GenerationX

IT’S EMBARKATION DAY!!!! Since I spent most of my planned pool time yesterday sitting in the airport in STL, I got up early to take full advantage of my pool walkout room to swim some laps and sip some green tea poolside. I’ve found outdoor pools in Florida tend to be a little cool for my taste but this one is a perfect temp. Getting up was no problem at all because thanks to the amazing bed in my room (one thing I like about Hyatt Centrics, they don’t skimp on the sheet thread counts and sleeping on the mattress with weighted comforter is like being back in the womb) and the Lobster Bar dinner I had in my stomach, I slept like a baby last night. Speaking of said dinner, when I got to Lobster Bar it was another reminder that the world is a different place than it was last November. When I was last there, the bar dining area was somewhat busy but still felt laid back and kind of cozy. Last night it was full out jam packed with people, complete with DJ blasting club music. The atmosphere change fortunately didn’t affect the service or food though, both were just as good as before. I decided that because I had a rough travel day, life is short and YOLO, I’d start dinner with a cosmopolitan cocktail, then have the bone in rib-eye and whole lobster surf & turf with garlic mashed potatoes and a nice glass of Pinot and then finish off with strawberry cheesecake and a 20-year tawny port for dessert. I didn’t have the steak last time and I’m so glad I tried it. Just as good as the lobster. Impeccably seasoned and seared to perfection. It’s too bad I have to get home right after the cruise for work commitments. I would have loved to do a post-cruise night in FLL and go have that steak again. Oh well, just a matter of mere hours now till Tuscan Grille steak awaits! As I was finishing my port and convincing myself not to lick the last of the creme fraiche off my cheesecake plate, I felt my 1am wake up time and failed attempt at afternoon napping start to catch up to me. I walked the 2 blocks back to the hotel, chromecast some Netflix on my room TV and was asleep within minutes. After I finish my tea I’ll head in to shower, pack up, watch my safety drill videos in the app and get ready to head to port!

Looking forward to sailing with you! Same here, I’m there for the ship and don’t know that I’ll even bother going ashore at all. I personally think decades and dress sizes are trivial numbers that society puts far too much importance on for us ladies. I think we’ll have a great time. Can’t wait to meet you in person!

Checking in from a beautiful evening in FLL to share a little about my hotel. My rule for myself for pre-cruise hotel stays is that when I’m sailing in a suite, I go a bit more economical on the pre cruise hotel but when I’m sailing in verandas I splurge a bit more on hotel. This time I returned to my pre-Equinox cruise hotel from November, the Hyatt Centric Las Olas. I’ve found the hotel to be just as nice as I remembered. They are definitely still taking room sanitation very seriously as evidenced by the strong smell of cleaning products wafting down my hallway as the cleaning crew turn checked out rooms. So far I’ve only had one hiccup. I love the “cabana” room category at this hotel that has a patio that walks right out onto the pool. It turns out that this weekend, the hotel is hosting hordes of teenage boys and their parents, siblings, chaperones, etc. for a basketball tournament and they are ALLLL at the pool and behaving how teenage boys behave when they’re away from home and at a pool. It seems the parents are also trying to live their best hotel pool lives because it was clear from the time I stepped on my patio at 4pm that they were all already SEVERAL mojitos deep, ordering shot rounds and determined to use their Bluetooth speakers to turn the pool area into Miami circa 1985 (and don’t ask me how I know what Miami circa 1985 was like, I may have been 3 years old at the time but I’ve WATCHED Scarface and Miami Vice, thank you). I guess my point is: ye be warned, the cabana rooms are great IF the pool is chill during your stay. If it isn’t, you’ll need noise cancelling headphones if you have any intention of taking a post-fish tacos jet lag nap. I’ve just sat down to dinner at Lobster Bar Sea Grille which I also discovered during my November Equinox cruise. Some pics from the hotel below. Full report on dinner to come.

