2023 England and Edinburgh: Planning the Trip

A Note

I wrote this log in multiple phases, some during the months of pre-planning, some while we were there, and some after we came back. As such, tenses shift a lot. I’m not planning on cleaning this up, however!

Planning

Oh, boy! I outdid myself for this one! This trip was the culmination of FIVE YEARS of planning and many (many, many, many) iterations. Original planning for this trip began somewhere around 2018 or so, when we realized that Andrew would be off to college in the autumn of 2023 and we could once again think about travelling as just the two of us rather than as a family. Scotland had long been on both our lists, so I began to look around at attractions and consider how a trip might be blocked out.

Somewhere along the way I stumbled across the website www.britainexpress.com, which had a massive wealth of information about attractions around the British Isles, including rating them on a “heritage scale”. Since the historic import of an attraction is something I care about, I began to collect a huge amount of info from this site and started to build up a large database of possible things to see and do. By the time I was done, there were roughly 1400 different places that were “in the neighborhood” of where we might go.

A few assumptions I was making about the trip. We would:

a) Start in London
b) Rent a car
c) Drive our way north making a series of overnight stops over 4-5 days until finally arriving in Edinburgh
d) Stay in Edinburgh for 3-4 days
e) Return home

Examining each of these assumptions was, of course, part of the overall planning process and I considered MANY different scenarios.

Could we avoid renting a car and instead take either a packaged tour and/or use train rides to work our way north? Train rides were ruled out pretty early as I realized that too much of our time would be eaten up by the train travel process, including having to get to/from stations. (I admit to also being heavily influenced by the writer Bill Bryson, whose chronicles of trying to use the railway system in an economically declining UK made it clear that service was pretty poor and getting rapidly worse.) We’d also have to plan our lodging to optimize for proximity to the train station and we’d be extremely limited in where we could go in a given town. We’d have to use taxis or buses a lot. Ultimately, this just wasn’t going to work. I also looked into a couple of packaged tours that took care of moving us via bus to various destinations, but organized tours just aren’t “us”, so I abandoned that line of thinking early on, also.

Could we avoid London entirely and fly to/from Edinburgh directly? None of my planning actually toured anything in London. We only were there because that’s where Heathrow is. So we could, theoretically, have flown directly to Scotland and used it as a base of operations, and/or made the trip in reverse direction, starting in EDI and working south to LHR. While Edinburgh is a place we really wanted to go, limiting to trip to ONLY Edinburgh wasn’t enough – I, at least, still wanted to see sites in England. Working south would have meant that the driving-heavy parts of the trip would have happened at the end. This was less attractive to me than front-loading all the driving at the start of the trip and being able to relax more at the end of the trip (since we could drop the car as soon as we arrived in EDI and then simply wander around the city mostly on foot for several days), so LHR to EDI sounded more attractive than EDI to LHR.

Could we fly into LHR but out of EDI and avoid going back to London? To fly back out of LHR, my initial thinking was that we’d take a train from EDI back to LHR and then catch a flight. This was do-able although a bit complicated on timing because we’d have to arrive in London the day BEFORE our outbound flight, but was the operative plan for a long time. Later in the planning I did consider just flying back directly from EDI, but the Kayak flight options all turned flying days into 18-22 hour days and routed through places like France or Copenhagen. Even worse, I couldn’t find a carrier that was flying the B787-900, which was the only one that had seats wide enough to make us happy. Late in the process I discovered that Kayak wasn’t showing me Virgin Atlantic (VS) flight options. VS uses B787-900s and still seems like the best carrier SFO-LHR, so I started looking at them – and found that we could fly from EDI to LHR and then step aboard VS’s flight LHR-SFO in a pretty seamless way, so that became the final plan.

As to WHAT to see, that was an iterative process of looking at the options, looking at a map, considering driving routes and schedules, and the whole myriad of options. Most of the plan fell into place pretty organically. The “anchor site” was the town of York, to see “whatever”, so the travel plan was designed with that in mind and other sites were selected simply because they made the most sense of our route and available time. While we’d end up seeing “Abbey” or “Historic House”, there were no particular “must see” sites on those lists – we’d be happy with whatever abbey or house made the most sense. There were MANY plan permutations before finally settling on the schedule we did follow.

Then, when COVID hit in 2020 I stopped planning because, as 2020 turned into 2021 and ANOTHER year of shutdown, it because clear that not only were we forced to re-think our comfort level for a 2023 trip, on a more practical level I was unable to do a huge chunk of the research that I love to do. Why? Well, not only were tourist sites switching over to COVID schedules – meaning that a lot of info about visiting was simply pulled down but, even more frustrating, hotel and restaurant info was hard to come by. Restaurants, in particular, pulled down their normal menus because they were forced to cater more to take-out offerings. So I couldn’t have fun (and also stockpile useful info) like I normally would by looking up stuff on the web. Sigh.

It wasn’t until the start of 2022 that I once again slowly picked up the planning process. This was driven by a combination of factors, the most significant of which was that in a post-vaccine world it was possible to again start realistically thinking about travel – even if we were still unsure about a possible trip in late 2023. Restaurant menus started returning to “normal”, although not always as quickly I would have hoped. Fortunately, the two year planning hiatus had restored my enthusiasm for the process and I made several tweaks around the flight planning (this is where I rediscovered the Virgin Atlantic flights) and some of the ground travel plans. The most significant of the latter was swapping out a day that would have had us doing to drive-by of Lindisfarne and tweaking a couple of days to try to make them less driving-heavy. I also condensed the schedule by cutting out the 4th day in EDI – while it could be easily restored, I felt like the original 4th day wasn’t that interesting to begin with and we’d probably already be pretty tired and would welcome coming home a day earlier.

In October 2022 I really got energized and gave the plan yet another look. I completed a survey of the attractions in Northumbria, County Durham, and Yorkshire that I’d never gotten around to researching earlier – and this had a huge impact, since I essentially filled in large parts of the map we’d potentially be travelling through with missing data. This allowed me to “see” our potential routes much more clearly, and I got a more firm handle on a route that took in a nice variety of places without having to deviate too much to the east or west of our main route northward. I also starting considering a longer trip (adding a few more days of travel between London and Edinburgh to reduce any long driving days).

I also realized a couple of things about York. By going in October we’d likely be missing the normal tourist crush. This meant that I did NOT have to avoid hotels in the city center out of fear about trying to park our car. I’d been planning to use a hotel outside of city center and using the Park and Drive services to get to the attractions. Instead, I realized I could put us into one of (rare) city center hotels with onsite parking – and then WALK to the attractions. Not having to account for shuttle schedules really simplified planning for York.

