anonmom

I was able to get a wasabi martini at the compliment Asian restaurant on the Jade in 2016 and in the getaway this year. Also got the moderno specialty drinks at the bar between moderno & blue lagoon on the Jade, and the Cagney's specialty drinks at the Star Bar on the Jade.

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Awesome review! Did you take pics of the current menus? I would especially love to see the MDR dinner menus, since CruiseLifeRick didn't post those on his review. Going on the Escape in December for our honeymoon and can't wait!!

I have lost a little weight or at least firmed up a bit on my 2 cruises. We cruise in the winter and take advantage of the beautiful weather to be more active than we are at home during that season.

We have had the UBP on both of our cruises, and we have it again in December. I drink all day long on vacation, and I eat everything I'm genuinely hungry for (no stuffing myself after I'm already full) and still the extra activity balances things out.

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The offers are definitely real, but the house never loses. They only offer these deals to people who are statistically likely to lose/spend more than the cost of the cruise. Take the cruise, but don't play at the casino. You won't get another offer, but that's ok. Next time just pay the cost of the cruise and *still* don't go into the casino. You'll come out ahead!

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Well, my hopes were to login to CC and do a somewhat "LIVE" review...But there's a possibility that will change somewhere between now and then. Lol

You need the middle package for this. The cheapest package is just chat.

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No, I don't believe so. Balcony is the highest upgrade. With 30,000 points you can upgrade from inside to ocean view or from ocean view to balcony. For 60,000 points you can upgrade from inside to balcony

Hmm. Maybe I should pay off our December cruise with the NCL card. I think we still owe $2500 (booked direct w/NCL) so that should be about 7,500 points, plus the 15,000 we got for opening the account. So if we just charged another $7500 over the next year we'd have enough for a balcony upgrade from OV.

Last year, when I got the card, we used it for $125 in OBC, which we put toward spa passes, but now my boyfriend got one, and I'm thinking the upgrade might be a better goal to save towards.

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You may not have gotten the card to obtain upgrades but indeed that is the best way to get the most value out of points earned on the MC. You can get $100 OBC in exchange for 10000 points but you can't use that onboard credit for gratuities or in Casino and you lose any leftover cash at the end of the cruise. You can trade points for cash but unless you have at least 25,000 points to trade in for $250 you will only receive a lower percentage of cash. But if you save at least 30,000 points you can trade those 30,000 points to upgrade an entire cabin from Ocean View to balcony. You could also use those points just to upgrade from an inner room to an ocean view but the price difference between an inner room and an ocean view is usually not very high so you're better off using cash to do that then use your points to make the jump from Oceanview to balcony. For instance our cruise next month currently costs $749 per person for an ocean-view guarantee but the balconies cost $1399 per person for a balcony guarantee. I just now accumulated 30000 points and I could trade those points for $300 cash. If I pay cash to upgrade our Inner Room to a balcony it will cost me an additional $750 per person or $1,500 total. Or I could pay cash to upgrade from an inner room to an ocean view for an additional $100 per person and then trade those 30000 points for an upgrade to a balcony. This would give my 30000 points a $1300 value rather than a $300 value.

 

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Can you upgrade from a balcony to a minisuite or a spa balcony or a suite?

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Being retired, Catherine and I will try to help with this conundrum.

When we arrive in NYC from Southampton on the inaugural transatlantic next year,

we will try to be the last ones off the NCL Bliss.:hearteyes:

 

"Out of college, money spent

See no future, pay no rent,

All the money's gone.

Any jobber got the sack

Monday morning, turning back

Yellow taxi slow, nowhere to go.

But oh, that magic feeling, nowhere to go...

Oh, that magic feeling

Nowhere to go, nowhere to go."

 

The Beatles

I'm with you! I never understand why people are so desperate to end their vacation.

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I've seen excellent reviews for the EPIC Kimpton, too. I think we will be staying there for our December Escape cruise. Pretty sure every room has a bay view, but we haven't stayed there yet, so I can't say for sure.

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The Spirit's Bier Garten only had one beer on tap, Heineken. DH said there were probably 15 or so different choices for bottled beer but since he much prefers beer on tap he stuck to Heineken when we were there.