At last…I MADE IT TO MIAMI!!! Please brace yourselves for a brief lecture on the merits of flying in at least a day early for your cruise. My flight this morning was supposed to depart at 5am and put me in Miami at 9:30am. However as noted in my previous post that didn’t happen. While I was hanging out in the Admirals Club, the agents were nice enough to give me the full 411 on exactly how things went so wrong. As I mentioned we had a 3 hour weather delay. Then we were delayed an additional hour and a half while a replacement crew member came in from Chicago. This 5am Miami nonstop has been a trusty flying friend for me. It’s one of the first flights of the day and the plane for the flight always comes in the night before. Usually the crew is either STL based and coming to start their workday or just coming across the road from the airport hotel after working a late flight the night before. It has all the makings of a flight with the lowest risk that something could go wrong. Yet today here I am getting to Miami almost 5 hours late. Had my cruise been leaving today, I would have gone from a reliable flight with only a 7% delay/cancel rate that would put me at the port with room to spare, to most likely missing the ship entirely (when you add in the time to get bags, find your transportation and get over to FLL to the port in traffic). In chatting with others in the Admirals Club lounge it sounds like several usually reliable morning flights yesterday and the day before (including this red eye) were also canceled due to crew shortages/illness, so by this morning, rebooking options were extremely limited. When our delay went past 3 hours, I was given the option to rebook on another flight but all the available options on AA the Admirals Club ladies could find me would have put me in Miami tomorrow well after sail away! I’ve on occasion pondered the cost and time savings of flying in the morning of cruise, but today 100% cemented my mind that I will be doing no such thing anytime soon. The travel environment is just too volatile. Ok that’s enough doom and gloom. It’s a beautiful day in Miami and time for vacation to start! Once I get settled in my hotel I’m going to head to the bar for a super late lunch. I have dinner reservations in Las Olas tonight at 8:30 and hate to risk my appetite, but I’m starving (the first class meal on my flight was extremely disappointing…as in the strawberries in my fresh fruit bowl and cucumbers on my smoked salmon plate had MOLD on them…I wish I were kidding 🤮). After that I think I’ll go for a quick swim then take a power nap by the pool!

Good morning from STL! Well the good news is (thus far anyway) my flight hasn’t been canceled. The bad news is we are on a 4 hour weather delay due to nasty thunderstorms rolling though St. Louis! I’m trying not to stress about it and making myself comfortable in the Admirals Club lounge with a bagel and beverages to take care of a few work projects. On the plus side, this should allow me to get a good chunk of my pre-cruise workload done, so when I get to my hotel in FLL I’ll be able to nap a bit and just relax. BTW, if you’re ever in STL and have Admirals Club privileges, the ladies who work in this lounge are fantastic! Super friendly, knowledgeable, candid with the information that they have and willing to go the extra mile to help out passengers in need of rebooking, hotel vouchers, etc. Even though it’s a relatively small lounge, I’ve rarely found it crowded (but disclaimer: I tend to fly early mornings). Hopefully the storms will move through as scheduled and I’ll be wheels up in a few hours.

This reminds me of the time Jeremy and I were cruising and met a couple from Australia the second night and the wife started telling a story about how she was so tipsy that she lost “a thong” on a booze cruise excursion that day. For a few minutes we were worried we’d accidentally booked a “themed” cruise. 😂

It’s my traditional champagne and cruise packing movie time! (If you’ve followed my other reviews or you just have really good taste in classic films, you already know the flick.) Unfortunately even this sacred pre-cruise ritual of mine was not immune to today’s supply chain issues. When I stopped at my neighborhood wine shop, they told me they haven’t been able to get a case of Veuve in for weeks. 😭 So I’m settling for a substitute this time. I realize this is next level first world problems, so I’m not pouting too much.

I do check the site regularly and play with dummy bookings. I’ve found that for the good solo fare discounts sometimes you have to click all the way through to the deposit screen to see the full discount and perks for the solo deal. I’m also on the Celebrity mailing list as well as mailing lists for a couple of travel agencies and I pretty much always open and scan all the emails to see what’s being offered. I’ve found that the sales that include really good perks are usually shorter in duration so it often pays off for me to be on top of it.

Us too! Looking forward to sailing with you!!!

