christa4

Sorcerer Tim, your answer is like magic to my ears. Thanks for sharing your experience. Sorry to read about your extended stay.;)

I agree with Tim. Sebastian actually didn't get back to my initial email, I had to follow up 10 days later and as a man of few words (via email), he responded with a simple email. I didn't use Loop. While on board, I did call his extension a couple times and he answered right away. I also asked Brian a couple times to get ahold of Sebastian for us, which Brian did. The team together was dynamite.

Sebastian in person is very chatty. He takes great pride in doing a great job. We didn't see him a crazy amount on the ship but everything we discussed with him on day 1 was executed perfectly. Actually, even higher than perfect. He went above and beyond. He's 34 and full of energy. He has worked in many different departments and has a good grasp on how different areas of the ship work. He's full of information and you can pick his brain as much as you'd like. His smile and energy are contagious. I honestly thought we'd see him more because I thought he needed to be around to make things happen. That wasn't the case. He did such a good job preparing for our requests that everything was flawless for us. He pushed the different departments and was able to make things happen that I don't think typically happen.

He likes cookies. He refers to the golf cart shuttles at Labadee as "Choo-choo's". And he's a perfectionist.

I forgot to mention the upstairs TV and its movement. Next week I will remember the trick, but I can't now but it has to do with the order of pushing buttons on the remote. Once Seepaul showed it to me it operated in a fluid movement. The jerky sound at night almost woke Lisa, however it is smart to put it up. I wouldn't want to walk into it at night.:eek: A steward on Allure that we know needed getting stiches in her head when she hit it on the TV's steel frame.

 

They also added the two lavender side tables since March.

Oh no! I did hit my head on it multiple times as I had my head flipped over blowdrying my hair. Never anything bad, just little brushes with it luckily. We didn't even really watch either TV. There was one night we stayed in we were so tired that we fell asleep to a movie and we watched the video on loop about what to do debarkation day.

The lavender side tables are neat. When we sat down with Sebastian (our Genie) on embarkation day to go over our plans for the week I sat Indian style on one of them as Kelsey Grammer's child was screaming next door distracting me. It was large and steady enough for me to sit comfortably with my legs crossed on it.

My son, daughter in law and granddaughter were in this room the last week of August. They had issues with the tv in the bedroom also. Very jerky movement going up and down

That's exactly what we experienced! I forgot to tell anyone so I don't know that they are aware of the problem. Maybe when Andrew boards on Saturday he can tell them! ;)

More to follow! It's lunch time!!!

- Christa 💜

Electric curtain buttons both down stairs by the window and upstairs by one side of the bed in the loft!

Room lights and no need to put your SeaPass card in to activate everything, there's a special card to do that.

We also learned on the last night that this magnet is double sided. We thought we only had one magnet. It would have been nice to know we had the DND magnet earlier on... 🚫🙈🙉🙊

- Christa 💜

Connecting door to Kelsey Grammer's room. ⤵️

- Christa 💜

- Christa 💜

- Christa 💜

Since I don't have access to my pictures on my phone from anything prior to the cruise (I take too many and my phone always fills up so I had to transfer them to my external hard drive), I'm going to go to what I found to be a super great part of the cruise. Our room. I have those on my phone so I'm going to post about our room now.

Ahhh... our room... what I'd give to be able to stay in that same room on all future cruises. Our room was amazing. I really wish each one of you could experience it. The details were beautiful and well thought out. We only had a couple areas of improvement on the room.

Here are some things that we noticed, whether good or bad:

1.) People are curious. Everyone looked into our room. While we were on the balcony everyone was curious to see who was staying in that room! While I was blow drying my hair next to the bed upstairs with the curtain open, people wanted to see who was up there. It was insane, yet it didn't really bother us. We were equally creeping back at everyone.

