Breakaway to the Caribbean! Day 8

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Trip Report

Day 8 – Bermuda Mostly sunny, hot, high 80s

The ship wasn’t scheduled to dock until 10:00, so we slept in a little, then had a quick breakfast at Garden Café. Breakfast is usually available in Taste and Savor, but it’s only for an hour in each restaurant, so we never got down there to try it. Once we docked, we disembarked fairly early, around 10:30, and it was a pretty easy process once we figured out what was going on. People were confused about where the gangway was located and the elevators wouldn’t go all the way down to Deck 4. So we got off on Deck 5 and walked down one flight to the gangway. I don’t think the elevators were restricted in any of the other ports, but I honestly don’t remember for sure.

Approaching Bermuda:

We did some shopping near the ship, and walked through the waterfront fort for about an hour. We brought our purchases back to the ship and I grabbed some pizza for a quick lunch before our excursion.

Our excursion was a Restless Native catamaran ride with snorkeling. We sailed about 45 minutes to a small cove with a tiny beach. But the catamaran came close enough to shore that the water was only chest-high; they lowered a staircase into the water and we just walked off into the bay. It was awesome. They provided snorkel gear, as well as a kayak and a couple paddleboards. The crew was great. They were 3 young guys, very engaging, friendly, and did a Q&A on the ride out to the cove. On the way back there were free swizzles, and fresh baked cookies. They got us back to the ship around 4:15 (all-aboard was 4:30). This was a great excursion, everybody loved it.

This was happening, while we waited for the start of our excursion:

Our catamaran:

Yes, this is me on the board:

As we returned to the ship, it was very hot and there wasn’t any shade on the dock, so NCL provided us with cool hand towels and water or lemonade while we stood in line to re-board the ship. This was really nice. (Can you sense a “but” coming?)

But. . . I need to talk about one thing that I really hated throughout the entire cruise. I haven’t harped on it before now, because I didn’t want it to make the whole trip report negative. As we disembark and then re-board the ship in each port, there is LOUD techno or dance club music, with a constant driving bass beat, blasting at the bottom of the gangway. This same type of music is played regularly at the pool, in the Atrium, in some of the lounges. We found ways to get away from it, but the music is the main reason that you haven’t heard me talk about hanging out too much in the pool area on Deck 15. It’s terrible. So this music is blasting at us as we wait 15-20 minutes to re-board the ship. As we go through the metal detectors, Kathryn set it off. (Her sunglasses were still around her neck.) The NCL security guy jokes, “Uh-oh, you gotta do dishes tonight!” Kathryn laughed and said, “I’ll gladly do the dishes if you could turn off this horrible music.” The crewman got totally serious and said, “You think it’s bad? Think about US!” They have to sit there and listen to it all day.

Once we got away from the music, it was time to get ready for dinner, because we had reservations at Moderno. It was a very fun experience. There was a great salad bar followed by unlimited amounts of meat served on skewers. There were about 15 different cuts of meat: beef, chicken, and pork. They also brought four small sides to the table, served family-style: white rice, mashed potatoes, fried yucca and sautéed mushrooms. In my opinion, the crusted sirloin was the best cut; even better than the filet mignon. The lamb leg and rack were both very good also.

Unfortunately, everything came out medium-well, and as you probably know by now, we typically like our meat served medium-rare to rare. We requested for a few of them to come back with medium-rare, and we waited a little while, but they were able to make that happen for us. If I were to do this restaurant again, I would definitely tell the server as soon as we sat down that we would want the meat prepared a certain way. I’m sure they would bring it to us the way we wanted, and hopefully telling them right at the beginning would save some time.

We absolutely stuffed ourselves. It’s so easy to do because they just keep coming with the meat. So we didn’t really feel like dessert, but the server wouldn’t let us go without at least trying something. So he brought us out a slice of chocolate cake with three-crème sauce. It was, well, not good. We didn’t eat it.

Other than dessert, as I said, this was a very fun dinner. The food was above average, and the service was excellent. (In our limited experience, the service in the complimentary restaurants was generally pretty poor, with maybe one exception. The only really good service we got was in the specialty restaurants.)

We had decided to dress up for dinner, so we took some pictures on the way out of the restaurant, and then walked through the shops to look at the “gold sale”.

By 10:00, there wasn’t anything going on that really interested us. So we decided to back to the room, get changed out of our nice clothes and then see if we wanted to get some dessert or walk the deck. But our room steward was still prepping our room. We waited in the elevator lobby until he finished at 10:25. I don’t know if this is the standard practice, but he had been getting our room done very late almost every night. It was definitely a source of frustration for us.

At that point, we decided to just stay in and relax, rather than going out again, so I finished up a book I had been reading and turned out the lights around 11:30.

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