Sunday, August 24, 2025 through Sunday, September 14, 2025
Introduction
I began documenting this trip back in October 2023, when I started the planning process. For the next two years I researched a TON of information and recorded my findings for historical purposes. Therefore, a lot of this document includes information that represented POTENTIAL activities that didn’t ultimately happen. However, I’ve kept that information here for my own future benefit.
When it comes times to document actual daily activities, I’m trying a different format for the cruise portion of the document. This cruise we found ourselves settling into a pattern of activities that don’t merit repeated narration. As such, I’m going to show the strawman I built for each day’s activities (based upon the pre-published activities published on Royal’s app in the 2 weeks leading up to the cruise) alongside the ACTUAL activities we did in a side-by-side tabular format. The narrative will focus on unique aspects of what we did – but I won’t keep writing things like “we spent <this time> reading at the Schooner”.
Planning for London…
Soooo….it is October 20, 2023 and we’re barely back from our trip to the UK, including Edinburgh, and I’m already thinking about the next one! It’s funny, because as recently as a week ago I was unable to feel any excitement about planning another trip, but now I’m already thinking about possibly planning a London-focused trip for 2025.
Some big take-aways from our trip this year were:
- We don’t want to keep changing locations like we had done;
- I don’t want to drive if I can avoid it;
- We want to dig deeper into wherever we are;
- Guided tours at destinations are a good thing;
- We are more likely to appreciate tours that include transport than we did when younger. Letting someone else handle the transport is both convenient and likely reduces our overall amount of walking.
I started by comparing the list of London museums listed on Wikipedia with the list I already had and ended up adding several dozen new options. I also started to survey some of the tour aggregator sites to note down any interesting looking options for both London and London day trips. The latter provided some ideas on both pre-packaged options as well as possible DIY day trips.
Next came the step of creating a Google map of London with all the various options shown as pins, to once again get a better idea of the relative geographic location of things to one another. I found that helpful in planning our journey to Edinburgh. I was hoping that at some point doing this for London might inform me about good destinations to group together. I imagined that I’d be noting likely Underground lines and stations for each potential destination so connections like “site A and site B are both on the Circle line so make a good pair to visit on the same day” would be possible to recognize.
The big driver in organizing the trip and what to see came when I decided to try to answer the related questions of “Which underground stations serve the most lines?” and “Which underground lines do most of the things we might want to see lie close to?” The former question led to the conclusion that the Charing Cross and Embankment station pair connected to a lot of lines, as did the Baker Street and Euston Station lines. The latter question was tougher to figure out – but when I focused on the Charing Cross area I did note that this seemed like a VERY good base of operations for a London-focused trip. Most attractions seemed to be right around 30 minutes away, and a few were even within walking distance.
Now, it is likely that I would have reached the same conclusion about most ANY station since all the lines are so interconnected. However, using our experience from 2015 when we stayed in Bayswater, our local station (Marble Arch) served ONLY the Central line, so we did a lot of transferring. Charing Cross, however, serves Bakerloo and Northern, and the nearby Embankment station serves two more lines (Central and District). Between those two stations we could get to a TON of places without transfers to other lines. Further, settling in Charing Cross brought The Clermont Charing Cross to the forefront of places to stay. The hotel sits on top of the Charing Cross railway station, across the street from Charing Cross Underground, and about a 6 minute walk from Embankment Underground – so while pricey the convenience factor was HUGE. The Clermont was also a sop to our age. There’s no way we would have considered a place like this 20 years ago. We would have considered it too expensive and not appropriate to our youthful spirit. At age 60+, it seemed like a good choice. In fact, I’d originally been looking at more modern hotels because the idea of having elevators was VERY attractive! As it happened, The Clermont did have lifts.
Ironically, as the months of planning stretched on it became increasingly obvious that the Underground was going to play only a minor role in our transport plans. Most of our routes to/from attractions were going to end up being via bus. I’m not sure if that was a consequence of the central location of our hotel making bus routes more plentiful or not. I think it is more likely that a) computer-based route-planning is now so simple that much more informed decisions are easy; and b) having now visited London several times I wasn’t so laser-focused on the “glamour” of using the Underground. Whatever the reasons, probably more than 80% of our travel used the buses.
One attraction I had to give up on was getting outside of London to Bentley Priory Museum, which was the place where the RAF managed the Battle of Britain from. It was just too far away to pair with another attraction without turning the day into a slog. I also dropped the idea of full day trips to the outer areas, since those required a 10-12 hour time commitment and were going to make breakfast and dinner challenging to fit into the schedule.