2.) The lights were delayed. It took us longer than I'd like to admit to figure out how to turn the lights off on the first night. We didn't realize that there was a delay on the light switch buttons so we just kept pressing each of them since it didn't 'work'. We eventually realized that there was a few second delay after you turned the lights off, or pressed the "0" button. What took us about 5 minutes to figure out seemed like it took 45 minutes because we were so sleepy and just wanted to go to bed. At one point, I thought I was just going to give up and sleep with the lights on.

3.) Having 2 bathrooms in a stateroom was something I wish I could always have.

4.) We could have used a wet bar. That's one thing that I think would have been a nice addition.

5.) The upstairs curtain didn't shut all the way so if you didn't want the Flow Rider lights shining in your eyes all night, you needed to prop a pillow up against it and the window. There were plenty of pillows, 3 on each side of the bed, so this wasn't a big deal. Luckily I knew of this in advance because Andrew touched on it in one of his Live posts in the past.

6.) The TV that folds up into the ceiling in the loft didn't fold down properly. Joey had to press the button over and over and over for it to move ever so slightly. This didn't seem right. Maybe user error? Either way, we ended up leaving this down and I bumped my head on it a few times as I was blowdrying my hair up there.

7.) We discovered part way through the cruise that there was a light outside on the balcony. Oops. We had no clue.

8.) The air conditioning unit does not turn off when the balcony door is open. Apparently this is a feature in many of the suites. (Score!)

9.) There were 2 separate thermostats, one upstairs in the loft and the other downstairs. We didn't discover this right away, as we only turned one to chilly and when we came back from dinner and a show on the first night, we realized there was a second one in the loft. The AC works extremely well, even when it's 108 degrees outside.

10.) If there is a crying baby in the room next to you, you will hear it. Kelsey Grammer's child was heard daily.

Ok, time for some pictures. We didn't really prep our room for these so don't mind our stuff laying about.

Back at work today. My coworkers are just the cutest! All that hurricane chatter! 🤣

More cruise updates to come!!

- Christa 💜

Thursday, September 14th, 2017:

We were able to check into our hotel as soon as we got there. Unfortunately, my dad didn't arrive for a couple more hours so we didn't have our supplies to start filling our welcome bags. Not a huge deal. We were hungry anyways so while we waited, we walked across the street to Wendy's. There weren't a ton of food options within a visual distance so that was the easiest and quickest choice at that time.

When my dad arrived, we loaded up a luggage cart and wheeled everything up to our room. Which by the way, was a 1 bedroom suite, and not the studio room we booked which was good but after hearing that a lot of our guests were upgraded to rooms much larger than ours - one even got a 2 bedroom suite, I was bummed since we had so much stuff and people through our rooms I wish we had received a larger room. After getting booted from our original hotel though, I just reminded myself that I was happy to have rooms for everyone.

Next thing on our list was to fill the welcome bags. This was fun because I forgot about a lot of the stuff we purchased for the bags so it was fun to see all of the goodies again. Unfortunately, I didn't look at all of the welcome bags when they came in 8 months ago so this was the first time I was seeing them. I was really aggravated because about 6 of the bags were really really faded with weird lines though them and the printing looked as if the printer ran out of ink during the printing process. Of course my bag was one of the faded bags and my good friends bag was also faded. This reminds me, I need to email the printer and tell them because it really was a bummer. :(

Thursday, September 14th, 2017:

It was an early morning. Our flight was at 7:55am out of CLE with a 50 minute layover in ATL with a scheduled arrival in FLL at 12:20pm. My bridesmaid, Destiny, lives near by so she was kind and picked us up at the house at 5:50am. We loaded up and took a smooth 20 minute drive to the airport.

For some reason, our TSA Pre Check info wasn't printed on our boarding passes so we went through the regular line which was annoying because I had a belt, tie shoes without socks, a laptop and liquids. There could have been worse problems - it went smoothly. The flights were great, no problems. We did make a name for ourselves on the 2nd flight because the 3 of us each ordered 2 drinks during our short flight. The flight attendant served us first because she got rid of half her drinks just by serving our row first. TIP: I think going forward, the key is to order multiple drinks at once!!! Score!