One of the new destinations became Alnwick in Northumbria. This location just naturally fit into the slow-paced routing I used. Amusingly, I recognized this area not from prior surveys of tourist attractions or historical knowledge, but rather because the area was the home of the Harry Potter family in a series of fanfics written by the author Northumbrian. His knowledge (and love) of the area came through his stories very strongly, and therefore I gave the attractions here more attention than I otherwise might have – and was pleasantly surprised to find that I had no hesitation about including some of them in the planning.

As far as Edinburgh itself was concerned, I kept going back and forth between 2 full days and 3 full days in the city. I ultimately settled on two on the presumption that a full day on the Royal Mile was more than enough time to experience “core Edinburgh”. I was able to find both a free Rick Steves audo tour and a local guide’s free audio tour that, when mashed up, seemed to offer up a really entertaining tour. Steves focused on the sights of the Mile, while the other tour took you into several of the Closes that intersect (and offered up some wonderful history, architecture, and social history notes). I was able to feed the various MP3 files through Microsoft Dictation and automatically transcribe those into a script of about 2 hour’s length that we can read our way through along the way. By meandering our way down the Royal Mile we should be able to easily spend a full day, taking in several key attractions along the way.

So various schedule permutations were tried before I finally settled on something REASONABLY firmed up. As usual, I had a lot of options where we could swap some things for others, but I generally liked the “mix” of choices enough to mostly lock down the itinerary by Nov 2022. I did check in with E on the question of “lots of different towns/new hotel every night with lots of short drives in between” vs “camp out in a few towns with LOTS to do for a few days/change location every 2-4 days with long drives in between”. We both liked the idea of hitting a few highlights in LOTS of places this time around. “Next” time we might focus on a smaller subset of towns – York comes to mind as a likely option, as well as another London-focused trip – based on what we experienced in our little samples this time.

Side note: As I used britainexpress.com as my primary source of potential sites to visit I kept thinking “wow – there are a LOT of castles in the UK.” Then someone tweeted this map, showing the concentration of castles in Europe (with the text “wow France!”). I stand corrected. And clearly my head will explode if I’m ever called upon to create a Spreadsheet of Fun for France. 😊



France will kill me...

I once again set aside planning until late April 2023. By that time we knew Andrew was going to attend CU Boulder so we had some actual dates for getting him to Colorado and getting him installed at school. Knowing he’d be moving in mid-August and starting classes near the end of August we realized that we could realistically push our trip up to September 2023 – so I went to work to book hotels. After a couple of hours I had reservations in place. Unfortunately, I should have booked flights first – because it turned out that our desired Virgin Atlantic flights in September were already pretty heavily booked, and the set of dates I’d based hotel plans around turned out to be terrible for flights. So I had to book flights, then go back and revise all our hotel reservations. Annoyingly, most hotel sites required me to cancel and rebook. Only ONE hotel allowed me the luxury of simply changing dates. A couple of hotels forced me to either email or call them to adjust because I couldn’t even cancel via the web. Grr. A good illustration of the difference of giant US hotel chains with centralized reservation systems vs smaller, independently owned UK hotels with limited IT budgets or expertise.

Flight Planning

Air travel is still very exciting to me. I love the hustle and bustle of airports, and travel by plane is still as exotic to me as it was when I was a kid. However, as we’ve aged there’s no question that air travel has become more burdensome to us. The level of discomfort has increased and we don’t bounce back as quickly as we used to when we were younger. No surprises here – just facts. These days, our physical comfort is MUCH more important to us than it used to be, and as a result of that I spend a LOT of time evaluating flights, looking for the best marriage of comfort to value I can.

This was the first time I SERIOUSLY considered business class. Our last cruise, where E and I flew Delta first class to Miami in order to benefit from their 21” (or maybe it was 22”) wide seats was an eye opener. Those seats weren’t fancy lie-flat seats or anything close to that – they were just WIDER. And that made a HUGE difference to our flight experience. We ruefully acknowledged that we might have spoiled ourselves. So I did look at business class on flights, but we’re still too frugal to splurge on the fares, which are 10x more than economy or 2x-3x more than premium economy. Perhaps someday, but not yet.

So having decided that upper class seating was outside our budget, I did quickly focus on the differences of Economy vs Premium Economy. There was fundamentally no difference among carriers when it came to Economy seating – they were all cramming folks into narrow seats in the 17”-18” width range. Among Premium Economy carriers, there also wasn’t much upside between the carriers – most offered more legroom but didn’t generally offer more width.

Except. Among the carriers who flew the B787-900 plane, Delta (who seem to have noticed that Americans are overweight) offered 21” seat width in Premium Economy. So I eventually narrowed down my flight searching to favor B787-900s with wider seats. We were willing to pay 1.75x for a PE seat vs an Economy seat. We felt like that was reasonable value – even if that was ALL we got over Economy. (Fortunately, PE still brings a few other perks.)

When I picked up planning again in 2022 I realized that I hadn’t seen any Virgin Atlantic (VS) flights in my research. E and I had flown VS on our honeymoon trip in 1998 and had loved the experience, so I visited their website and discovered that the Delta flights were actually operated by VS (and were potentially less expensive if booked direct with VS). Further, a test booking on the VS website of a potential EDI-LHR-SFO trip (where the LHR-SFO leg was the flight that mattered) offered up EDI-LHR options that hadn’t shown up on Kayak. It was this revelation that allowed me to ditch the idea of taking a train from Edinburgh back to London in order to fly out of LHR. We’d just fly out of EDI and connect at LHR for the trip home. While this lengthened the day of travel, it also vastly simplified things and, overall, was a MUCH better plan. By the time I actually booked flights, however, neither Delta nor Virgin still offered an EDI-LHR connecting flight – I ended up having to book a stand-alone BA flight which would NOT check our luggage through to SFO. Upon landing at LHR we were going to have to retrieve our bags and then make our way over to the International terminal to catch our Virgin flight. Fortunately, we’d have several hours to do this.

Finally, after blocking out daily schedules and doing some test flight bookings it looks like leaving SFO on a Wednesday and returning on a Saturday may offer some of the lowest pricing. A Thu/Sat and Fri/Sun pairing seemed more expensive. When I finally make REAL bookings I’ll figure it out…but for now, the days we’re in various locations respects some of the constraints imposed by schedules at various attractions. (When I finally did make the bookings, we ended up flying out Sunday and coming back on Wednesday. The primary reason for selecting this was it allowed me to find pairs of seats in Premium Economy for both directions. The fact that this combo was also about $2K less than some of the other options was icing on the cake.)

