Monday, April 8, 2019
Boarding day started with us getting up a little bit later than expected since I’d carefully set my phone alarm to 845P instead of 845A. D’oh! Nevertheless, we had more than enough time to shower and go down for an AWFUL breakfast. We both took just a couple of bites of greasy powdered eggs and sausage and gave up. We were about to board, so it wasn’t like we were going to be too far away from a ton of food. At 10:05 we hailed a Lyft driver who arrived in about two minutes, and by 10:25 we were walking into Terminal A at Port Miami.
A note about a new part of the online check-in process. This was the first cruise where the online check-in assigned us a time window for boarding. Since I had waited about 5 weeks to check-in the first available slot was noon. Since you are required to select a time window to complete check-in I did so. However, I knew from reading Cruise Critic that check-in times are NOT enforced – at least, not yet. Therefore, we just ignored our time window and showed up at the terminal at 10:30 as planned. The new process also means that, assuming you already have your Sea Pass card printed out, you simply approach one of the iPad-equipped agents standing by the entrance who quickly takes a photo of you and sends you onto the ship. From the time we entered the terminal door to walking up the gangway was well less than 10 minutes. A huge improvement as compared to our prior cruises and really well done by Royal!
In prior cruises we’ve always ended up with at least one bag carried on-board with us that was just too dang heavy. Usually it was because we had a couple of bottles of wine in a backpack. Although the wine bar we had been to the prior night had bottles for purchase, we didn’t find anything that we really wanted to try, so this time we decided to use our OBC to buy wine onboard and so walked on board with a backpack containing only our small electronics. So much nicer!
We like to board as early as possible which means that we often have a few hours in which to explore before we’re ready for lunch – and even before we’re ready to have a drink, if such a thing could be imagined! Creating a tour plan was something I’d done to fill time pre-cruise. It wasn’t like we’d ever had a bad experience exploring the ship without a plan. (“No – don’t go out that door! Oh, no…MAN OVERBOARD!”) On the other hand, having a route in mind did encourage us to linger a bit more during our wanderings and make a more conscious effort to look at the artwork more closely than we’d previously done. Without a route in mind I tend to be thinking more about where to go next rather than simply enjoying what I’m seeing. We did spend a lot of time down on deck 4, looking at the “art” and playing our favorite “OK, someone puts a gun to your head and you HAVE to buy something” game and, once again, confirming that E and I are scarily in-sync when it comes to our tastes.
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| Not OUR ship, but this is Miami's Terminal A for Royal Caribbean |
We meandered on our tour for just over an hour, ending up at the Windjammer to have some lunch. The Voyager class ships have the WJ layout that includes both the two main island stations at the back as well as the “corridor-style” serving stations down each side which I’m not a big fan of. On the other hand, their eating spaces seem well laid out so, while not our overall favorite from a “flow” perspective (we’re fans of Radiance-class WJ) it wasn’t as bad as the Freedom class. While eating we took advantage of the roving drink guy who was offering the Drink of the Day (Mai Tai) to start our cruise off with a drink. The Mai Tais did NOT make our short-list of “go-to” drinks.
For the first time ever we purchased internet access. Our excuse for doing this was because our 8th grader was on a trip to DC at the same time as us and we wanted to be available in an emergency. Of course, we knew that relying on internet access wasn’t good enough, so we’d set up other family members as his emergency contacts to be sure he would be covered. The REAL reason for getting internet access is that I had an Android game that only worked with live internet access and I wanted to play it! Yeah, TOTALLY a first world issue!
Ended up getting myself a Surf and Stream package, and for the wife got her a bundled Surf and Royal Refreshment package. The Stream would allow us to listen to SF Giant games if we wanted to – so we thought. The reality is that the stream was so slow that the audio would constantly pause while more buffered. I believe that there’s almost no value in the more expensive Stream package. As we crept up to the cruise we thought it increasingly likely that we’d NOT be getting off the ship at Coco Cay. Nassau was already off the table, so we thought that perhaps taking in a ballgame might be something we’d want to do while sitting out on our balcony reading and enjoying a cocktail or two (or three…). We had expected our internet credentials to be waiting for us in our room, but such was not the case, so we ended up having to go to guest services to get that info. Actually, as we started to get in line at Guest Services one of the roving agents asked what we needed and quickly re-directed us across the deck to the Voom booth. There, the agent looked us up on a print out and gave us our codes. Took about 2 minutes. (Our stateroom attendant later brought us the official printouts around 515P, during sail-away.)