My aunt and uncle picked us up from FLL and drove us to the hotel so we didn't have to worry about transportation there.

Wednesday, September 13th, 2017:

I worked until 5:00pm that day then ran to an appointment at 5:15pm and had to stop back at the office after my appointment so I could finish up our wedding programs. I ran a few more errands before finally making it back home. My cousin, who was my Matron of Honor, came over to spend the night since she was on our flight and she lives about 1:30 away and the airport is close to our house. This worked out well because I had her help with a few last minute details such as folding our wedding programs.

The negative part to giving my dad a bunch of our supplies and luggage in advance - it made me feel really disorganized. I found myself pacing around unable to gather my thoughts. Because I didn't have everything laying in front of me, I had the feeling of forgetting things.

Today is full of being lazy, dog cuddles and laundry. Back to work tomorrow.

Now that I'm back on my computer, I'm going to start including some details of our experience. I think the best way for me to do this is to go through each day and then go back and touch on some of the daily items in more detail. If there are any questions along the way, I'll do my best to get them answered! Thank you all for being so patient and waiting on this review! Sorry for not being as Live as I had hoped.

Home! These 2 are so excited and since we don't have any food at the house and they haven't gone for a r-i-d-e in the c-a-r in so long, we are going to grab some food!

- Christa 💜

So close to making it home! Bye bye vacation!

☀️🔜❄ [j/k... but seriously though... it's going to feel that way.]

- Christa 💜

Ok ok ok... had to post this picture of our matchy-matchy luggage. I'm calling it our wedding luggage.

- Christa 💜

Getting sooo close to having internet on my laptop! Short layover in Atlanta this morning before making it back to CLE.

FLL➡️ATL➡️CLE 🛫

- Christa 💜

I've been MIA, I know it! We've been so absolutely crazy busy I can't get over it. I need a vacation from this vacation. Not even kidding. Still no computer internet (boo). So here are a few little overviews for you.

1. Haiti was crazy busy. We requested an over the water cabana but as you could see by the other photos, some were completely missing and others were damaged. We "scored" a Standard Cabana, S1. Not my favorite but because we had a bunch to do that day, looking back I'm not too upset by it. I guess when Kristen Bell and her family request an over water one, they get priority to what wasn't damaged by Irma.

2. We ran into quite a handful of virtual Cruise Critic friends on this sailing, specifically a group at Chefs Table last night. I'm still suffering from a food hangover this morning from that dinner. The dinner was amazing. Once we are back home I'll be sure to add a photo of our menu.

3. We met with the Captain last night prior to the Chefs Table to take a photo! It was pretty special. A little obnoxious if you ask me though. We don't like attention being on us.

4. Yesterday we did the longest excursion: Xplor. I'm so tired and ever so slightly sore for all of the walking and swimming involved.

5. There has been some drama in our group. I'm not going to go into it in detail but soon enough I will explain why some of our plans changed.

6. Our room is --- absolitely.over.the.top.amazing.

7. Our Genie, Sebastian, is great as is our room attendant, Brian, along with Brian's assistant.

8. Cabin Crawl was fun. We started in a 2 Bedroom Aquatheater Suite and ended in our room. We visited a Grand Suite, Owners Suite, Junior Suite and Crown Loft Suite.

9. Our photographer friends are working on editing photos from the wedding day.

10. Hurricane Maria hasn't changed anything for us, such as port locations. We actually experienced extremely smooth water and we were told that it's is because of Maria and the weather she sent our way outside of her path.

11. We are talking about sailing again September 2018 since we didn't get to experience as much as we had hoped. Too bad if we were to book, we'd only be staying in an interior storeroom. Anyone hiring? I need a pay raise if I ever want to stay in the Sky Loft Suite again (sad). [Will work for Star Class Suites]. - Not even kidding.