I also looked at the logistics of connecting at LHR coming from EDI. It looks like our domestic flight will arrive at LHR T5 but we’ll head back to the US from LHR T3, so we’ll have to move between terminals. I’m assuming that our one-way flight EDI-LHR will be on British Airways and it is likely that we will NOT be able to check our bags to SFO when boarding in EDI. We’ll probably have to retrieve our bags from baggage claim in T5 and then get both our bags and ourselves over to T3 for check-in. (This turned out to be the case. There was no way to book the entire EDI-LHR-SFO journey as a single ticket – i.e. as a single locator number – so we effectively had two individual flights that are NOT technically “connecting flights”. So we must pickup our bags from the BA flight at T5 and we have to use a method of moving from T5 to T3 that is NOT the purple route Connecting Flights bus. Further, once we get to T3 we’ll have to go through security again. I’m still going to leave all this info in the log, however, in case it is helpful for a future trip.) Doesn’t sound too difficult, but will add some time to our inter-terminal travel since we’ll have to wait for our bags upon arrival at LHR.

Upon arrival at T5, we may have up to 10 to 15 minutes of walking if we arrive at T5B or T5C, respectively. Once at T5A, if we have to retrieve our bags we’ll go to baggage claim on Ground Level. Once we have luggage we follow blue directional signage for “Terminals 2,3,4 via Free train transfer”. Along the way we should see well marked kiosks for “Train Tickets” which will dispense tickets. Then follow blue signage for “Trains” and/or “Lifts for Trains”. (The video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=caQ84XzxsOM shows this whole process nicely. The ticket appeared to dispense w/o use of a card – just pressed a button. This guy stepped onto London Underground marked as “Next Elizabeth Line via Ealing Broadway”. Once onboard, the train’s signage indicated “Train to Paddington”, although he was only going to another terminal.) Once at the T2/T3 stop he exited and followed clear signage to lifts that took him up to where he chose the path to his terminal.

Once at T3 we’ll exit Heathrow Express on Level -2 and make our way to Virgin Atlantic check-in on Level 0. (The Heathrow airport site says to take the elevator to Level -1 and then take some stairs to Level 0, but this sounds sub-optimal. I’m betting we can take the elevator to Level 0 and – perhaps – have to walk a bit more on Level 0…but hopefully we’ll be able to avoid lugging suitcases up a level of stairs.)

As best I can tell, there are THREE ways to get from T5 to T3. The first two start the same: once we exit baggage claim we look for the signs that will take us DOWN to either London Underground OR Heathrow Express. The choices are:

1) London Underground (Piccadilly line to Terminals 2&3, departing every 10 minutes). Each of us would need a contactless payment method in order to get past the turnstile, although we wouldn’t be charged for the ride as long as we only travel between terminals. Our VISA cards SHOULD work, but either Google Pay or Samsung Pay are options, too. It is roughly a 6 minute walk from the T3 station to the T3 Departure terminal.
2) Heathrow Express (Elizabeth Line to Terminals 2&3, departing at least every 15 min). We can grab a free inter-terminal transfer ticket from one of the machines in the station. It is roughly a 2 minute walk from the T3 station to the Departure terminal.

Both options 1) and 2) take 16 to 20 minutes to go between terminals. Upon reaching T3 I believe we have to once again go through security (yes, this is the case) since we’ll have been outside the secured zone once we step onto the Underground or Heathrow Express. The Heathrow Express seems like a better choice since it is both simpler to obtain a ticket (free machine dispenser instead of needing a contactless card) and an easier walk once at T3 (2 minutes vs 6 minutes).

3) The THIRD method is available if it turns out that we CAN make our EDI-LHR flight an “official” connecting flight – and right now I’m pretty sure we CAN. I probably just need to book directly with Virgin rather than trying to book via Kayak. In this case we should be able to use the Connecting Flights bus service instead. After baggage collection at T5 Level 0 (I think that we can only check through to SFO if booking on a partner airline – i.e. Air France, Delta, or KLM. Since BA isn’t a partner, we’ll likely be issued multiple tickets – and that means we’ll have to collect our bags upon arrival from EDI and then check them in again with Virgin once we get to T3.) we follow the purple signs for “Flight Connections” (skipping the Arrivals lines in T5? Or is the Arrivals line also the line to get to Baggage Claim??). We’ll eventually get to Level 0 on the runway side. We then hop onto the dedicated T3 bus that departs the terminal every 6-10 minutes and takes 10-15 minutes to get to T3. A video walkthrough of this method can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-4sVZRpwow.

Car Planning

Nothing special here. We’ve rented cars at LHR before and would once again make use of our familiarity with Budget to get something. (At least, that was the plan until I actually made the reservation in April 2023.) We’d only be driving one way, with the intention of dropping the car off at EDI airport on the day we pulled into town and then get around the city itself mostly via walking or public transportation. Given that everything we planned to see was along The Royal Mile we figured we could pick a hotel as central to that area as possible and only have about 1 mile to tackle on any given day (i.e. walk up to ½ a mile to one end of TRM and then another ½ mile back to the hotel by the end of the day).

On the expectation that I’d be renting from Budget, I took some time to figure out the logistics of pickup at LHR. International arrivals are at T3, which has a Budget/Avis desk in the arrivals terminal. Apparently, all Budget pickups will LOOK like they happen at an offsite facility that’s near T5…but they also have an on-airport pickup depot open 24 hours that services T2/T3/T4 – and you can choose to fulfill your pickup there, instead, REGARDLESS OF WHAT YOUR PAPERWORK SAYS. From a customer service response to an Avis/Budget customer I found: “If you do not book a BA flight at the same time as your car, your pre-paid voucher will show collection from the Terminal 5 depot, but in reality, you can choose which depot you collect your car from. We recommend you check the depot opening hours - in the event that the Terminal 5 depot is closed, you can use the Terminals 2 - 4 location. We do not need to know in advance which terminal you wish to collect the car from.”

For car return at EDI, it sounds likes the process is pretty efficient. There’s a central return center on airport property. Many folks mentioned that it only took them about 5 minutes to complete a drop-off, after which there’s a 5 minute walk (mostly under a covered walkway) to get to the terminal, from where we can hop onto Airlink 100 Express to take us into Edinburgh. The bus’s final stop is about a 10 minute walk away from The Inn on the Mile.

