass without stopping. We’ll have elevators that refuse to rise to our floor, making multiple trips up/down just above or below us. They just seem to have a strange algorithm in operation. And we know we're not being fragile flowers because this is a common topic from others. Weird.

We had a couple of morning trivia events, including Cartoon Characters 21/35 (30 wins) and Sports 18/20 (20). We also read during the Scavenger Hunt. Teams have only 15 minutes to try to gather up to 40 items on a list before returning to show off. The activity staffer running it was quite funny and we learned that being present for the final 15 minutes can be entertaining.

Lunch: DAS: burger/fries, EMS: Honey Garlic Chicken (mostly just “Chicken") Desserts: Oreo Cake (red/red – just a lot of white cream with soggy cookie crumbles); Raspberry Pound Cake (yellow/green – at last it had an opinion re: flavor). At dinner we both added a Desert Pear Marg to our meal. A lovely lavender shade, but otherwise not much. It was fine but not something we'll repeat.

Post-lunch we returned to cabin to dress for outside and spent time on pool deck just chilling and planning to let the bar waiter bring us stuff as we read and relaxed. Never actually saw bar waiters at all, so I went to the Pool Bar and got me a Mai Tai (drink of the day and very good) and brought E her request of “something frozen with strawberry in it" and got something with strawberry, mango, and peach with rum and ice. We sat on the non-sun side of the pool deck - which was actually quite nice – for a couple of hours reading before returning to the cabin to nap and relax (more) before dinner. In truth, our butts were getting sore from the pool chairs we had been sitting on.

Shows: The Generational Showdown (not the correct name) is intended to be two teams of 5, one of 7-12 year olds and the other 45+ who compete to answer questions more suited for “the other" group. So kids had name as many B&W movies as they could in 5 seconds while the older group had to name Disney movies. Sadly, the audience was too small so they had to expand the kid group with a 17 and 20 year old. The overall lack of energy in the room didn't help things along and we actually pulled out our tablets midway through and paid more attention to those than the show.

The Perfect Couple is intended for 18+ only and, like Love and Marriage, starts with auditions on-stage to find those willing to be bold. One couple got selected when they mimed a blow job to the prompt “show us how excited you are to greet your partner at the airport after they return from a 30 day trip”. That's the vibe. It's crass and low-brow, but we enjoyed it as we'd never seen it before. I suspect that, again like Love & Marriage, if you've seen it once you've seen them all – but it does move at a faster pace than L&M and I'd probably be OK with watching it live again, whereas we only watch L&M on the in-room TV replay if it happens to show up.

 

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2026 B2B Day 3: Sea Day #1 (Cruise #1: 5N Mexican Riviera)

    Saturday, February 28, 2026 

Cruise Compass

We had a few new experiences today, taking in some events that we’d never witnessed on other cruises before. This is mostly because we spent time reading during some event that was BEFORE a trivia event we were actually targeting. 

Among the new stuff:

• We watched a morning dance workout class in the Music Hall while we caught up on our daily tablet games. There were probably 25-30 people participating as they were led through dance aerobics by one of the activity staffers.
• We (unintentionally) crashed a Top Tier event in two70 in mid-morning when we went to play The Crew. Actually, it is possible that we were invited to the event, which was celebrating mostly those attaining Pinnacle status, but we arrived at least 15 minutes into the event and no one at the entry batted an eyelash. We did NOT attempt to claim any of the free champagne that was being poured.
• The Top Tier event was followed by their somewhat mawkish Salute to Veterans (which included digging deep to also celebrate police and fire folks). The ship’s orchestra was there to play a medley of service tunes, Taps, and finally the national anthem. Finally, at the end of those events there was some sound testing in two70 that led to some REALLLY LOUD noises as we continued playing The Crew.