12. Just finished breakfast in bed. Getting ready to head to the pool.

- Christa 💜

Looks like you guys had a blast. Mmm, pizza. I could go for some now.

 

Have fun today upon embarkation and let me be the first to welcome you to Suite 1724.

ANDREW - Before I forget!! Sebastian is your Genie! You're going to LOVE him! Wait until you hear the types of things we requested but how he went way WAY above and beyond! I am going to have to write a long post on how amazing he's been just in the first 12 hours of meeting him!

I'm case you're wondering, 1724 accommodates 50 people quite nicely for a little in-room reception. 🥂

- Christa 💜

You guys! So many cool things! I'm having trouble connecting my laptop to the internet so I can't post all the details just yet. So for now I'll just add a couple pics from my phone! 📸🖱🚫

The pics include the Fine Line show in the Aquatheater. A snapshot of our dinner menu at Wonderland. Trial run(s) of our unity ceremony drink. View from my mom's Crown Loft Suite (1732). Early setup stage of our in-room Welcome Reception. &&& a picture of Joey as we were departing Port Everglades (Fort Lauderdale).

Seriously though, the love on this ship is unreal. I can't wait to share my experiences. Today was super long yet not rushed a d quite enjoyable. Everyone on the ship has literally gone above and beyond.

Goal for tomorrow: 1.) marry Joey; 2.) Get a picture with Kelsey Grammer; and 3.) Get Kristen Bell to sing a Frozen song at our reception. 💜

P.S.- yes, the ship does spray tans but by the time I found out, I didn't have time to do it. I think the spa said it was like $40 but then again... I had so much info thrown at me today I could be way wrong. *womp womp*

- Christa 💜

We made it to the terminal! Somehow our friend and my mom and her boyfriend were pushed through with us and are sitting with us in the Star Class waiting area. Easiest process ever. Details on our unloading and check in process to follow!

- Christa 💜

Looks like you guys had a blast. Mmm, pizza. I could go for some now.

 

Have fun today upon embarkation and let me be the first to welcome you to Suite 1724.

Who doesn't enjoy pizza and beer? Since there aren't a ton of places close to our hotel, we thought we'd just order in food for our group.

Thank you, we are super excited!! I'll take good care of 1724 for your arrival in 14 days!

We have to get ready and pack everything back up. We have SO much stuff with us. Our chariot arrives at 9:30am this morning. Not my ideal first choice but my mom picked the time and I'm not too upset with it.

The price for one trip from our hotel to the cruise port was $150 (inclusive of tip, etc.) while the price for 3 hours, which can do about 4 round trips between the hotel and cruise port was $270 all inclusive. I went with the 3 hours because for $120 more, I was getting 3 extra trips that I'd be happy for my guests to use. I think $40 round trip for the extra 3 trips was totally worth the experience for my family and friends.

In case anyone is interested, this is the place we will be using.:

LPC Transportation Inc. 8930 State Road 84 Suite 106Fort Lauderdale, FL 33324Ph: 954-473-6631 TF: 800-611-6631 Fax: 954-473-2559

Let me remind everyone, 1.) this is my 3rd ever cruise and Joey's 2nd; 2.) this is our first time on Royal Caribbean; 3.) This is my/our first time in a room category other than an interior stateroom; 4.) we are getting married tomorrow.

Anyone know if the spa offers spray tans? I could use one!! :D

Cheers!

Great day today! Everyone that was supposed to come in today made it safely. Many with delays and one couple even ended up at a different airport. I ordered like 11 large pizza's and all but a miscellaneous 2 or 3 were gobbled up. We played a few hours of beer pong. Standard for this group. I'm not a solo selfie person but in honor of my cousin who is in her 20's and seeing palm trees for the first time, I share with you what I'm calling my Tianna Selfie. 🌴

We are calling it a night early tonight.. We didn't even drink the 7 cases of beer we had. I can't wait for tomorrow! Lots of adventures ahead of us. Lots of new things to experience. ✌😄

- Christa 💜