When it finally came time to book the car, I discovered that Budget was about 2x as expensive as other options. I ended up booking a small car with Alamo. The car I booked actually seemed to have a larger trunk than the models rented by Budget, meaning that our 2 full size suitcases should be completely hidden in the trunk rather than potentially visible through a hatchback.

One nice discovery was that the Waverly Train Depot in Edinburgh is a place that you can return most rental cars. So we’re going to pickup from LHR but return to the train station on arrival in Edinburgh. We can drop the car and then make the 0.3 mile walk to the hotel rather than going to EDI airport and having to take the shuttle that would let us out at Waverly Station. I did see some internet chatter saying that navigating to Waverly can be confusing, but I’m expecting that phone-based nav will be able to deal with this.

One thing that will be new and improved this time is Navigation 3.0. I hope. When we did our honeymoon trip to the UK in 1998 we had only a book of maps to guide us – and we did pretty well. With the advent of dedicated GPS navigation by the time of our 2013 family trip we used our Garmin GPS – and had challenges. The GPS knew more about street names than the street signs themselves, so would often tell us to “turn at Such and Such” – but there were no obvious markings of just where Such and Such really was. Further, the fact that our US-sourced GPS couldn’t accept postal codes made things a bit more challenging. We got lost more often with the GPS than we had previously with just our paper maps.

This time, with the ability to use Google Maps on our phones it looks like we can download the entire UK map set offline and have access to ALL the POIs for routing, plus Google Maps also accepts postal codes as valid locations. (Actually, I was able to do a test routing between to UK locations sitting on the couch at home, and for those I could use postal code or even – much easier – site names.) So we should have full routing, full turn-by-turn, and ample destinations to use. I did check whether or not I could use Waze, too. I can – but that seems to rely on an active data connection to get road conditions so I decided to stick with Google Maps …which might ALSO want a data connection to update road conditions, but I KNOW I can offline Google Maps if needed, and offlining Waze maps requires some hacking. Well before the trip I saved all our destinations to Google Maps so we could call them up quickly as we needed them for navigation. (Further research yielded data usage estimates for online use of Google Maps or Waze, and I ultimately decided to purchase one month of Verizon’s Travel Package that include unlimited data in the UK. This way we can use my phone for full-featured navigation.)

Somewhere along the line during pre-planning I changed my mind re: using Waze. I’m planning to add a month of international data to both our phones since this is how Verizon offers it, and this means that we SHOULD be able to use Waze in the UK just as we use it in the US. With that in mind I went ahead and looked up all the various driving destinations and saved them to Waze so we can hopefully call them up with a minimum of fuss.

Hotel Planning

As usual, I spent a lot of time reviewing potential hotels using my normal method of looking up hotels “near” our attractions (for a variable definition of “near”) and checking both Google and TripAdvisor (TA) reviews. For TA, I do pay attention to their ordinal ranks (i.e. Ranks X out of Y Hotels in <location>) to get another comparison point. Sometimes that’s hard because two properties close together might use different ref scales (i.e. Hotel A ranks X out of 12 hotels, Hotel B ranks Y out of 3 Small Hotels), but I find value in having both a user star ranking as well as a relative ranking.

In general, I’m looking for 3-4 star hotels with at least Queen-sized beds and bathroom en suite. Figuring out actual bed size is sometimes a challenge because a lot of places will mention that they have “Double beds” – but it isn’t clear whether that means a Full, Queen, or King. If they explicitly mention that a given room can be either a Double or a dual-twin I assume King size. Otherwise I try to gauge from room photos, as unreliable as that might be.

For a trip to the UK, I’m also looking at things like easy parking for our rental car, the availability of breakfast at the hotel for convenience in the morning (although I don’t really worry about whether it is included or extra), proximity to places for dinner, location relative to whatever attraction we’re seeing nearby and – sometimes – historic background of the building. All things being equal, I’d rather stay at a 17th century coaching inn instead of a modern cookie-cutter Best Western.

For each place we’d be staying I generally had a short list of 3-5 properties that sounded interesting, and usually ended up with one of those that ranked 4.3+ stars on both TA and Google, as well as being high in TA’s ordinal rankings. For Edinburgh I quickly chose The Inn on the Mile primarily due to its placement pretty much dead center along the Royal Mile. I was quite surprised that, while expensive, it was still relatively cheap compared to other hotels with similar (or worse) proximity.

Attraction Planning

As mentioned earlier, www.britainexpress.com was a treasure-trove of information about attractions throughout the UK. I spent a ton of time compiling info to the Spreadsheet ‘O Fun and had the ability to sort attractions by geographic regions. I marked each attraction as YES, MAYBE, MEH, and NO to create a shortlist of options. I also mapped each attraction on a mymaps.google.com map and color-coded each one based on its YES/MAYBE/MEH/NO rating. With that, I was able to visualize the relative location of various attractions and began to consider potential driving routes that would pass nearby some of the higher-ranked attractions to find an efficient path that didn’t have us deviating too far from a (mostly) N/S route from London to Edinburgh.

The process was VERY iterative – easy enough to do when there’s 5 years to plan! I had the luxury of having both a primary plan as well as several backup choices. Most backups were selected as being “bad weather day” options, moving us from outdoor to mostly indoor activities. As per my usual obsessive planning, I spent time recording lat/long and postal codes of our key destinations “just in case”, and then much closer to travel I once again visited all the necessary websites to confirm things like schedules and pricing. I had tracked some of the schedule info when I first compiled my database but the world changed a lot both post-Covid and post-Brexit, and I wanted to be sure that our destinations hadn’t cut back on the days or hours they were open.

About five days before we started the trip I revisited all the attractions we intended to go to and decided whether I should (or was required to) pre-book tickets. While all sites certainly were happy to let me pre-purchase on the web, the only ones that REQUIRED it were Chatsworth House, The Real Mary King’s Close, and Holyrood House. For everything else we’ll just plan to buy at the door.

Photography and Other Gear

Unlike prior trips, we’re not taking a dedicated camera this time. Instead, my plan is to make liberal use of my phone (a Samsung S21). To that end, I took some time to watch some online tutorials about how to use the various controls and features of the phone, which is something I’ve never really paid attention to before. If (and that’s a big “IF”) I get my act together, I’ll take photos on the plane, of places and things we eat and, of course, of attractions. We’ll see how long my dedication lasts.

On the expectation that our cell phones will be critical pieces of daily life for navigation, lookup, and photography I also ordered a new portable power bank. We’re going to give Andrew our old Anker 12K power bank and we now have a new Anker 20K model. Since my new laptop backpack includes a USB passthrough port, there’s a mesh pocket inside the main section of the backpack to hold the power bank. I had a chance to use the new backpack during Lyric’s 2023 Festival and found it to be really well-suited for my needs, so pleased about that.