Thank you! We have the same issue in our marriage. I just have an annual hours requirement rather than official vacation day count, and my job is one where I can keep most projects moving from anywhere that I have wifi, so it’s much easier for me to get away than my husband. My trick to getting him onboard with my solo trips has been that I always cook or take him out for a really top notch meal right before I leave and we made a deal that while I’m away, all of my house rules are suspended (as long as the place looks like how I left it when I get home). I think he enjoys being able to spend all evening playing loud violent video games on the living room TV with no earphones on, sitting his beer bottles wherever he wants without a coaster and being able to head to the river with his fishing pole without me blocking the doorway and asking if he finished fixing the sink yet. I’m fairly confident that within 24 hours of my departure my home will look like a frat house and there’ll be men’s pants (and who knows what else) lying on my dining room table. But it’s totally worth it!

Have a wonderful trip on the Summit! If you feel inclined to post some pics/reports while you’re onboard to help get me through till I board her in July, I will be forever grateful!

Thank you! I hope you are feeling better and back on the seas soon! I’ll be sending thoughts for strength and health your way!

I’m having one last lunch with Gen Z before she heads off to be spoiled by Nana and Papa for the weekend and she asked to make a cameo appearance in the review. She’s been quite tepid towards me since I told her I was heading off on a cruise without her (only downside to that Millennium cruise, now she knows EXACTLY what she’s missing 🤦🏾‍♀️), so I decided to buy my way back into her good graces with bottomless chocolate milkshakes and chicken tenders. Worked like a charm!

From personal experience I know that this can be the case with AA…And sometimes the agents at the desk at the airport have completely different answers than the phone agents!

Just finished my eMed Covid test (negative, yay!). The process went much smoother this time than it did for my Edge cruise in January. I suspect the proctors have had a lot more practice by now so they know the drill much better. So far my flight is still on according to plan (knocks wood). It’s a beautiful day to pack for a cruise! 21 hours till wheels up!

Excellent news! Safe travels and see you onboard Saturday!

This is a smart idea! I actually checked and I have enough southwest miles to book an STL-FLL flight late tomorrow morning one way for free. Even if I end up having to cancel it too close to get the miles refunded, it may be worth burning a few thousand miles for my own peace of mind. Thank you!!!

Ok, so I know we have some real air travel warriors/experts on the boards so if any of you are reading this and can weigh in, that would be fantastic. Here’s my question: I was just on an AA discussion board and someone posted that their red eye STL to MIA flight for tomorrow morning had been cancelled and they were told by AA the earliest available rebook was on Saturday (6/18, aka my sail date). I am scheduled to fly a nonstop red eye STL to MIA on Friday morning (6/17) and when I just did a dummy booking it looks like there are still about a dozen seats left open on my flight. My question is how concerned should I be that my flight is going to get canceled, given that it’s not being offered as a rebook option (even though it looks like seats are available) and that I’ll also be offered no alternative options to fly till Saturday (even though there are several other flights out Friday, albeit not nonstop, to Miami). I don’t know if this changes the analysis but the person indicated that they booked a ways out on an extremely cheap fare (almost 900 less than what seats on my flight are priced at currently) so not sure if that would affect what rebook options would be. I know that whatever will be will be and situations like this are why I book the earliest flight (with a less than 10% cancellation rate) a day in advance so that I have a good chance at options and time to still make the ship if things go wrong. Just checking to see if anyone has any insights that could drop my anxiety level a few notches!

I think we’re the sailing right before you. We sail on the 24th! I’ll have my 40th birthday onboard 😁 bummer we’ll just miss you!

Looking forward to sailing with you and your family! Hope to see you at sunset bar at sail away. We will drink to your triumphant return to cruising!