As far as trivia for the day, here’s how things went:

• Visual Trivia, Romance Movies: 8/20, pathetic
• Tri-bond Trivia: 15/18, 17 wins
• James Bond Trivia: 5/20, 12 wins, another very poor showing by us
• Sports Trivia: 6/20, 16 wins. The three women next to me were making healthy use of their drinks package but did know sports. At one point, in response to a baseball question, one of them said to her friend “all I know about those guys is that I dated one of them” and I realized that they fit that “type”, i.e. the Bull Durham team follower type.  
• Afternoon Trivia: 6/20, with 16 winning. The winner was referenced by the game host as “Mr. Blue Shirt” – we’d later hear him called “Wally”, as he also B2B’ed our cruises. Wally was clearly a serial solo cruiser who was VERY impressed with himself. He always played as a team of 1 and always loudly called out the answers he’d memorized. (Those that he wasn’t certain about didn’t earn the same level of volume.) Winning was clearly VERY important to Wally – and we’d meet another guy later in the cruise (Dan) who had a very similar MO.

On the food and drink front:

·

• I tried one of Schooner’s special drinks: Toasted Marshmallow Old Fashioned; meh, while Eileen had a Pina Colada (also meh).
• For lunch (the only one I bothered taking notes for) I had the BBQ pork chops (good) with mashed potatoes and gravy (the expected meh) while E made herself a sandwich by picking apart their roasted chicken. We tried both the “mainstream” red velvet cake (yellow, too much whipped crème, not enough cake) and Coconut Custard Tart (awful – suffering from the same gelatinous issue that so many of the mass-produced desserts have).
• The poor MDR waitstaff: at dinner the waiters and assistant waiters are obligated to dance like monkeys and perform the Macarena around dessert time. Hate it! While we didn’t witness this any other night, on our final night onboard we heard them calling all waitstaff to prepare for their entertainment as we were leaving the MDR.)

After dinner we went over to the Music Hall and read while listening to the Family Majority Rules game. This is our second time at this game, after our time on Brilliance. It seems likely that the “winners” come out of teams with serial cruisers on them, as the questions (which are clearly standardized since it was the same ones we already heard) generated mostly the SAME majority answers as last time. We guessed that the answers that were mentioned by only 1-2 teams were newbie teams who were making honest responses, while the majority responses were mostly tams going “yeah, this was the majority answer the last 3 of 5 cruises…”

We attended the first of their two production shows this night. Sequins and Feathers involved a large cast of 6 singers, 12 dancers (6 men, 6 women) and 4 showgirls. Honestly, not certain I could tell the difference between female dancers and the showgirls. The last couple of cruises the male dancers didn’t seem as strong as the women, but we thought all the dancing was good this time. The singing was fine, with one of the men being particularly strong. Like all shows, lots of costume changes and what we THOUGHT were some tough quick changes…until we later saw Starwater, which has some horrifically tough changes. We were both happy to plan on re-watching this show on the 2nd leg of our B2B.

Now, let me insert some general comments on other things I was tracking on a daily basis:

• Internet speed: With only one exception, we remained connected to Starlink via a Los Angeles-based ISP. Down/up speed tests showed 8Mbps down/3Mbps up speeds, in general.
• Wireless quality: Wireless generally got worse the deeper into the cabin I got. At the bed it was fine, at the couch next to the balcony it was sometimes spotty. It seemed like we both got auto-disconnected overnight every day. We’d have to reconnect every morning.
• Weather: I used the Windy app for forecasting, which wasn’t necessarily the best choice. Doing it on my tablet rather than phone was tough because I didn’t have location services on the tablet, so had to click on the map and compare the long/lat with that shown on the TV to ensure I was in the proper location.