Finally, I’m expecting to take my laptop with me on the trip. While I could try to get by with only my tablet + Bluetooth keyboard there’s no question that I’m MUCH more efficient when I can use a full laptop, so that’s the plan. I’ll leave behind the USB port extender which means that most of my OneCloud local storage will be gone. However, I can access everything I need via the web, so I’ll just have the laptop and power supply. Since my existing wireless mouse won’t work w/o bringing along the USB hub I ordered a bluetooth mouse for traveling so I don’t need to worry about a receiver plugging into my laptop. Even though our agenda looks pretty full, I’m anticipating that we’ll have enough downtime in the late afternoons and evenings to make use of the computer. I think our days of “go go go” all the time are starting to wind down – we need a bit more downtime these days!

As to “other” gear, I’ll bring our UK power adapters, our Anker multiport USB charger, and an assortment of cables as usual and we should be good to go.

The Week Before Leaving

Despite planning this trip for five years, it was still a bit of a shock to receive an email from Virgin Atlantic on a Sunday morning one week before our flight, indicating that the window had opened for us to pre-order our meals. Were we REALLY that close to our trip?!? When I clicked on the email link to review the meal choices I was actually taken to a page that had a confusing message that “it appears that you’ve modified your booking” and that they’d send me a new link “soon”.

My guess at the time was that the email I’d received was a bit early – our 7-day window really wouldn’t open until about 5P on Sunday, and I’d gotten the email around 10:30A. This guess was strengthened when I searched for a direct link to their food portal and, upon entering our flight info, received a response of “Welcome, Early Bird!” and telling me to check back later.

Returning later in the day, after 5PM, proved me correct. We were allowed to pick from amongst three dinner choices, all of which were (surprise...not!) underwhelming. We were offered (IIRC) “butter chicken”, which was probably some chicken and rice glop, a fish dish (airplane fish – wheeee!) or Pasta in a cheesy alfredo sauce. Both of us opted for pasta, figuring this was the least offensive choice.

I also made a couple of last minute purchases, including blister plasters in case we hurt our feet while walking, compact flat packs of duct tape, and also some brass binder fasteners for the Folder of Fun, in order to secure the sleeved copies of the Schedule and Travel Summary inside. Another improvement to the folder was to attach a couple of binder clips to the papers in the side pockets so they wouldn’t slide around like they’ve done in the past.

As per prior trips I checked with the bank in order to file a vacation plan. It seems like this is no longer a requirement – both WFB and BofA’s websites no longer offered the option, instead indicating that this was no longer needed. I guess they now simply alert you via text messaging and have you accept/deny “strange” charges. We’ll see. Fortunately, we’re going with 3 different credit cards between us so it seems extremely unlikely we’d find ourselves without a working card. The intent is to charge as much as possible to the Royal Caribbean (BofA) card, since they don’t charge a currency conversion fee.

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2019 Bahamas 4N Bahamas on Mariner of the Seas: Going Home and Final Thoughts

We had a false start to our day when the 715A alarm I’d set on our phone actually went off at 315A, just after I’d finally gotten to sleep. For some reason my phone was in a weird timezone and this messed up the clock. We reset it to go off at (the real) 715A, although we actually woke up at 7A. A quick shower and trip to the WJ, then off the ship around 850AM. Customs was unexpectedly streamlined. We stood in front of a camera and that was it! No agents, no showing passports (to anyone or anything) – nothing! I guess facial recognition is at work here to decide that we were the same D&E who left Florida several days earlier.

Tried to get a Lyft to take us to the airport but clearly got a driver who had no idea how to navigate the port roadways. Watched on the app as she made many wrong turns. She should have arrived about 8 minutes after contact. After 20 minutes of watching her flail, along with a couple of phone calls where it was clear she had little English (including one call where I think she conferenced in a guy who translated for her) we canceled the call and instead used one of the $10/person shuttles. We were actually walking to get a taxi when we got stopped by one of the many folks holding up “Miami Airport” signs trying to get passengers.

Finally got to the airport around 10A, well in advance of our 1210P flight. Breezed through security since we had TSA Precheck and there was no one ahead of us, and sat at the gate until our flight was called. On the second leg of our trip we were served lunch. I had chicken enchiladas that far exceeded my low expections. They were, in fact, quite good. E had the chicken salad, which she said was "meh". We were both surprised that the dessert which we both thought was a chocolate ice-cream bar turned out to be a cake-pop (that was pretty good).

Finally back home, we retrieved our car and drove to the house, to be greeted by our very pathetic kitty who informed us in no uncertain terms that she'd missed us and didn't appreciate being left in the care of one of the neighbor kids <g>.

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2019 Bahamas Day 5: Sea Day

We started our last full day with a sit-down breakfast in the MDR. From there we went to Morning Trivia where we tied with another team. We actually kept trying to lose the tie-breaker by letting the other team answer first since we had enough keychains already, but in the end we got four more(!) which we gladly gave to some kids sitting next to us.

We wandered the ship a bit more looking for the (supposed) souvenir glassware sale that was said to be on the Promenade, but no luck. Going outside we decided to go find the helipad, which we’ve never done before on other ships. We picked what looked like a “secret” stairway tucked up near the front of Deck 4 and actually were successful, so we can now cross “helipad” off our informal checklist.

We then tried something called “A Royal Mystery” in the Star Lounge. Forming up into a team of 6, each team was given a packet of information/clues/puzzles and we had to figure out who the guilty person or people were from our list of suspects. Overall, there were about 7 different puzzles that we had to solve. We managed to solve all but the final one. We actually got the answer partially correct, but only totally by luck. Two other teams in the room did get the answer and took home (just) bragging rights.

On the way from our lunch at WJ, we found our souvenir glassware on sale just outside the WJ entrance, so we were able to purchase two more RCCL hurricane glasses to add to our barware collection. We (sadly) broke one of ours last year so the two we just bought will bring us to 5 total glasses. Sure, we could have bought a sixth, but that will just have to wait for our next cruise!

Not ours - but still looks great!

Back in the room just after lunch we found the various “so you’re going home tomorrow” information waiting for us. More importantly we had an email from Delta that it was time to check into our flight and select our entrée for tomorrow, so took care of that and then spent about an hour on our balcony relaxing prior to our 230P Escape Room reservation that we’d rescheduled back on Day 2.

