mahdnc

Bob, our next cruise is the Apr 2025 Transpacific sailing on Solstice (Sydney to Honolulu). How about you? Oh, and how is your wife's recovery coming along? David

I incorrectly captioned the first photo in the prior post as being taken from the 29th floor. Our room was on the 28th floor (Room 2810). Sorry for the confusion.

I’m sorry about your accident!

Nice! It seems like you often luck out with air fare!

Hi, Ruth! I didn't quite follow the 2nd half of your post (the part I quoted in this post). In the 2-4-2 instance, would you purchase the two outboard seats? And you would upgrade both coach seats to two coach-plus seats? Yes? And what plane these days have 2-4-2? It sounds kinda like the old 767 planes, but every time I have flown long haul on United it's either 787 or 777 which have 3 outboard seats in each row. David

Is "anti-social" not one of the reasons listed?

how does one go about buying an extra seat (e.g. middle seat) to keep it empty?

No, sorry--I never asked him about the origin or derivation of his name.

Marcia and I got off the ship healthy and remain that way. I am sorry to hear about your norovirus. Maybe we would have all gotten infected if there was a slot pull!

Here is our stateroom attendant, Gede (pronounced like “good day”). He is from Indonesia and fairly experienced. He last worked aboard Millennium. Gede was pretty efficient and generally we were pleased with his efforts. It took a couple of days early in our cruise for him to understand our schedule so that he could get our cabins made up while we were out. Also our cabin was missing a few things at the beginning of the sailing like the room service breakfast cards and laundry form that we had to chase him down to get for us. On the other hand, when we pointed out a few things with our cabin that needed repair, he saw to it that it was addressed by maintenance fairly quickly. Gede was responsible for the aft cabins (including ours and @julieawill) and a few cabins on the port side of the ship. Because our aft cabin door was on the starboard side hallway, we didn’t see him that much as we went about our day. We did run into Oana from Romania quite a lot as she had 17 cabins on the starboard side of the ship including @Bob29321. She seemed to be always out there cleaning. We would say hi to her at least 5-6 times a day as we were going or returning from our cabin. We asked her why she seemed to be always working. She explained that in addition to performing the daily tasks that go into servicing a cabin, she likes to devote extra time to performing a deep clean in a portion of the cabin (she would rotate the portion of the cabin that needed to be deep cleaned). She said that is how her mother raised her. Pretty impressive. It is always amazing to me how cheerful these stateroom attendants were every minute of every day. Telling us with a smile to have a nice day and then turning around to clean a bathroom.

Linda, I very much look forward to seeing you again on the other side of the Pacific!

Sadly the string quartet was removed as well:

Our table was located on the top floor except we were right by the entrance to the MDR so we couldn't never looked at it on a regular basis. Here is what it replaced (2010):

We completed our single night stay at the Miami Marriott Biscayne Bay Hotel last month. We booked a bay view room and were assigned one on the 28th floor (out of 31 floors of rooms). I was very pleased with the room. Here are a few documentary photos for the record. Here is the bay view room on the 29th floor The view from the room window when we checked in on Fri Apr 19 2024: This photo was taken with a "normal" lens (i.e. not telephoto or wide angle) and it approximates the scaled view of what we saw from our room. This photo was taken on the day we checked in (Fri Apr 19) and the cruise ships were starting to leave the Port of Miami Another "normal" lens view when we woke up on Sat Apr 20: Here are the ships that were at port that correspond to the picture immediately above. Here is the floor plan with the red dot indicating the precise location of our room, 2810. Highest guest room is on the 31st floor. Here is an annotated photo indicating the hotels that I was aware of that are in the photo. When you look at this photo on a large screen, it appears that the Doubletree rooms have balconies which include the rooms that directly face the bay. Here is the category of the room and the price that we payed. I believe this reflects the AAA price.

We did a diving/snorkeling excursion through Celebrity when Solstice anchored at Arlie Beach although that was back in 2018. I did publish a photo review of that 12 night GBR sailing including our time at Arlie Beach which you may find of interest. Of the four port days at the GBR (Arlie Beach, Cairns x2, and Port Douglas), Arlie Beach was our least favorite from a snorkeling/diving perspective because of the diving conditions at the time. I know the link to the "Important Information" bulletin in the review is corrupted/no good. Here is a good link.