We decided to return to our room post-lunch, but rather than take the mid-deck elevator that would let us out just steps from our door we decided to instead take the forward elevator and walk down the corridor to look at the art that was in our area. It turned out that the luggage was being staged in the hallway at this time and we happened to run across our two bags, so we rolled them back to the room with us and unpacked.
Now nicely settled, around 1P we legged it up to the rock wall desk as that’s where they were handling sign-ups for the escape room. We made a quick reservation for 2:30P on Day 2, and then went to Boleros to pick up our second drink of the trip. Royal is now using paper straws which neither of us like, but E had brought along some reusable aluminum straws, so we took the drinks back to our cabin and enjoyed them while confirming our internet access. We relaxed on our couch until it was time for the 4P muster drill. One bit of pre-muster homework was to locate the most likely bar to get our sail away drink from, and it seemed that Boleros was still going to be the best choice.
Muster was a bit strange. We went to our outside C16 location, but as soon as they scanned our cards they sent us back inside….to Boleros! A crewman came in and announced that our muster station was, indeed, outside and that we were Boat 18, but we were meeting inside because of “reasons”. He then wished us a nice cruise and left. We all looked at each other wondering whether we’d just had a 30 second muster drill? A few people did wander away, but were back within about 2 minutes saying that we actually were not yet done. Soon the standard announcements were made…but there was constant chatter inside and we literally couldn’t hear a word, nor were any crew trying to quiet us down. There was one crew member who gave us a totally silent life jacket demo, but that was it.
There was one HUGE benefit of our Boleros-based muster, however. E and I happened to be sitting at the bar, and when the bartender returned at the end of muster I said something like “oh, look, our favorite person is here”, which was enough for him to decide to start filling drink orders starting with us! So we quickly got our sail away drinks and went back up to our balcony to sit while we pulled out of Miami. My sail-away drink was a Citrus Rita, which I thought was pretty good. Would be happy to get it again.
Mariner was docked at Terminal A headed toward Miami, so we had to proceed to the turning basin before we could reverse our facing and start to head out to sea. On the way into the turning basin we passed the docked Norwegian Sun and MSC Armona. By the time we’d turned around the Sun had already headed straight out to sea, so we followed her. It took about an hour before we finally cleared the berthing channel and were truly on our way. As my balcony chair was in direct sunlight for the first half of that time I got pretty heated up so took a quick shower before we went to the MDR for dinner.
I had sent email to rccldining about 2 weeks before sailing requesting a table for two and was pleasantly shocked when they quickly replied saying “done”. Sure enough, we had a nice table for two on Deck 5. We ordered a bottle of wine to go with our meal. Just before dessert an officer stopped by our table and made some quick small talk in praise of our wine (a Ravenswood Zin) and I asked him if he’d ever spent any time in California. He said “yes” and we made a few more comments before the Executive Chef joined him and then they moved on. I hadn’t been able to see his name tag so asked E if she had figured out who it was. Turns out it was the Captain, so we had our Brush with Greatness!
Post-dinner we went to the Schooner for our first trivia of the cruise. It was 70’s Disco Music Trivia, and we SUCK at music trivia. It was a train wreck. We got 3 (of 20!) and didn’t even meet the minimum threshold when the host said “how many got four or more right?” Total humiliation. To console ourselves we went out to the Promonade and sat outside the Pub, where a live band (Euphonic Jive) was playing. They were REALLY good and we decided right there that we’d try to find time to listen to them again.
During their break we went back down to Schooner to listen to the pianoman, Mathew Gauthier. While he had a nice voice, his piano arrangements were not very interesting so we only stayed for about 4 songs before going back up to the Promonade to people watch while waiting for the band’s next set. From there we made our way to the theater to catch the welcome show.
At the welcome show we were introduce to CD Ricky (Matthews) from Jamaica and a couple of the comedians (J.R. McCollum and Basil) who were onboard. Each of the comics did about 12 minutes and then Ricky did a quick wrapup. Ricky is no Marc Walker – although I admit he did grow on us as the cruise went on. A lot of energy. Post-show we made our way back to midship via the outside deck and thence to our room where we called it a night. The one request we made of our stateroom attendant was that we have 2 wine glasses in our room each day, so when we got back there were 6 clean glasses on the vanity. (Ironically, we never had wine on our balcony as we’d expected, so the glasses went unused.)