There were 13 of us for the room. Production values were better than I expected, with unlocking and openings being accompanied by sound and lighting effects, and a few clever puzzles. We succeeded, although benefited from hints given by the host (who stays in the room with you). At $20 each its actually a pretty good bargain!

The rest of the afternoon was spent, once again, relaxing on the outside of Deck 4 (with another Coco Loco, each) reading. We even skipped Harry Potter trivia, figuring it would be crowded given all the kids on board – and we frankly thought that we’d contend for the win, and we didn’t want to keep stealing the spotlight.

As we finished up our final dinner, we realized a couple of differences in the MDR this time around. First, there was a more overt push by the MDR staff to get you to buy specialty dining, even going so far as to offer you an instant discount to move your current night’s meal to one of the other venues. (Jamie’s, specifically. I assume it wasn’t selling well.) Second, no warning at the last meal that dessert may be delayed due to the normal staff parade. Now we were among the early diners and were out the door by around 710P, so maybe that was still to come? Finally – a small thing, but one I missed – the waiter no longer ran a crumb-scraper along the tablecloth before dessert.

We enjoyed about a 30 minute respite in our room after the meal where - as before – I got caught up on these notes, then headed down for what we expected to be one final drink before heading over to the theater for the farewell show, which this time featured a juggler in addition to the normal appearance by the singers and dancers. (CD Ricky explained that the 4 day cruises are designed to be something like a “sampler platter”, cramming lots of stuff normally spread out over 7 days into 4. Part of this meant that the farewell show included a guest act.) The juggler was pretty standard – not a single trick that we hadn’t already seen a zillion times before.

Our last activity was to head to the Star Lounge for the “Perfect Couple” show. We thought this was going to be the Love and Marriage game show, but instead it was 4 couples competing in silly tasks (stand face-to-face, put an apple between your belly buttons, and then roll it to one person’s mouth without using hands; roll this cold lemon up the man’s pant leg, across his crotch, and down the other, etc.) where the worst-scoring couple would get knocked out. Whole thing took about 30 minutes and was sort of “meh”.

Back in the cabin, we (sigh) packed up and went to bed.

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2019 Bahamas Day 4: CocoCay

Like Nassau, we had also been to Coco Cay during our 2015 Bahamas cruise on Enchantment. While there we had rented two snorkel sets and had taken turns swimming out with our oldest son. At the time our youngest son wasn’t “water safe” enough so we were unable to do this as a group activity. As it happened, both Eileen and really enjoyed our short turns and were looking forward to doing this again on the current trip.

Given that rental cost was around $40 per person for the full day I decided to look online before the trip to see if we might be able to find some decent new gear that we could buy at a reasonable price and at least not have to get expensive, old, abused rental equipment. I found a full facemask with small fins (making for easier packing) at Amazon. (If the link doesn’t work, the title of the item was “COZIA Design SNORKEL SET with SNORKEL MASK - SWIM FINS included - OCEAN VIEW free breathing SNORKEL MASK FULL FACE with adjustable FLIPPERS”). Reviewers commented positively on the full face mask as being great for visibility, not needing to chomp down on a snorkel, and the comfort of the fins. Negative comments centered on needing to “burp” the mask about every 15-20 minutes to prevent too much CO2 build-up, incompatibility of the mask for those with any kind of beard (which was clearly indicated in the info describing the set), and LACK of fin comfort. There were several who warned that the fins were uncomfortable until they discovered and removed a strengthening piece meant to be used only during storage, so it is possible that the fin complaints were folks who hadn’t noticed this.

Not knowing too much about how to evaluate things, I read the reviews and decided to go for it. ALMOST. At the last minute I chickened out.

Turns out this was a fortuitous turn of events, because the day dawned for us to go ashore and we were starting to think we wanted a quiet day. I had slept very badly that night – took me forever to get asleep and then I kept waking up really hot, so when we finally dragged out of bed around 830A I was already tired. On top of that, it was clear that a thunderstorm had come through sometime in the early morning, so while it was clearing up to be a nice day it was definitely humid.

Lots of time to decide, of course, so we headed down to WJ for breakfast and then caught Morning Trivia at Schooner. Once again we were victorious (although against only two other couples), this time getting a paltry 9/16 on questions about the longest/tallest/largest/etc. Sample: what airport has the longest runway (NOT which is the largest airport)? This time we won priceless RCL highlighter pens (and two more keychains).

From there we went up for a competitive round of mini-golf at Mariner Dunes. We both sucked equally and ended up tied after the end of nine holes. We then completed an “Art Tour” of the ship by taking the elevators at both the aft and midships to the top deck and then working our way down the stairs, checking out the stairwell art as we went. Nothing we saw qualified as anything we’d want in the house.

By this time it was about 11:30 and we were feeling like it was time to sit out on the balcony and veg out until lunch. Our balcony faced the pier, but that’s so narrow that unless you look straight down all you see is ocean. We were also out of the direct sunlight, so another bonus.

This trip we would have no longer needed to tender to the island since Royal had completed the permanent pier a few months before our trip. Actually, it was still partially under construction as while smaller ships like Mariner could dock the larger classes need more length. A few pieces of the new “A Perfect Day at Coco Cay” project were in operation by our arrival, although several other parts were not expected to finish construction and debut to passengers until a month after our cruise (May 2019), with full operation of all planned features not expected until December 2019.

By the time of our cruise, here’s what was officially in operation:
• The pier
• Up, Up, and Away Helium Balloon ($39-$99) – although supposed to be ready we never saw this when we looked to shore. I think it was actually not yet completed.
• Chill Island: beach (free) and chairs (free), umbrellas ($), sun beds ($), snorkeling ($), Chill Grill (free)
• Ocean Lagoon Freshwater Pool (free), snack shack (free), swim-up bar ($)

Went up to WJ for lunch – they were serving the same pork ribs as on-shore, so chalk up another win for me! After that we decided to grab our tablets and head down to a shaded area on the pool deck, where we proceeded to relax and read, this time with a couple of Coco Locos each. Amazing how quickly 3 hours passed! At 4PM they started playing a game on the pool deck that involved the contestants being sent to get something and return to their chairs – last one back each time was knocked out. When the host sent them to “bring back someone in a red t-shirt” we decided it was time to go as we didn’t want to become unwilling participants in future rounds, which seemed like a good possibility.

We returned to the room for a few minutes and got ready for dinner, and then went back downstairs around 515P in order to listen to the band again. Dropped by the MDR first and went in to place our bottle of wine on our table so I wouldn’t have to carry it around. We’d taken it back to our cabin from Chops since we’d planned to drink on our balcony earlier in the day, but we’d ended up with our Coco Locos instead.

