And we are back!

Our 5 day cruise on Royal Caribbean’s Empress of the Seas turned out to be just what we needed.  It provided us with relaxation, beauty and free child care!!  After two long weeks of not parenting Duckie because she was at sleep away camp, we needed to ease back in the responsible adult thing :-)

Somebody was happy to be crusing!

Even though I used to be a travel agent and even worked at the Norwegian Cruise terminal in New York City for a time, I’ve never sailed with any cruise line other than Royal Caribbean.  It’s like when you find a pair of jeans that fits perfectly, you don’t start shopping around for other brands.  You stick with what you know as long as it works.  For me a high level of customer service is important when I travel and in any business/service transaction.  This was my 8^th cruise (I think), Duckie’s 4^th and Hubby’s 3^rd.  Each cruise has left us feeling happy and refreshed, but maybe this one the most. 

At only 5 days and 2 destinations, this was the shortest cruise we’ve taken and it was the smallest ship on which we have sailed.  The Empress of the Seas was built in 1990 and has since been dwarfed by each ship the company has built since.  It was retired and then two months ago it returned to service after being refurbished.  Because of this transition the ship is like a grandmother on Twitter.   The dining room has a old school feel, with chairs that look very much like the carpet, and gold railings surrounding a grand staircase.  But up on deck, a large HD screen floats over the bar showing movies and the Olympics while guest watch from the hot tub or the salt water pool which is small by today’s standards.  Other upgrades include the rock climbing wall, steakhouse restaurant, and in room flat screen TVs with satellite coverage. 

But that’s exactly what made it so great.  Unlike my usual, let’s keep it moving self, I was happy to not have 1 million options of things to do.  In fact, it’s fair to say there was still plenty to do, I just didn’t do it.  There were shows, and bingo and Karaoke, and a Casino, and game shows, and dance parties, and a spa.  But here is how we spend our days at sea:  Breakfast, followed by sitting in or around the pool, while Duckie played with a new friend.  Lunch pool side and then a shower.  Duckie then went off to kids club, which is essentially, summer camp on a ship, and we napped or read or sat in a lounge chair on deck with cigars.  Then we’d head to dinner with or without Duckie (sometimes she preferred to stay eat with the kids club, she’s just not that into being parented, post-camp).  Our waiter was obsessed with making sure no diary was slipped to me in any dish (lactose-intolerance) and the assistant water got me hooked on sour dough bread which was tolerated by my gluten-intolerance.  (It’s not easy being green!) After dinner, we’d watch a movie on deck or relax in the cabin. Then we’d usually have a late night snack before bed.

Our daily view

We spent one full day at sea before docking in Grand Cayman.  We’d all been before so, instead of swimming with the sting rays or having Duckie pull the tails of the gigantic biting turtles (in fairness she was a 1 year old when did this), we just hopped a $5 taxi van to Seven Mile Beach (the Sea Grape section) and spent a few hours swimming in clear blue water with our goggles on to create our DIY snorkeling adventure.  And in between swims we relaxed on the rented beach chairs under the rented umbrella sipping cocktails from the beach bar.  Really, there could not be a more perfect day.

 

Grand Cayman

Tandem Float

Tender Boat in and out of Grand Cayman from ship

After another day at sea we docked in Key West, a favorite place of mine and Hubby.  But we are used to being there at a hotel or with a car to go out and adventure and also to eat a lot.  On foot in the hot sun and with little desire to pay for a meal, when great ones were free on the ship, we found ourselves without a real plan.  After hitting up the Starbucks and CVS it was starting to feel a bit too much like home, so we hailed a cab and asked to be taken to a nice beach close by.  The taxi driver seems to think the beach in Fort Taylor State Park with rocks instead of sand fit the bill.  While I disagreed, we were there, so we rented beach chairs and an umbrella and creeped over the sharp rocks on hands and feet until we were comfortably in the water, and then a thunderstorm began!  Ha!  It started to rain really hard, people ran as fast as one can over rocks out of the water and under the awning of the convenience stand.  We stood under our umbrella, getting dressed and wondering how we’d time our beach trip so perfectly, as to make it a complete waste of time.  But just as things were looking, well overcast, humanity gave us a reason to smile.  The guy at the beach chair and umbrella stand refunded us our rental fee.  We hopped a cab back to the ship got on board and headed to lunch.  By the time we were done the rain had ended and we resumed our normal at sea activity of relaxing. 

 

Key West through the Port Hole

Normally when all three us of cruise together we have our picture taken on formal night and purchase one or two 8x10 photos.  This serves as a simple way to get something close to a bi-annual family portrait.  But because of the small size of the ship they did not have a photographer and backdrop set up outside of the dining room.  Instead they advertised a photo studio with no sitting fees.  So we made an appointment for that last evening and had our photo session.  We came back a few hours later to select photos and nearly fell out of our seats laughing.  The photos were all black and white, which we knew going in, but the photographer used a camera filter which highlighted the whites, thus exposing every single gray hair on my head and aging me by 20 years.  For hubby this caused him to appear as though his hair line had moved back a foot!  We easily eliminated 20 or more photos and selected just three photos to purchase.  Which was two more than, we’d originally planned to purchase.  The photographer was aghast.  He could not believe we would only want three pictures.  So I said, “Yup, that’s all we need. How much will it be?”  I was thinking he might give us a discount because we’d had to wait 30 minutes for him to be available, after he’d asked us to come early.  He said people normally chose more pictures and the digital package was $550.  We were practically rolling on the floor laughing at this point.  Which I understand might have been offensive to the poor guy, since it was his job to sell ridiculous things to dummies.  So I explained we didn’t need the pictures digitally, we just needed 3 prints.  He remained stunned, while thinking really hard and then said … wait for it … “That will be $350.”  Of course, even he couldn’t say it with a straight face.  Suffice it to say I can’t show you how my grays glistened and Hubby’s newly bald head shined, because we left empty handed, repeating every few minutes, “ Did he really say $350?!”

 

But I can show you this photo of me using my Birdling Bag as my everything bag for the cruise/beach  (You might want to get one at birdling.com)

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that photo studio idea won’t catch on with all the other ships.  If it does then I need to start a business selling sand in the Sahara.  I said as much in the survey Royal Caribbean emailed post-cruise.   All in all, it was obvious that most of the staff was new to Royal Caribbean, service was still good, just not great as it usually is.  And based on experiences I heard from previous clients, average service (and food quality) on Royal is still better than good service on Carnival or Norwegian.  So I’d expect they just need a few months to work out the kinks of scaling down their big operation to this smaller ship.  And with prices as low as small ship sailing offers, I think there will be many other guests who are ready to enjoy the relaxing just as we did.

Well that's all for now.  Duty calls time to prep for back to school, back to life and back to dreaming about my next vacation.  Maybe next time I'm in at Miami's airport I'll stop in here ...

Namaste .... Talk soon, BMK