As usual, I started by trying to find interesting pairs of places to visit each day and created my strawman schedule. Then I did the normal process of mixing and matching, yanking out certain places and substituting others until I worked my way into a schedule that looked interesting and do-able. About the only thing I didn’t manage to fit in – at least initially - was to see a West End show. I could have made it work, but a 230P matinee turned out to impact the morning options a lot…and I had doubts about our stamina to do a full day of activity and then add a 730P show on top of that.
I was a bit more cognizant of down-time this go around. Most days were designed to finish around 4P, giving us about 2 hours of time to unwind at the hotel before dinner. This was similar to what was (unintentionally) built into the England and Edinburgh trip, but I was hoping that ending our day “at home” would feel more relaxing than it did during that trip, where we generally ended each day with “checking in to new hotel and dealing with getting comfy”. Additionally, I really tried to consider our fatigue level the last few days of the trip and included some less-strenuous ideas for that period.
…Turns into Planning for a Cruise
It is now March 2024. During November 2023 I had settled on a 12 day trip (10 days in London between two travel days) and had a pretty solid schedule. The thinking was that we’d do this trip perhaps as early as April 2024 – but for “reasons” we decided that this was “too soon” after our Edinburgh trip.However, E and I have decided that we’re ready to cruise again and have noted that there’s a really interesting 15 night Transatlantic on Brilliance of the Seas departing Southampton August 31, 2025 and heading on a northern route via Scotland, Iceland, Greenland, Canada, and Boston. So we’ve decided to combine the two trips into one! However, I’ll cut down the London portion to 4-5 days, which will actually make the London leg better, since it leaves only the “strongest” destinations.
Within 48 hours of making this bold choice I’d reached out to our old travel agent (who didn’t immediately respond to me until a week had passed, during which time I’d already flexed to make the reservation online via Costco), done prelim research on the various ports of call, revised the London portion of the trip, figured out options for getting from London to Southampton, and started getting reacquainted with the CruiseCritic message boards. It is always nice how motivated I can get when I’ve got some interesting travel questions to answer!
I did reach out to Kim Royer at Avoya Travel, who handled several of our RCCL bookings previously, but I initially concluded that she was no longer with Avoya since I didn’t get the expected quick response. On a whim I checked with Costco and discovered that we could get a $540 Costco gift card if we booked through them, which seemed like a pretty good deal. No idea if a travel agent could have done better, but after waiting long enough for Kim’s response I went ahead and booked through Costco. I’m pretty sure that all travel agents were offering pretty much the same cabin pricing – it was mostly a question of what OBC or other freebies they were giving away. The Costco $540 store credit seemed like a pretty good deal, however. Eventually, I DID hear back from Kim, who was dismayed that I’d already booked via Costco. I ended up using her to book B2B trips on Harmony out of Galveston for 2025 (which later morphed into a B2B on Quantum out of Long Beach) – but I feel like booking via Costco was a better deal. (FWIW: the Costco $540 store credit was WAAAAY better than the paltry $50 per person OBC that Kim was offering!)
For all our past cruises I’d essentially booked a cabin within the first few days of release. This sailing of Brilliance OTS had been open a while, however, and therefore selection was less robust than I preferred, but still workable. All suites were sold out – not that we were wedded to a suite but for a 15-day trip I would have been interested in considering one, and the double Q&A points would have been amazing. However, several balcony cabins remained – although (more desirable) port-side cabin inventory was pretty low. Despite that, I was ultimately able to grab stateroom 9046, one of the 1B Balconies – which meant a larger stateroom (201 sqft + 24 sqft balcony). I purposefully got a non-connecting room designed for 4 people to guarantee that we’d have a full-sized sofa. I also picked Deck 9 rather than Deck 10 since I didn’t want to be immediately below the pool deck.
We had no choice re: dinner seating. All that was available on the Costco booking site was MTD. I suspected that this reflected all the early and late seatings being sold and not something specific to Costco. Up to that point we’d never tried MTD so weren’t sure whether to worry about this (and therefore try to get on the early seating waiting list) or simply wait until we got onboard. I figured I’d let things ride and we’d see what would happen. Given that we expected to book 4-5 specialty dinners and perhaps do a couple of nights of Windjammer it probably wasn’t a big deal to take our chance in the MDR. As it happens, our March 2025 cruise on Navigator (unexpectedly) ended up with MTD and we discovered that, other than an awkward first night experience, MTD at 6:45P was actually pretty nice! By the end of the cruise we'd be sold on MTD as our default choice for all future cruises.