When the band finished their set at 6P we went over to the MDR for dinner. When we got to the table I noticed that the bottle of wine wasn’t there. This wasn’t a shock, since I hadn’t told anyone when I dropped it off that it was ours, and since we’d carried it out of Chops instead of having them label and deliver it for us we assumed that the MDR staff had pulled it aside since they didn’t know the source of it. Sure enough, our waiter (Johnlee, assisted by Tomas, both from the Philippines) had placed it on the waiter station and quickly retrieved it when we mentioned that it was ours. Although this was supposedly Formal Night we saw very few jackets or ties on the men. Frankly, we saw more attempts to dress on the supposedly more rustic Alaska cruise than we did on this Bahamas cruise. Adherence to the formal dress rule doesn’t matter to us (we were dressed in more business casual ourselves).

Once again back to our room to sit on the balcony and enjoy the sunset, which finished up around 8PM, putting us in perfect position to head down to the headliner show at the theater by 830P. We had skipped a few trivia events during the afternoon and also skipped the 8P event since they had all been Name That Tune style games and our seats were better left to others with more skills in those areas. We were also aware that we’d won a lot of the trivia events so far on the cruise and we were starting to pull back at this point so that we weren’t keeping others from winning the priceless trinkets.

The headliner was a comedy magician, Tim Gabrielson. He was very entertaining. The magic was of the “where’d your $50 Bill go?” variety as opposed to big stage tricks. We had a great time. Once that was over we called it a day – once more no Quest (now called “Crazy Quest”) for us.

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2019 Bahamas Day 3: Nassau

Having been to Nassau previously on our Enchantment cruise we already knew that we were going to spend the day onboard. There’s nothing here that is our kind of thing. An expensive day at Atlantis holds no interest, and of course we LOATHE shopping. Finally, heading to Senior Frog’s sounds like our idea of hell – so ship day it was to be.

We awoke around 745A docked in Nassau, between Disney Dream and Carnival Liberty. At breakfast we watched kids shoot down the water river/water slide on Disney. On our way to morning trivia we took a quick spin through the very sad Library. Decks of cards and several chess, checkers and Scrabble sets. Three bookshelves of sad looking books (oooh – look – by Lenny Dykstra!). After coming in 2nd w/14 of 15 on trivia, we spent the next 30 minutes pleasantly chatting with the Ohio couple next to us – scoping out our main competition! They normally cruise on Celebrity so asked them a few questions about the entertainment. Sounds like they don’t have the large theaters on their ships so the entertainment is more about bringing small acts onboard.

Our balcony that morning was perfectly situated to give us no direct sunlight, so we spent an hour of so pre-lunch sitting outside (during which time I wrote up Day 1). Later in the afternoon we figured we’d probably need to move to the other side of the ship to avoid the sun. A quick WJ lunch around 1220P and then back for another trivia game at Schooner at 1P.

…AND THE STREAK CONTINUES! Another win, albeit a shared one. This game was “Name the Celebrity” from a set of photos. We (and the other three teams/6 people) all got 15 of 20 and all shared in the joy of priceless RCCL keychains. This was our 6th win in 5 cruises, so we’re feeling pretty good. It certainly made up for last night’s pathetic showing. Of course, we still want an undisputed win – and it would still be nice to have more people competing…but we still took the prizes!

With about 75 minutes to kill prior to our scheduled time at the escape room we returned to our balcony for a bit more relaxation and still-manageable sunlight. Once we found the escape room starting area up in the VCL we sat down with (staff) members Chris and Luciana to await the arrival of the other couple signed up. Chris was hysterical, telling us we’d interrupted his moves to get Luciana to “say yes” – to what, who knows? Anyway, we ended up rescheduling our time to Day 4 since the other couple didn’t show up.

Since we now had time, we once again made our way to Schooner for more trivia. Along the way we stopped at the Sports Bar and grabbed some new-to-us drinks to enjoy during our game. (E had one of the hard ciders while I had…I forget. Whatever it was it was NOT a short-list candidate.) This time it was brain teasers along the lines of those things where they’ll write “ROBIN” in a circle and you have to figure out that the answer is “Round Robin”. This time we won fair and square, with 11 out of 20. As the prizes were more keychains we gladly gave them up to whoever wanted them, which in this case was a couple of young kids.

After that, we grabbed a couple of snack sandwiches from Cafe Promenade and made our way out to two deck chairs out on the (extremely) quiet Deck 4. These were out of the sun, facing the Disney Dream. Here we relaxed with our tablets and read until it was time to catch one more trivia event. This was Name That Tune: Pop Songs where we once again showed our “skills” by scoring a measly 4 out of 32. The only song we could ID by title AND artist was “Hand in My Pocket” by Alanis Morrisette, plus two other songs where we got the artist only. We’re SO un-hip.

Dinner was at Chops, which turned out to be underneath the Adventure Ocean deck – so lots of stomping overhead through dinner. Apparently, there were about 500 kids aboard our cruise, which certainly matchee the eye test we’ve already done. We each got our own 1st course (me: Lobster Bisque, E: Crab Cake) and shared the Black Pepper Bacon (really, pork belly) since we’d never tried that. Glad we tried it, although not going to be a go-to dish in future. I think the steaks were among the best prepared we’ve had on any ship. More flavorful than expected. We finished up the wine we’d bought on the prior night and also started on a new bottle.

We rounded out the night by seeing the Gallery of Dreams production show. Strange production. Pretty much a “nothing” musical score, and the dancing didn’t really seem to give all the dancers that much to do to really show off. A couple of interesting set pieces crammed onto stage showing some technical artistry (but certainly not up to the standards we saw on Freedom OTS), but the costumes were mostly “meh”. Eileen thought that the Russian costumes were pretty good but the others didn’t show much in the way of design or execution skills. (E and I met doing community theater and have been involved in theater tech for decades, so we "see" shows differently that most people.)

We had planned to walk back via the Promenade to give a listen to the salsa group in Boleros as well as the guy performing in the pub, but our timing was wrong and they hadn’t started up yet. Since we were getting a bit pooped we decided to head back to the cabin and relax. We never did manage to hear the salsa group. We eventually did find the pub guy. He was a guitarist and we got bored with him midway through his first song.

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2019 Bahamas Day 2: All Aboard!

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.

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.)

