Friday, February 27, 2015

Cruising.......the good, the bad and everything inbetween.......


DISCLAIMER:  What you are about to read is entirely OUR experience.  Please do not let it influence you in any way in making your own decision about whether this is the vacation for you or not.  There are two kinds of people - ones who LOVE to cruise and one who DO NOT LOVE to cruise.  I do not want to be responsible for keeping you from experiencing something that might be the best thing you ever did.  So, please before you read, keep in mind.  Everyone is different, everyone has a different experience, everyone sees things in a different way.  This is just my story of our particular experience.  Just as watching the movie "Jaws" has not keep us out of the water, please take our experience with the same thought in mind.  Just because it happened to us, does not mean it will happen to you!!

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All of us have things in life that we want to experience and see before we leave this beautiful planet that God has so generously given us to enjoy.  For years, Gene's dream has been to take a cruise.  I, on the other hand, had always been afraid too, because of seasickness.  I have never had good experiences on the water, except in other people's boats in the river or inter-coastal waterways.  We have family in Savannah that lives on the inter-coastal waterway and when the girls were little, we would go spend the weekend and go out in their boat and have a wonderful time - every time!  But, every other time, when I went out on a boat of any size or in turbulent waters, I ended up sick as a dog.  Case in point, after we had been married a year, Gene took me to Miami and we went out deep-sea fishing.  My trip consisted of laying on the inside bench of the captains room, throwing up in a bucket.  And as if that weren't enough to convince me, we chartered a boat out of Key Largo once to take us snorkeling on the other side of the reef there and me and both our girls ended up very, very sick.  I even got sick on the "Maid of the Mist" ride at Niagara Falls!

But, over the years, I have talked to many,many people who said the same thing.  "On a cruise ship, you don't feel it.  You don't get sick because they have stabilizers and it keeps the ship from rocking and rolling.  You hardly know you are moving."  If you were one of those people who told me that, I don't blame you, because no doubt this was your experience or you wouldn't have said it.  And also, people told me to get all the things available now for seasickness - patches behind the ear, bonine, dramamine, sea bands (bands that go around your wrists that have a pressure point ball that presses into your wrist).

So, I decided Gene and I would do it!  We would take that cruise that he had wanted to go on for so long.  Well, it seemed that other plans were in order for us from the beginning.  The first cruise we booked in December went bust when two days before we were supposed to leave for Florida, Gene's eye surgeon went to take the stitch out of his eye where he had cataract surgery and the cornea began to tear and fluid began to leak out.  They had to immediately put stitches back in the eye and of course we were not about to go on a cruise with his eye like that.  So, we cancelled and re-booked for January.  Two days before the January trip, Gene is diagnosed with the flu.  Again, no cruise for us.  Still determined to do this thing, I booked again, at a lower price which we took as a good sign, and we were set for February.

Now, let me assure you that I am a person who thoroughly investigates everything before I do it.  I check out every review I can read, I go to consumer reports and read everything they say, I read blogs of other person's experiences, etc.  Then armed with all that information, I make a half way educated decision.  Well, on this one, I somehow failed.  Now - after the fact - I can find all kinds of bad reviews about the boat we took, the cruise line we chose, etc.  Maybe I investigated from a slanted point of view because I wanted to go so bad!

We were excited when we left home, looking forward to a good trip.  Gene felt weak from having had the flu a few weeks before, but insisted he was well enough to go.  RED FLAG #1 - Do not do this if you are not at your height of health.  In our case,  we were going to be visiting 4 islands in 7 days.  That's a lot of walking in heat and sunshine to which you are not accustomed.  While cruising may be a relaxing experience to some, it did not prove to be so for us.  It was exhausting....

We used one of the Park and Go lots to park the car because those were $7.99 a day instead of $12.  They drove a shuttle right up to the car and they loaded our suitcases and us and carried us directly to the cruise terminal.  RED FLAG #2 - the driver of the shuttle was in a big hurry so he THREW one our larger suitcases off the shuttle, breaking a piece off the handle which had the identification tag on it.  However, the crew from the ship said "don't worry, we will take care of it and it won't get lost".  More about this later. Gene used his walker because he still did not have all his strength back, which ended up being a good thing for us because that put us in the disabled line and we were able to go straight through check-in and directly onto the boat without delay.  We were greeted by one of the nice staff members and told our cabin was already ready even though it was only 1:00 and we could go to our room.  We did and were well pleased.  It was a nice room, with TV, DVD player, good size bathroom, lots of storage space (however, still not enough for the RIDICULOUS amount of stuff I packed), sofa and a spacious deck.  Here are some pictures of us on the deck before we left shore:

We waited for our luggage to arrive, and three of our four suitcases made it.  Which one didn't, you ask?  You guessed it!  The one that had been thrown off the shuttle and the handle had broken!  I called the front desk and they said give it an hour and if it still didn't show up, come to the Customer Service area.  In the meantime, we enjoyed watching the shoreline of  Ft. Lauderdale and ordered some drinks and ice for the room.  There was a mandatory safety meeting at 3:15, so I wanted to be sure to check on the suitcase before then.  So, off to Customer Service I went, only to find a long line of other people experiencing problems.  I finally was directed to a shorter line that was just for people who didn't receive their luggage.  They were taking us one at a time into another room to look at the excess or unmarked luggage or luggage that had gone through x-ray and was being held for some reason.  The man in front of me had a prosthetic leg.  He said to the rest of us "I'm sure they are holding my suitcase, because I had my swim leg in it.  I use a different one to swim.  When they x-rayed it, I'm sure they saw a leg and freaked out!"  Sure enough, he was right.  He was made to open the suitcase and get the leg out so they could see that it was a prosthesis!!  Even he had a good laugh with that one!  When my turn came, they took me in the room and there were (of course) a ton of black suitcases that all looked alike.  Finally, I saw mine way in the back.  They said "do you have a way to identify it".  I said "yes, it has a broken handle, because it was broken by the shuttle guy".  Sure enough, that one did, so they shuffled everything around until they got it out and sure enough the ID tag was gone.  So then I had to open one of the compartments to make sure it was my stuff.  Nothing like pulling out your socks and underwear in front of a bunch of strangers!  So, suitcase problem solved.