It turned out that MTD reservations opened up (somewhat randomly and certainly unexpectedly) on May 30, 2024 – I just happened to check on the web and stumbled on it. I was able to grab the (earliest) 6:45P options for all nights of the cruise. Having done that, I then went to the Roll Call for our cruise and made my first posting, alerting others that they could jump in, too. A 6:45P dinner, being only 15 minutes later than our normal daily dinner at home, was actually awesome, although we’d have to see how that would impact on-board events, such as shows. We were also curious to see whether Royal would shift to a 3rd scheduled seating (which would no doubt be for something like 630P or 645P if they did it) by the time of our sailing. Many folks on CC were convinced that Royal was currently testing this on selected ships/sailings, so our 645P MTD might very well end up being just a normal 645P-ish “middle seating” between early and late seating when this cruise sailed some 500+ days from the time I made the dinner reservations. (In Oct 2024 it looks like Royal was rolling out 3rd seating at 7P seating on newer cruises.)
At the same time that MTD reservations opened they also posted the first options for specialty dining. We could grab 10% off on lunch or dinner reservations at Chops, Giovanni’s, and/or Izumi, as well as Taste of Royal lunch, Izumi Sake lunch, and/or Chef’s Table. I wasn’t ready yet to make individual reservations – I was frankly hoping they’d eventually post some kind of multi-day restaurant plans at some point. So I just started tracking the newly posted offers on the Royal Price Tracker website and bided my time. I mean, I COULD have booked some random dates and then re-booked if/when prices changed, but the 10% off just didn’t seem like it was likely to be the best offer and there was a TON of time (probably more than a year, if I’m being honest) before I needed to worry about securing us reservations. My initial budget planning assumptions were that we’d end up booking Chops twice and once each at Giovanni’s and Izumi. In the end, it turned into one each of Chops and Izumi, and two Giovanni’s. (E was in favor of de-emphasizing Chops as she was feeling it was a “been there, done that” kind of place for us.)
The price tracking site started showing the first price manipulations on August 31, 2024, exactly one year prior to sailing. Up until that time, all the prices (including restaurants, internet, and refreshment package) had remained fixed. On this date all of them showed minor price drops – for example, Chops dinners dropped from $50pp to $48pp. Even though the internet pricing claimed reductions, when I did a test booking it netted out to exactly what we’d already paid, so I think they reduced the price for the first device by a few bucks but simply hiked the price of the second device. I figured I’d simply keep tracking to see if any REAL savings were going to result.
The first REAL sales started in November 2024. Apparently, November is historically the month that Royal launches their Black Friday sales. Somewhere before this I had purchased us a 3-night dining package and made a reservation at each of Chops, Izumi, and Giovanni’s. I was able to rebook all of those at minimal savings (the difference being that the package booking had INCLUDED tips while the “sale” bookings quoted prices sans tips…by the time they finally added the tips I think I saved something like $15 in total). The big win in November was that I also rebooked internet and E’s drink package at sale prices and saved about $90 on those.
Next step was to do some quick research on the ports we’d be stopping at to get a sense of what options existed. I made a connection between RCCL’s list of excursions and those offered by https://shoreexcursionsgroup.com. I was certain the latter was the actual supplier of RCCL’s excursions and was able to use their website to see the specific tours available on our sailing.
I presumed we’d do some kind of 6-8h bus tour in Reykjavik in order to see a selection of volcanos, hot springs, waterfalls, and other natural sites. (In May 2024 I was following twanger’s live sailing on Jewel that included several Icelandic ports, and it became clear that we MUST take some kind of tour here – it looks absolutely, stunningly beautiful.) The two ports in Greenland didn’t have significant tourist infrastructure and it seemed like our best bet there was to simply walk ourselves around the area – assuming we got off the ship at all. I kept my eyes peeled for trip reports over the next year to get some inspiration as to options. The (tender) port of Qaqortoq is tiny, with small buildings that look like they come from the Lego color palette. The general feeling was that the grocery store is about the only place of interest, however. Meanwhile, the capital of Nuuk is a slightly larger town with some possible self-tour options.
In August 2024 a member of the Roll Call announced that she was seeking people to join a Northern Lights tour she was organizing for our first night in Reykjavik. She was working with Get Your Guide to schedule a 19-person van that would set out around 9:30P and take up to 5 hours, depending on viewing conditions. The trip would have a go/no-go decision point around 5:30P, canceling (and refunding) if viewing conditions were too poor to even bother trying. The negotiated cost was projected to be $85 per person and we quickly emailed to secure space. We had to make pre-payment to the organizer in August 2024, at which time she had secured a lower price of $75 per person which struck us as being extremely reasonable!
I dragged my heels on considering options for the two Canadian ports (Sydney and Halifax). More when we get to that part of the recap.