 

And Henry's Pub only had two beers on tap, Heineken and Bass Ale.

 

We have never been on the Escape but I know DH is really hoping for a District Brew House (or something similar) on the Bliss. Our next cruise will be on that ship next year. Living in the Seattle area we have no shortage of craft beers!

Ah, that is disappointing. My fiancé is really looking forward to the District Brew House this December. We are similarly lucky to have a lot of great local craft beers and ciders here in Minneapolis. I'm always down to try a new alcoholic beverage, regardless of whether it is spirits, cider, beer or wine, but cocktails are my true love, so it doesn't matter as much for me.

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Too kind! I still need to get you all my final thoughts. Also, is it worth posting Freestyle Dailies? I have them for the seven days.

 

 

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Yes, please! It is always good to see the full listing of times things are open, etc.

Awesome! I mean how could you go wrong with a day like this...

 

 

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This looks amazing! We're doing Eastern Caribbean on the Escape in December, do we won't be in Costa Maya. Does anyone know if there is a golf cart rental in St Thomas or Nassau?

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Oh, no, I meant a beer menu! I thought Escape was the only NCL ship with a variety of craft beers. Hoping I'm wrong and that the Spirit's Bier Garden also has a decent selection.

I don't think those are inside rooms, I think they are only decorative windows. Someone else may chime in if I'm mistaken about that. I never saw anywhere on the ship where you could be on the other side of those windows looking down into the atrium.

 

I did not take pics of any menus. I know there is a recent thread here with pics of the menus. The only food that the Bier Garten served on our cruise were the same things that were served poolside - burgers, hot dogs, chicken, pasta salad, etc. We never saw a separate menu for the Bier Garten. Also, the times listed in the dailies of when the Bier Garten would be serving food were not always accurate. Several times we went up there looking for quick bites at the times listed in the dailies and food was not there at those times on the days we tried to go. :confused:

 

 

 

Yes, we thought the Spirit was a beautiful ship. Dated in some respects but for a ship that is nearly 20 years old we thought she was in really good shape for her age. The bathroom in our cabin really needed an upgrade too (I will get into that more at the end of my review). Glad you may consider sailing on the Spirit. We also thought she was really the perfect size ship for the Mediterreanean as well. Would definitely sail on her again regardless of a few dated aspects.

 

Enjoy Valletta. It was one of my favorite ports of the entire cruise. A really beautiful place.

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They have some of their menus right on their website. If you go to the Yelp review, you can find pictures of the actual menus.

Yeah, for some reason there are no prices on the menus that are on their actual website. Yelp shows the same pricing as the site I posted screenshots from above, so I guess that is probably the current pricing.

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Coral Gables is a large area. Yes, there are planned neighborhoods and strict HOA's and then there are regular streets. Some nice, some not so nice. The entire community is not planned neighborhoods or gated.

 

Little Havana is a great area filled with lots of wonderful people and culture. It's also an area where in recent years crime, drugs and poverty have spiked again. Many building are falling apart and some new ones are going up. It's a poor area. There are a lot of drugs deals in the area. There are also some very fascinating areas.

 

Age isn't the issue with my advice. The majority of my friends average around 30! Many are born and raised here.

 

Remember to hit Ball and Chain for happy hour. Food is great as are the cocktails. One of my favorites there is their Chicharron. Enjoy Miami!!

Can you do me a huge favor and take pics of the menus at Ball and Chain? I'm most interested in the happy hour menu, for both food and cocktails. But I'd be interested in seeing the lunch and dinner menus, too.

This is what I've found online, but it is at a third party website, so I don't know if the prices are to date:

I would also love to see pics of any food/drinks you get there on Sunday!

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I don't think that posters on here are telling you won't enjoy things. Myself, brunello22, BlueHerons, Flymia are locals that do know a bit about the area and neighborhoods. Getting advice about Coral Gables is something I would take from locals and not from Wikipedia personally, but that is just me.

 

I have also happened to live in Jersey City from 1985-87!

