Sailing Like a Celebrity -- Day 9

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Day 9 -- At sea
Mid 50s, rain

We decided to have a very lazy morning. We stayed in the room (and by "we", I mean Kathryn), and I went upstairs to Oceanview and brought breakfast back to the room. It had turned cold and rainy overnight, but we were determined to enjoy our balcony for one last morning. So we put on our Concierge bathrobes and sat under blankets while we ate outside. 

Our bathrobes. I have pictures of us wearing them, but I want to stay married, so I'm not posting those! 

Once we left the stateroom, I went up to the Solarium to enjoy the heated pool one more time. After drying off and putting on warm clothes, we saw that the buffet was MOBBED for lunch, so we went to the Cosmopolitan restaurant and had a sit-down lunch, which I actually enjoyed very much. We sat with a mother and daughter from Canada, and a young couple from NJ who were on their first cruise together (and the guy's first cruise ever). We joked with them about how brave they were to choose a 9-night itinerary for their first cruise. That's a long time to be stuck on a ship, if you're not enjoying it. But they were both having a blast. They were in their mid-20s and were one of the youngest couples onboard. But they both said that they had loved the entire experience. I had the Pad Thai Shrimp noodles, and enjoyed it very much. It was nice to be waited on, instead of walking around the buffet. It was a nice experience for our last lunch.

After lunch, I decided to have one more go at the poker table. Without going into too many details, I crushed the table and finished first, winning $270. At that point, I realized that the cost of parking at the port was $300 ($30/day), so I pocketed my winnings and decided to use it for the parking garage.

We had made a bunch of friends during the sailing, and we'd decided to meet in the Martini Bar as a last hurrah. We had such a blast. The bartenders did something that I'd never seen before. We all wore boas and sunglasses, just to be goofy. They did a "martini pour" of about 20 drinks at once. It was actually pretty impressive!



And since we were being "goofy", my DCL Castaway Cay shirt made an appearance, as well.

The final evening's show was the song-and-dance crew again. The ladies went and liked it, even though the singing was kind of uneven throughout the performance. I used the time to pack up. 

Dinner appetizers were cream of broccoli soup and a duck "roll up". There's no way in the world that I would ever order broccoli soup, but Dale said she enjoyed it. The roll-up was like chicken fingers, except made with duck meat. It was really good! My entrée was short ribs on polenta and it was excellent. The pasta primavera was also very good and was very light, so it didn't make you feel stuffed. Kathryn had chicken puttanesca with fried capers and sun-dried tomatoes. It wasn't what she expected, but it was great. For dessert, we all had the Grand Marnier soufflé, which was very good. And Reynaldo did his duty! (If you don't get that soufflé joke, shoot me a message  )

Cream of Broccoli soup:

Duck roll-up:

Pasta Primavera:

Chicken Puttanesca:

Short ribs (and yes, it was WAY too much peas-and-carrots!!):

Soufflé:

We said goodbye to our whole serving team. They were wonderful for the entire sailing. I felt very fortunate that we had the same team every night. They were great. After dinner, we basically went to the room and finished packing up and put the bags out in the hallway.

And that was the end of our first Celebrity cruise. The next morning was a pretty standard breakfast menu in the Cosmopolitan restaurant. Disembarkation was very easy, including a reserved area for Concierge guests to wait before going to the gangway. Interestingly, we did not have to produce our passports to get through Customs. They had facial recognition machines, which I assume they matched to our passport pictures that we provided at check-in.

And that was it. We really enjoyed our experience. Not everything was perfect, but the service we received was excellent the entire time and that really made it a wonderful cruise. Thanks for reading along  I hope you enjoyed the report!