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2019 Bahamas Day 1: SJC to MIA

Getting There: San Jose to Miami

The toughest decision was whether to upgrade to First Class for the SJC-MIA flights. (We would never normally consider FC, but since we were trading in points it became a viable option.) Getting to Florida (whether FLL, MCO, or MIA) from the Bay Area is simple, but is NOT a comfortable trip. The main carriers are American, Delta, and United. American flies absolutely the WORST planes to Florida from here. None of the carriers can be said to have comfortable Economy seats, but AA’s planes are particularly crammed full of narrow seats, most of which lack both personal IFE AND power at the seats. So AA wasn’t a real player for us. They DO have some good timing options, so it is a shame that they use such poor equipment.

Seriously, American (top two lines)?  You want us to use our own devices for IFE…but don’t put power into the seats on the Airbus planes so we can keep our tablets running?  And you use the same narrow seats in Economy and Economy+?  And those narrow B737 seats?  No thanks!

United to Miami had really limited timing choices, none of which worked for us. They arrived in Miami later than we preferred. The biggest issue, however, was that the post-cruise flights all got home quite late on Friday night, which was the same day Andrew was returning. We already planned to have him picked up at the airport and kept with a family member until we got in, but we wanted our flight to arrive home no later than about 8PM so we weren’t imposing too long on goodwill. (MUCH later we’d find out that Andrew’s red-eye flight home wouldn’t arrive until early Saturday morning, long after we’d be home.)

So that left Delta. I had spent a lot of time looking at Delta’s Comfort+ seats on their planes, but reviews on SeatGuru were really discouraging. A typical plane would have 4-5 rows of C+ seats, but the reviews would suggest that more than half of them were actually sub-standard even from an Economy perspective. Too close to bulkheads, too narrow due to in-seat tray storage, too narrow due to impingement by exit doors, etc. LOTS of complaints that being charged a premium price for some of these C+ seats bordered on fraud. Mostly importantly, the C+ seats really didn’t improve on what was already a pretty narrow (typically 17” wide) seat. So moving up to Comfort+ seemed like an absolute waste.

But what about First Class? Those seats were listed as 3-4” wider than the Economy and Comfort+ seats. Sure, lots of complaints that the cushioning wasn’t great, and that all the other things you might want in FC – mostly upgraded food – weren’t that impressive…but those W I D E R seats were the thing we really wanted. Since we were basically getting a pair of Economy seats for free (thanks again, credit card points) we decided to pay for the upgrade. If we hadn’t been subsidizing the trip with points then we’d have sucked it up and endured really uncomfortable planes in Economy seats.

The planes Delta uses SJC-MIA.  The Comfort+ seats give no more width than standard Econ, although kudos for wide-spread personal IFE and seat power.  The First Class seats really give you some nice additional width.  Many reviews says the “Recliners” really DON’T recline much – just a couple of inches, like typical Econ seats.

We had flown Delta for our 2016 Alaska family cruise and had endured no less than 4 flight changes (made by Delta, not us) in the weeks leading up to our departure. Ironically, by the time the dust settled we ended up back on our original flight – which had theoretically been cancelled as the very first change they made. So given that I was making flight reservations eight months in advance for our trip to Miami I fully expected Delta to once again make random changes to our flights.
Delta didn’t disappoint:

• Late October 2018: Minor delay for departure of last leg home
• November 18, 2018: All four flight legs change numbers, but everything else the same
• December 8, 2018: All four flight legs change departure times by +/- 15 minutes. Total time of inbound legs about 30 minutes longer.
• January 19, 2019: Return flight from MIA changed number and equipment (was A321, now A320)
• February 4, 2019: Return flight from ATL changed to depart 2 minutes later the previously.

About 72 hours prior to our flight we each got an email from Delta asking us to pre-select our meal on the longer leg of the flight. We each had a choice of either a turkey-sausage omelet with potatoes or steel-cut oatmeal with fruit and nuts. Apparently, Delta has been doing this for about a year now, as it helps them both streamline on board service as well as ensure they actually have the food that the passengers really want. I like this a lot – I personally hate the stress of worrying about whether my choice of meal will be available by the time service comes around to me. The actual meal was not very tasty.

As our flight was going to board starting at 5:45AM, by working backward we realized that we were going to have to get up about 4AM. YUCK! As usual, I made prior arrangements to use Park N Travel for parking and shuttle service to the terminal. Didn’t want to risk trying to find a Lyft at 430AM to get to the airport. We got to the parking just before 5AM and were in the terminal in more than enough time for our flight.

A (fortunately) amusing introduction to our flight. We were sitting in row 2, so could hear what was going on in the cockpit pre-flight. At one point they were clearly doing some systems testing because we heard a pleasant (but forceful) voice saying "TOO LOW. TOO LOW", "PULL UP, PULL UP", and "STALL WARNING." Better to hear those on the ground than in the air, but did help get the pulse rate up for just a moment there!

The flight in FC was pretty nice. We couldn’t understand the complaints about sub-standard seat cushioning. Seemed fine to us. While a lifetime of flying Economy means that I’m conceptually aware that FC exits the plane faster than I usually do, I truly had NO IDEA how fast FC is actually off the plane!. We kept getting off the plane within about 90 seconds of the door opening. That was amazing (but not something I’d pay extra for.) The food was nothing special, although not ever having to push past a drink cart (since everything is hand-delivered) is nice. Again, not something I’d pay extra for. Boarding first and knowing that there will be no competition for overhead space? Nice…but not worth extra. Now, the additional seat width and leg room? THAT I might be willing to pay extra for – although the reality is that we won’t. It will be tempting...but we won’t.

During our stop-over in Atlanta we had lunch at Grindhouse Burgers. I had selected them based upon reviews from sites that surveyed all the airport restaurants, and this one rated highly on multiple sites without being a really expensive place. Not sure what all those reviewers were thinking – we thought it was pretty poor.

Got a Lyft from the airport to our hotel, Hampton Inn and Suites Midtown. Took about 15 minutes. The room was very comfortable. For dinner, there was a wine bar called Lagnieppe (recommended by someone on CruiseCritic) that was ½ block away that was INCREDIBLE! It offered wine-by-the-glass and build-your-own meat+cheese platters inside - plus live music starting at 9P on Sundays, when we happened to be there - and outside had tons of seating with a food window to get things like churassco and fries. We both had this and it was delicious. A great chimichurri sauce, and I think the fries were among the best I’ve ever had.

We had semi-planned to buy a couple bottles of wine on our way out the door of the restaurant, but as we looked through their collection we couldn’t find anything that appealed to us (plus prices were on the high side). So in the end we decided to keep the backpack light and order our wine onboard.

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