 

Enjoy your visit to the area. As I had said, you will love Ball and Chain. I'll be there this Sunday again!

Can you help me understand why you don't think staying in LH is a good idea? If there is a certain street where multiple tourists get murdered every year while minding their own business, I would like to know to avoid that street. But if the issue is just that the area doesn't look middle class or that the residents suffer disproportionately from gun violence due to gang/drug/poverty issues or that the vast majority of people one encounters will be non-English-speaking people and/or people of color, then I ask people to believe me when I say that those things aren't issues for me. Or things like Latin music playing until 2-3 am on weekends or feral dogs roaming the streets and barking all night. I totally get that these things would drive some people nuts. They just don't happen to bother me.

Also, there are things that would make me act a certain way, while still not deterring me from my overall plan. Like if the pickpockets are particularly bad on certain streets, or if they have particular tactics they use on unsuspecting tourists, that would be good to know so I can be mindful.

Regarding Coral Gables, are you saying that Wikipedia's characterization of it as being full of planned neighborhoods and strict HOAs is misleading?

As to Jersey City, I lived in Jersey City Heights around 2003-2005. Great neighborhood, but I think non-spanish-speakers sometimes found it intimidating.

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Maybe this is the issue? If you average my age, my fiance's age, and our daughter's age, it turns out that the average age in our family is only 26! ;)

Seriously, though, I like Cruise Critic because it is specific to cruising, so posters here understand that I have a limited time at each port of call, and they know exactly where I need transportation from, ie that I am arriving at the cruise port and not the airport or the main highway into town.

But the posters here are *very* conservative about what areas they will go into, compared to the internet population in general. Take Belize City as an example. You can Google 'public transportation to Belize Zoo' and get trip advisor threads that tell you, step by step, how to get from the port to the bus station and exactly what bus to take and how much it costs, as well as blogs from people who are backpacking all around Central America. But when I posted about it here, the vast majority of posters insisted that it literally could not be done and that I should just hire a tour guide.

I definitely think it is ok to mention that you wouldn't be comfortable doing a particular thing, but it is weird that people state with such certainty that *I* wouldn't be comfortable doing that thing. How do people know this without meeting me?

This is an interesting thread, I can see on airbnb that there are a few very nice looking places that are very well reviewed in the location anonmom mentions, with lots of favourable reviews, none of the reviewers mention problems with the area. I am guessing that this is a generational problem, most people using airbnb are younger and perhaps more clued up about these things while older people are more cautious.

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So this often happens to me on Cruise Critic. I'll post that I'm interested in going to a place/doing a thing, and a bunch of people tell me I won't enjoy it. I'm not really sure what to do about it. I totally get that people have different tastes and standards. I don't think everyone has to like the things I like. But *I* like the things I like, so I want to do things that sound fun or interesting to me.

I fully understand that Little Havana is a working-class, majority Latinx neighborhood, and that many parts are run down. I'm a working-class Latina. I live in a run-down, working-class Somali/Native/Latinx neighborhood in Minneapolis. I have lived in Quito, Brooklyn, Jersey City and Las Vegas, always in run-down, working-class neighborhoods full of immigrants and other people of color.

In Cozumel, I like to walk out the secret crew exit of Punta Langosta, walk a block south and then go to the No Name Bar, where you can buy one $6 drink and then use the WiFi for free for as long as you want, then walk down the steps into the sea for some no-frills snorkeling.

I wish NCL still sailed to Belize City. We went there a couple of years ago and many people on CC said to just stay on the ship, and that if we did get off, we absolutely needed to book a tour guide. We just walked out of the port toward the bus station and tons of taxi drivers offered to take us where we wanted to go (the Belize Zoo). We kept walking toward the bus station until a driver made an offer we really just couldn't refuse. He drove us to the zoo, waited for us and got us back to the port in plenty of time.

This year, we went to Harvest Caye. It just wasn't our kind of place. Too sterile. No one lives there.

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What a beautiful ship! What are all those windows that look into the atrium? Could they possibly be insides? I wouldn't mind an inside as long as it had a window to a nice atrium like that...