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2026 B2B Day 2: Boarding Quantum of the Seas and Sailing Away (Cruise #1: 5N Mexican Riviera)

Friday, February 27, 2026

Cruise Compass

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

 

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2026 B2B Day 1: San Jose to Long Beach

Thursday, February 26, 2026

NOTE: Each day of our trip will include the expected plan (timeline) for the day next to the actual timeline followed.  I had what I THOUGHT was the final schedule for the first leg of the cruise a couple of days before we flew to LGB, but it turns out that it kept changing up until we boarded.  Nevertheless, I did have time to pre-plan a timeline based on the information I had, and as such the Plan vs Actual for leg 1 is pretty complete.  Since the schedule for the second leg didn’t get finalized until we were onboard during leg 1 I didn’t have the same opportunity to pre-plan the second leg.  As a result, there’s less chance to compare a plan vs actual on the second leg.   I also noted too late that the dates heading each column are wrong.  “Wed 2/26/25” should be “Thu 2/26/26”, and so on for each successive date.

I had planned to book us into the Best Western Plus Hotel at the Convention Center as this would provide us with nicer restaurant choices than our prior choice of the Homewood Suites at Long Beach Airport.  Unfortunately, when I finally got around to making a booking in late December 2025 the BW was, rather surprisingly, fully booked.  I kept trying over about 10 days to see if I could get in but finally had to give up and find a different place.  None of the other downtown places (with space) appealed.  Several were too expensive ($300+ for a night) or too sketchy.  So ultimately, I fell back to the Hilton properties again.  This time, I decided to try to lower cost (but higher rated) Hampton Inn at Long Beach Airport.  This is the building-mate to Homewood Suites, so the location still allows us to tap into the big shopping center in the area near the airport.  Last time, I’d picked the Homewood because they, in theory, had a better breakfast than Hampton – but we failed to realize that the Homewood breakfast was behind a pass-carded door and ended up eating on the Hampton side anyway.  It was poor – but we saved about $75 or so by taking the Hampton.

The night before we left for LGB I got a message from Hilton inviting us to perform check-in and get an eKey to the room via my phone.  It took a bit of doing as I discovered that the Hilton app needed to be excluded from passing through the NordVPN tunnel in order to connect to my account, but once I white-listed the app in the NordVPN app things worked just fine. 

We also packed the night before our flight so we didn’t have to scramble in the morning.  We each took a full-sized suitcase and had no issues packing everything we wanted.  We both use some of the lessons learned from our TA on Brilliance six months previously, tweaking our clothing lists.  That meant that all we had to do before leaving the house around 1020A was to put our suitcases into the car and put our tablets into the backpack, which also held the Folder  ‘o Fun and our cable bag.  We headed to Spring Park by SJC and were in the terminal by around 11A (expecting to board starting around 1225P).  Waze was INCREDIBLY insistent that we take various strange routes to the airport.  Once we got onto 87 and it wanted us to exit at Curtner – which we did – we realized that there was an accident just ahead of us that had 87 at a standstill.  So we ended up taking a bunch of back streets into downtown before getting back onto 87 at Julian.  We arrived at Spring Park about 10 minutes later than expected, but that still gave us time to go buy deli sandwiches to serve as our pre-boarding lunch.

Our flight was 100% full, but since the only things we carried on were E’s purse and the travel backpack we had no worries about boarding.  The flight is a very quick 56 minutes from takeoff to landing, so in almost no time we were in Long Beach and picking up our luggage.  Once outside, in the supposed pickup area for the hotel shuttle, I tried calling the hotel for pickup.  Unfortunately, I got into Hold Hell and after trying twice (and wasting 15 minutes) we finally just requested a Lyft, which arrived within just a couple of minutes and we were finally at the hotel by about 245P.

The Hampton room was – perhaps – a bit smaller than the Homewood Suite room, but we find it just fine for our needs and if we ever need to book one of these places again we’ll just go with the cheapest option.  The more centrally located Best Western is still a place we should try, however. 

Our room at Hampton Inn Long Beach Airport

For dinner we once again made the very short walk over to The Hangar LBX, where I tried a sampling of onigiri from Tenori while E tried out street tacos from La Taqueria Brand.  We were both really happy with our choices and would gladly eat at each of them again.  Once back at the hotel we grabbed a couple of snack bags of cookies from their little store and headed back to our room for the night.

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