Sea Days
John and I took advantage of my gap in contracts and grabbed a last-minute deal on Royal Caribbean – a 7-night cruise out of Galveston in a porthole room. Over the years, we’ve cruised a lot on Royal Caribbean and its sister line, Celebrity, so have earned our way up to Diamond status. Diamond earns us 4 drinks per day per person and a free photo (each). Historically, it garnered us a shorter check-in line, but that perk has disappeared.
These days you need to check-in online prior to boarding – including providing your own photo to go on your sea-pass card and making sure you’ve downloaded the app that gives you each day’s itinerary and the dining room menu. You are asked to choose a 30-minute arrival slot to try to keep the lines down, and we arrived for the 1-1:30 (you can’t go to your room until 1PM, so not much sense in arriving earlier). The line looked long but moved quickly, and from the time we arrived at the port to entering our room took just under an hour.
After we unpacked, we were ready to explore.
Modern cruise ships like to keep you busy – if you want to be. The Liberty is a Freedom Class cruise ship with a maximum capacity of 4900 passengers, so with that many people, you need a lot to do. For the more physically active – they have a surf rider for boogey boarders and surfers, a sports court that converts from basketball, to soccer, volleyball
and pickleball, the Perfect Storm water slide, a rock-climbing wall and a large gym. For the less active, they have a 9-Hole putt-putt golf course, 4 swimming pools, 7 Jacuzzis, a library, and lots of trivia competitions – at least 3 per day.
Our typical day started with 30-60 minutes in the gym or walking around the deck 12 jogging track, breakfast at the Windjammer, then 10AM trivia. John generally headed poolside to read, and I played my guitar for a bit before joining him. One morning, we held our own in high wind playing pickleball against some experienced players. Lunch at the Windjammer was around 1PM, more poolside time and maybe a walk on Deck 4 promenade. John liked to play volleyball at 4. Most days we made it to trivia at 5PM and dinner at 6:45 (unfortunately, we’d miss the 7PM music trivia).
I like to dress for dinner – and John typically wears slacks and a polo shirt, though cruising has become a lot more casual over the years and you can wear shorts to dinner if you’d like (and a lot of people do – even on formal nights).
For evening events, the main show was at 8PM or 10:15PM. Acts included a comedian, a juggler (better than it sounds), on Voyager class and larger ships that have an ice rink they present an ice show,
and the Royal Caribbean Singers and Dancers performed the Broadway musical “Saturday Night Fever” adapted from the movie of the same name. The evenings on ship are filled with music – the Schooner Bar (aka the piano bar) featured “A Girl Called Jake” who performed for 3 hours every night.
A guitar player entertained those that preferred the pub, and a Latin band played for all the dancers at the Boleros bar.
People with special diets can be accommodated – vegetarian is easy, vegan is hard (they do have alternative milks in the Windjammer, but you have to ask for it and I did not see anything in the buffet specifically marked “vegan”, the vegan dinner menu is on the app, but not printed in the menu you’re given when you sit). They do have gluten free options, and if on a keto or paleo diet they will bring the meal without rice/potatoes. And everything is salty (caveat – I don’t add much salt to my own food, so a lot of restaurant food tastes salty to me).
One thing that has become a lot easier – they use facial recognition when you disembark – so no standing looking at the customs officer asking about your trip, just look at a camera, they make sure you match your pre-loaded passport photo and off you go.
I will post the ports of call blog in a couple of days!