We had our safety meeting, the final call for boarding was made and it was time to leave.  We stood on our deck and waved at all the other ships in port and workers and anybody that would wave and with anticipation set out on what we had hoped would be a wonderful journey.   I had discovered at the hotel the night before that we had forgotten the patches prescribed for seasickness and left them home (I had 8 million other things I DIDN'T need, but not the one I did!), so I was wearing my sea bands.  These go on your wrists and put pressure on a certain point on the underside of your wrist to stop nausea.  They work!!!  And believe me, it was a good thing they did!

We decided we would go find this wonderful abundance of food we had been told about because by this time, we were hungry.  We found these to be our choices - there were three restaurants on board that charged just like the restaurants you eat at anywhere else, there was the main dining room which had two major entree choices every night an appetizer and a couple of dessert choices but at least it was included in the fare - main drawback was men were expected to wear jackets at dinner, there was the cafeteria style serving line (which is where most people at) that would have self-serve salad, desserts, breads and drinks, but you had to go through the line to get your main entree and sides.  They had some pretty decent tenderloin steak a couple of night, but the other nights, it was chicken fixed 500 ways or spaghetti and sauces.  The sides were  rice or potatoes and mixed vegetables.  That was it!  We did have pork loin one night and cod and mahi mahi one night which were both pretty good,but other than that, it was pretty skimpy.  And, when they fixed your plate, they were very skimpy.  They would put half a spoonful on the plate of each thing and that was it.  Let me say one thing right here - NEVER DURING THE ENTIRE TRIP DID I EVEN SEE A LOBSTER - MUCH LESS PUT ONE IN MY MOUTH!  The cafeteria was only open certain hours.  Otherwise, you had room service which had a hamburger, a club sandwich,  potato chips, fruit and cookies on it or you could go pool side to the bar area and get slices of pizza from 11:30 am until 6 every day or to a hamburger/hotdog stand called the "Dive In" to get hamburgers or hotdogs from 11:30 to 9 every day.  I don't know what we had built up in our mind, but this was not it.  We had heard about eating constantly, food everywhere, all the lobster and sea food you could handle, and on and on and we saw NONE of that.  Now, I know there are those of you who are saying "wasn't that enough".  Well, quite frankly, for the price we paid, no, it wasn't.  I expected better choices more often.

The first night at sea, we experienced our first storm.  If I have any piece of advice for you that you will consider important PLEASE let it be this.  When you are choosing your room, go middle and go low.  We were the second room from the front of the ship on the outer port side on the 4th deck.  The engines were LOUD and we felt every little move the ship made.  The wind howled outside our door so loud it sounded like a hurricane.  We had to lock our deck door to keep it from constantly blowing open and sucking everything out of the room.  We could not use the deck when we were moving.  The wind was so strong you had to hold on or you would have been blown overboard.  That night it stormed and rained and the ship pitched back and forth and back and forth.  I didn't get seasick, but I thought I would go mad.  We couldn't lay still in the bed.  It was constantly throwing you back and forth and back and forth.  I finally took towels and pillows and stuffed them all around myself to try to stay still.  The next day wasn't much better.  Everyone was having trouble walking.  No one could balance.  They had to hold on to things to stand up.  Praise God for sea bands!!  I also took a couple of Bonine (like Dramamine) and those I'm sure helped me to not have nausea.

I'll address the stops at the islands and then post some pictures and be done because I realize I'm getting long winded.  At each island stop, they put you into port and you got off and went directly to THEIR shops.  How do I know they were their shops?  Because they had advertised them to us before we got there.  Their main focus was to sell diamonds and jewelry.  If you didn't buy their expensive excursions into the towns, all you had a choice of seeing was their expensive stores.  Everybody had their hand out.  They gave seminars on the ship giving out 50% off discount cards to be used on the islands.  That's all well and good, but if you take a $5,000 ring and take 50% off it's still too high for my pocketbook.

By the second day Gene was running fever and feeling terrible again.  He went to the ship's medical center, where the doctor checked him over, did not run any tests and pronounced a relapse of the flu.  He gave him Tamiflu and Mucinex and charged us almost $300.  Gene ended up feeling terrible the rest of the trip and as you know, had to be hospitalized in Savannah for a serious case of bronchitis.

All in all, we went through 4 bad storms while at sea, one woman broke her arm because the boat pitched so badly she feel and her arm broke, Gene was too sick to ride his horse like he had so wanted to - luckily they resold his ticket and we got that money back, I was too sick to even get off the boat in San Juan because of a storm the night before and seasickness did overcome me for a while and Gene was too sick to get off the boat at Half Moon Cay.

Now that I've told you all the bad, I will tell you the good.  The staff - all of them from the highest paid down to our cabin steward - were some of the nicest people I have ever meet.  They went out of their way to try to help us have an enjoyable trip, but it just wasn't meant to happen for us.  Now that I look back on it, I kinda feel like God sent us two chances to not take this trip, but we were determined - so He let us have our way.  "There's a way that seems right to a man....."

Here are some more pictures - one sure thing about it - God made a beautiful world for us to enjoy!








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