I LOVE this B2B idea. We should totally do this together sometime! A B2B together where we bring the husbands for the first week then kick them off our ship for the second one! 😂

My suitcases and luggage tag holders have come up from the basement and my husband has started making comments about projects that need to be done around our hobby farm next week then saying “OH that’s RIGHT, you’ll be on a CRUISE then, so I’LL have to handle that.” All signs pointing to less than 48 hours to wheels up! Speaking of the cruise, here’s a little about what I plan to be doing while my husband is repairing a pigsty and trying to keep our tomato crop alive through 102 degree heat… Let’s start with the most important topic: food! When I booked my specialty dining, Celebrity was running a 10% off flash sale which, along with only having to pay a cover charge for one person (solo cruising park!) allowed my OBC to go a bit further. Not sure if it was the sales or the fuller ship but specialty bookings in the cruise planner were much harder to come by for this cruise. My S-class first night dinner tradition is to eat at my favorite, Murano. But this time both Murano and Tuscan Grille were showing sold out for the first night! I’m making the best of if and made a reservation to do Sushi on 5 for first night dinner instead. I was able to book 2 other nights at Tuscan Grille. Also, since it’s my favorite and all my other cruises till the end of the year will be on M and E class, I decided to go on a Murano binge and booked 3 nights there (albeit one with an extremely late dinner of 9:30 as the only available reservation time). For those doing the math, that left me with 2 nights with no specialty plans. Both are on port days where I have excursions planned so depending on how tired I am, I’ll either go to select dinning in the MDR or take those as rest nights and have a chill casual room service or buffet dinner (the joys of which I discovered on Equinox in November) and then spend the evening on my veranda with my book and a glass of wine. Speaking of excursions, I have excursions booked through Celebrity in St. Thomas, St. Maarten and Tortola. There was also a decent sale going on when I purchased these. I believe it was 20% buying 2 excursions and 30% off buying 3. Here again, for the first time in a long time I saw excursions sold out in the cruise planner several weeks prior to the cruise, but I was able to find a few that interested me. In St. Thomas I’ll be going on a half day sailing and snorkeling trip. In Tortola I’ll be doing an island tour and trip to Cane Garden Bay beach. The port I’m most excited about for this cruise is St. Maarten! This was one of my favorite islands and most stunning beaches when Jeremy and I sailed on Silhouette a few years ago and I’ve wanted to go back ever since. All of my previous post-shutdown cruises, the island was still closed to cruise ships and I am very excited to return. I’ve booked a trip to Orient Beach that includes a beach chair/umbrella, lunch, and 2 drinks. With the discount I believe I paid about $65 for it. It seems like a fair deal as I think when I was last on the island (pre-inflation of course), we spent about $120 on taxi rides to/from the beach, lunch and a couple of drinks each. I also didn’t want to stress about the island potentially requiring a ship’s excursion to go ashore and then everything being sold out and missing the chance to go. My schedule this month has been so hectic I haven’t been able to get to the spa for my monthly massage, pedicure and facial, so I’ll be trying the Equinox spa for the first time and booked those on our sea days (comparably priced to what I spend on land with the pre-cruise booking discount). I’ve also got some OBC saved just in case once I’m onboard any additional sushi lunches, wine tastings, etc. strike my fancy….Who am I kidding? We all know that a pork ramen lunch and a wine tasting or 3 will end up striking my fancy. Well, I think I better get back to my pre-cruise to-do list! I’ve got to print out all my confirmations and luggage tags, pick up some dry cleaning and make sure all is in order with my NAVICA app/account for my home Covid test first thing tomorrow morning. This time next week I’ll be lying on Orient Beach! Wohoo final countdown!!!

Oh she’s quite salty with me I assure you! She’s going on a sailing trip with her father next week and I keep trying to tell her that will be just as fun as a cruise. She just cuts her eyes at me and says “Daddy’s sailboat does NOT have a Retreat Lounge!” 😂

Thank you! Which Beyond sailing are you guys doing in November? My friend Red and I are sailing on Beyond on Nov 8th!

Hello!!! Omg that is so funny about the map dress. I may need to reach out to that Amazon seller and ask them to start paying me a commission. 🤔😂 Enjoy Reflection! I’ll let you know if I hear anything about restart of refurbs. I’ll be in aqua class for our cruise next month on Summit and will be sure to do a review of that cruise too!