Breakaway to the Caribbean! Days 9 and 10

Categories

Trip Report

Day 9 – At Sea Mostly sunny, humid, 80

Our last day! As usual, we ordered room service. We asked for our normal delivery time, 8:30-9:00, and as an experiment we wrote “Not Early” on the ticket. It came at exactly 9:00. I stayed in the room and sat on the balcony after breakfast. Also watched Serena win Wimbeldon. Nice lazy start to the morning.

At 10:15, we went to the Atrium because they showed “Destino” on the big screen. “Destino” is an animated collaboration between Walt Disney and Salvador Dali. It was wonderful, even with a crew member doing some narration over the soundtrack to let us know what was happening in the story. A couple things to mention about this showing:

It’s very hard to concentrate or really appreciate a movie on the Atrium screen. The sound and video quality are both very good, but there’s so much else going on around the Atrium (and on the deck directly above it) that there’s a lot of distraction. People walking through or having conversations, all the people at the Guest Services and Shore Excursion desks, O’Sheehans right above you. All of these things make it tough to enjoy something like this as you would in a theater.

Why is a Disney animation being shown on a Norwegian ships, you ask? Interesting question. I think it’s because the film is distributed by Park West Gallery, which conducts Art Auctions at Sea on the Norwegian ships.

Although I enjoyed the short very much, my favorite part of the whole experience was seeing Roy Disney in an interview, talking about how Dali’s artwork had been discovered in the Disney archives and the process of bringing the project to completion.

You can watch the film (without the interview) here:

After Destino, I picked up our luggage tags for disembarkation and then found the girls on Deck 8. Sat for a while and soaked up some sun before heading to Savor for lunch. Nobody was interested in coming with me, but I wanted lunch in a sit-down restaurant one time before the end of the cruise. I had the fried shrimp (very good) and hummus plate (ok, not great, and not enough bread) appetizers. I tried the BBQ meatloaf for my entrée, and it was pretty good; not too dry, and pretty good flavor. I honestly forgot that there was probably dessert, so I got up to leave and my server caught me on the way out to ask if something was wrong. She tried to convince me to look at the dessert menu, but I was already half out the door, so I apologized, but I didn’t stay.

I spent the afternoon between my favorite outdoor spaces. I sat with the girls on Deck 8, then spent some time with my feet in the water at Spice H2O, then read for a while on our balcony. I like the water at Spice H2O, but I like the quiet of our own balcony. And it’s easy to escape into the air conditioning if the sun gets to be too much. It also allowed me to be in the room by myself for a little while, so that I could get my packing started without being in anybody else’s way.

For our last dinner, we went back to Savor. In hindsight, we probably should’ve given the Manhattan Room another try, but our first experience wasn’t good and we found that we liked the atmosphere of Taste and Savor better. So there we were. For appetizers, Molly had melon and prosciutto, which was excellent. The rest of us had scallops in butter. This was served in an escargot plate. There were one or two tiny scallops in each bowl of the plate in a lot of melted butter. A lot. It was ok.

For entrees, Kathryn had the Beef Wellington, served with finger potatoes. The meat was done very nicely and the pâté between the meat and the pastry was delicious. She liked it very much. Dale and Molly had shrimp with bouillabaisse sauce over mashed potatoes. They both said it was very good and particularly liked the sauce. I had wiener schnitzel with lemon and capers. I was served with no sauce, no vegetable. The lemon and capers were one small lemon slice, with three capers, wrapped in an anchovy. It was more of a garnish than anything. It was ok, but very dry and not a whole lot of flavor, to be honest. I asked for a few of the shrimp as a side and that made a nice “surf and turf” meal.

After dinner, it was time to get serious about packing, so we headed back to the room. As we were in there, the room steward came by to turn down the bed, but we told him that we would be out of the room soon because of the show that I’ll talk about next, and he went away. (That was a mistake.)

After getting some of their packing done, the girls went to the Breakaway Theater at 8:30 to hear Carla Stickler, who has played in some major Broadway shows, most notably as Elphaba in Wicked. She sang several songs from that show, as well as West Side Story and some others; but she didn’t talk much about her Broadway experience. Still they enjoyed the show very much and it was a great way for them to end the cruise.

Once the show ended, it was back to the room to finish the packing. Unfortunately, the room steward was still in there at 9:30. Rather than wait around, we went up to Shakers with our Trivial Pursuit cards and had a drink. Around 10:15, we went back to the room, and surprise! He was still in there. He finally finished at 10:30. Two nights in a row, we were waiting in the hallway until 10:30 for our room to be turned down. So frustrating. He usually did a decent job, but for me personally, it’s really poor service to make me wait until 10:30 to have my room ready.

At 11, I snuck out to see the Liar’s Club. This was a show featuring the cruise director, a Second City cast member and one other crew member. It was “hosted” by another member of the Second City troupe. The idea is that they pick obscure dirty-sounding words from the dictionary (like asswage or fulfart) and the panelists each give a definition and the crowd tries to guess which one if the real definition. It was pretty funny, as long as you were in the mood for very silly humor.

Since it's the last full day of this report, here are just a few more pictures of the ship as we prepare to say good-bye.

Day 10 – NYC

One of the things that I really liked better on this cruise than some others that I have been on is that we didn’t feel like we were being pushed off the ship. Breakfast was available at the buffet or in the complimentary restaurants, and we chose Taste. It was a simple menu, but there were good options and again, we felt like we could take our time.

Everyone is assigned a disembarkation time, so it’s not a mad crush as soon the ship is cleared through Customs. The disembarkation process was well-organized, but took forever, just due to the sheer number of people who had to walk through the door. Once we got into line, it took us about 20 minutes to get to the pier. Then it took 30-40 minutes to get into the terminal. (Unless you were a guest of the Haven. They had their own lane to walk past the line. But it was unmarked until right before we entered the terminal, so as they walked by, some people were getting really mad, telling them to get back in line. A couple more signs might have been useful.) Once we got into the baggage area, we sailed through. We found our bags and walked through Customs in probably 5 minutes.

So that was our first experience with Norwegian Cruise Line. Lots of things we enjoyed, a few things that we really didn’t enjoy. But overall, I’m glad that we took this cruise. The itinerary was perfect for us and there were enough things that we liked so that we had things to do, if we wanted to be active.

indicates a required field

Leave a Reply