I also didn't realize there was a beer garden on the Spirit. Did you happen to take a pic of the menu?

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I guess I don't see what would be wrong with a child spotting Jasmine, wanting her picture taken, waiting an hour for that, then getting lunch at the first place the child likes the look of, going on one ride the child wants to go on, and then buying a souvenir and calling it a day. As you pointed out, at that age your daughter spent an hour playing in a water fountain. My daughter is 6. There is no way a child would have a concept of how big WDW is. Say, "we're going to a fun place for a few hours!" and don't pass by things she wants to do without doing them. That's what is hard for kids. If she thinks the first 4 things by the gate are the whole park, she won't miss what she's missing.

I do hear you about WDW changing things to increase revenue. I just don't think that spending thousands of dollars on a multi-day stay is in OP's budget. However, she feels like her son has been scarred for life by not going to WDW as a child, and would therefore like to spend a few hundred dollars to save her grandchild from this fate. Her only choices are go to WDW for 7 hours next February, or don't take granddaughter to WDW.

Now, if OP (or anyone) thinks they can go to WDW for half a day and see a large percentage of even just the MK, she is going to be disappointed. But if she just goes with the flow and does whatever attracts her granddaughter's interest, they can have a nice excursion together.

Her granddaughter will not know that there were other princesses there that she *didn't* get to meet. But she will have the picture of her and Grandma and Jasmine, and I bet she will think that is pretty special.

I'm not one of those who have said, "don't go," but the comments of those posters who have said that do not read to me the way you are implying here. Rather, their advice seems to be coming from a place of knowledge and experience, and from the perspective of getting enough value from money spent.

 

As a matter of fact, I'll suggest to you that you've got it 180° backwards. The people (including me, to some extent) who are saying, "Go!" are the ones who aren't considering those who have less money. To say, "Go!", knowing what many of us know about WDW from having brought our own relatives on their first visits to WDW in the past (and in my case, in February as a matter of fact), is to some extent throwing caution to the wind, spending money without a truly conscientious regard for value.

 

That's a false dichotomy. There are many things to do in Central Florida that lend themselves to half-day visits. WDW is not one of them, and that's due to deliberate operational decisions by WDW to try to force visitors into week-long visits. It has been a very successful strategy for WDW. It has allowed them to capture a lot more revenue than if they ran WDW to best serve day guests. Don't miss the message here: WDW deliberately degrades the day guests' experience in favor of week-long guests and in favor of their own hotel guests. It's not incidental. It's tactical.

 

Many people do care about whether the money they spend is worthwhile. That's the crux of the issue here: Is this excursion worthwhile? Reasonable people disagree, and some who have visited WDW many times are saying that this is not a good value. There is a lot of very undeniable truth in that.

 

This is part of the equation, I'm sure. Our Rachel probably could have appreciated a few hours at WDW at 9, if we prepared her for how short our visit would be, but at 5 it would have just been torturing her. (Even the end of a full week at WDW at age 5 was a bit torturous for Rachel, overshadowing some of the good of the week.) Different children are different. Our Benjamin would have been great with a short visit at 5.

 

I don't think you understand. The first thing that your child may see that she wants to do is a meet and greet with Jasmine. You could wait, even in February, for a half hour, an hour, or even longer. Poof, 1/4 of your time is gone and you've effectively paid $100 for a family of four to have a photo taken with a costumed character. The waits for having your photo taken with some characters have gotten so long that some of them actually offer Fastpasses. This is a big part of what the nay-sayers are pointing out: An inadequately planned first visit to WDW is bound to be a waste. Again, we don't necessarily have to all agree about that, but the point is valid and has more foundation than the carefree "Go anyway!" that big fans of WDW may instinctively offer instead.

 

Revisiting our Rachel: We didn't have admission for our check-out day on that first visit when she was 5. We took her to what was then called the Disney Marketplace to buy t-shirts and such. She was almost inconsolable until we came to a fountain. She played in the water for almost an hour before we had to leave for the airport. It turned around what was shaping up to be a terrible experience that day. And that was a simple fountain at a venue that had free admission and free parking. Like you said, a 5 year old won't know what she's missing.

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I think sometimes people with more money don't understand those of us who have less money. I think going to WDW for half a day is a lot more fun than not going at all.

Of course you won't get to see *everything* but who cares? 5 year olds have no concept of what they are missing. They only know that they want to do things that they see. If you plan everything down to the minute with the fast passes, then every time your grand daughter sees something she wants to do, you will have to rush her past it so that you can get to the rides you have booked.

Just let her lead the way. When she sees something she wants to look at, stop and let her look at it. She'll be excited just walking down the street and seeing whatever characters you happen to run into.

Buy her some plastic junk and some crappy overpriced fast food and she'll be thrilled.

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Awesome review so far! Hoping to do a Med cruise on the Spirit out of Barcelona in 2018 or 2019, so I'll start my research by following along :)

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Hmm, I actually don't think I would like Coral Gables *at all*. This is direct from their Wikipedia page: "Coral Gables was one of the first planned communities, and prefigured the development of the gated community and the homeowners association. It is infamous for its strict zoning regulations."

I'm​ not really worried about the Airbnb being a scam, since if it was, they would have asked me to contact them off the site. As long as you follow the rules and pay through Airbnb, they hold on to the money until after your stay and they guarantee it.

I get that there is a risk of not being satisfied with the room or the location, but that is a risk I'm willing to take. We will only be there one night. If it is truly horrible, I will ask Airbnb for my money back. If it just isn't quite what I expected, that isn't a big problem for me. I'm the type to just roll with things.

So, I'm off to Google Versailles now, because I think that is where we will have breakfast on Sunday morning, assuming they are open then and the menu looks good. We will have a big breakfast onboard on Saturday and will go to ball & chain for dinner/happy hour/dancing around 4pm, so I think we'll just grab a couple of cubanos for lunch on Saturday.

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I post on the boards because I like to talk about stuff. So I will definitely Google stuff, but I also want to hear what people have to say right now. It is like talking to your neighbor or co-worker and asking them if they have seen a new movie you are interested in. You aren't asking because you are too lazy to read the reviews online or in the paper. And you don't expect the person you are talking to to 'know' the 'right' answer to "was such-and-such movie good?" You are just making conversation about something you are interested in. I'm interested in the cruises I have taken, the cruises I have booked, the ports I've been to, the ports I'm planning on going to soon, etc. So I want to make conversation with internet strangers who share my interests.

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I'm looking forward to hearing more about your experience today. I have gone back and forth between whether I am interested in paying the extra money for vibe or not.

Some people describe it as a quiet, uncrowded place to relax, others make it sound like a semi-exclusive 'cool kids' party. Is the crowd more upscale than at the main pool, older than the average age on the ship, quieter, more social, etc? Or is it just that the crowd is smaller, so there is better service and less overall noise?

For my money, Vibe is a "must have" ... if you want to get away from the crowds and "madness" of the main pool area. Most of the people who spend a lot of time in Vibe have been, in my experience, people who aren't into hairy chest contests (although many could likely win) or the latest Pitbull music. Vibe tends to be a quieter atmosphere. One thing that's nice about it, if this is your scene (and it kinda is mine) is that because it has a limited number of people, you tend to wind up meeting new people who you hang out with up there all week. As a solo traveler, I kinda like having that as a hang-out.

 

Richard

Don't get me wrong, I agree with all the above, there just isn't a lot of time to spend there. At least for me, but I try to get in as many activities as I can. I also always get off the ship for as long as I can.

 

So not a "must-have" for me, and I think you all know me well enough from this thread to determine if you are a similar type of cruiser or not.

 

That said, I do plan on spending a decent amount of sea day time in Vibe tomorrow. Unlike day two when I was running around trying to experience everything I could.

 

 

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Oh, now I see the 2 different Yardbirds. The one in Miami/Las Vegas does look a lot more interesting than the other one, lol

The Airbnb is on SW 9th Ave & SW 6th St., so only a few minutes away from Ball & Chain on the #8 bus. I'm Latina, so bars on the windows don't bother me. It is pretty common in Latin America.

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