So this was originally supposed to be a "live" journal while we cruised on Oasis of the Seas 12/4-12/11, but I took too many naps and had too much fun to type up my notes, and then work/the holidays happened. This is my review of Oasis and Royal Caribbean in general, with all the bloody guts and details included.
We sailed on Oasis for my father's birthday: a group of 6 of us, all adults. For background, my family took a cruise on Carnival in 1995, during which my mother got extremely seasick and vowed never to set foot on a boat again. Since then, about once a year my father would gently suggest going on another family cruise and get immediately veto'd by my mother; this has become a hallowed family tradition, alongside setting up the Christmas tree and trying to explain to Grandpa what Facetime is.
But this year, it actually happened! My mother loaded up on prescription-grade, likely non-street-legal anti-seasickness meds, and decided to grin and bear it for the sake of true love. My wife was anxious, having never been on a cruise, but also curious. I was excited; I took another cruise by myself on Carnival pre-pandemic for my friends' wedding and generally enjoy the enormous quantities of food, random conversations with strangers, and gambling (not necessarily in that order).
Below is the agenda for this review sections (and I apologize if I get the order of some of these events wrong). Actual useful travel tips I will put in bold.
1) Day 0- Planning, Packing Tips, Miami Dinner
2) Day 1- Embarkation, Windjammer, The Room, General Ship Thoughts, MDR
3) Day 2- Coco Cay, the Arcade, Poker
4) Day 3- Sea Day, Sociological Mysteries
5) Day 4- Solairum Bistro, Cozumel, Submarine Rides, Ice Show
6) Day 5- Roatan, A Lack of Sloths, Chops, Aqua 80
7) Day 6- Puerto Costa Maya, Casino, Johnny Rocket's, Cats
8 ) Day 7- Disembarkation, Flying Home
Day 0- Planning, Packing Tips, Miami Dinner
People say the planning can be as fun as the actual cruise, and while that's not actually true, there is a sort of perverse joy in waking up to the buzz of your phone with a notification from the Royal Caribbean app announcing a special, limited-time sale on excursions and drink packages, and combing through them to discover whether they are different than yesterday's special, limited-time sale on excursions and drink packages (spoilers: they're not). My wife and I spend roughly a third of our waking hours in the months leading up to the cruise watching videos from Matt from Royal Caribbean Blog, obsessively over-thinking every last detail in an attempt to not be anxious and/or spend the entire night before the cruise packing and re-packing.
The night before departure, we are anxious, and spend the entire night before the cruise packing and re-packing. Beyond the excellent lists and suggestions hosted on Cruise Critic and elsewhere, my recommendation is to get some little magnetic hooks to help hang things on the walls, a USB charging plate that will let you plug in 2-3 devices into one outlet, and extra plastic bags for wet clothes. Also, think very hard about how many pairs of socks/underwear/t-shirts you will need, as it's easy to think you're not packing much and then end up with 7-8 suitcases of stuff you won't even use. Despite our best efforts, my wife and I each end up with a full-to-bursting backpack, a roll-on bag, and three layers of clothes to wear so we don't have to pack them (as it turns out, wearing your Formal Night outfit on the plane does not get you better service, it just makes you uncomfortable)
We fly into Miami a day early and set up shop at an AirBnB. Our pre-cruise dinner is at Los Gauchitos (https://www.losgauchitosmenu.com/), which my brother and SIL recommend because of their excellent pizzas. When we arrive, we find that there are no pizzas served for dinner, just meat and seafood. What a disappointment! This is clearly all Joe Biden's fault.
(My father grumbles in a conspiratorial tone about how we must have gone to the wrong Los Gauchitos restauarnt)
My brother orders the Parillada for One, to split with my mother. Parillada for One includes short rib, flank steak, chicken, sweet breads (which are NOT what they sound like) and sides. The Parillada for One could easily feed three reasonably hungry people, so buyer beware. I have Pescado con Camarones, which is fried white fish with shrimp, both pretty good.
Miami in wintertime has the humidity and warmth of an early Midwestern summer but without the bugs. I can understand why people want to live here despite the ridiculous rent prices.
Day 1- Embarkation, Windjammer, The Room, General Ship Thoughts, MDR
To get from our AirBnB to the Port of Miami terminal, we call two Lyfts. This takes significantly longer than we thought because nobody can quite figure out which terminal in the Port of Miami we are supposed to be going to; Google and Royal Caribbean's website give contradictory answers and nobody wants to end up getting Lyfted to a container ship heading for Peru instead of Oasis of the Seas. We asked to be dropped off at Cruise Terminal A, which seemed to get us there OK and well before our 11:30 boarding time.
Arriving at the Cruise Terminal is THE most chaotic process I've ever experienced; the parking lot of the Indy 500 or a Taylor Swift concert is a polite little backwater compared to this. There are cars, vans, and buses everywhere treating lanes, signs, and traffic laws as suggestions, with angry-sounding police and Royal Caribbean staff literally banging on people's windshields and screaming at them to "get out of the way", pointing into lanes that are already full of vehicles. We manage to get out of our car and are met by a porter who is screaming because there's no other way to be heard. While my original idea was to carry our own bags, between the screaming and the honking and the Frogger-like danger of cars zipping by, I end up handing the kind gentleman our roll-ons and praying they end up on Oasis and not on Maersk Alabama heading to Peru.
My mother and father are waving at us from a separate line that clearly says "SUITE PASSENGERS ONLY" or some variant thereof, but because we're all on the same reservation, the rest of us get to skip the line for District 12 peasants and instead get ushered up into the Capitol-esque lounge for VIP passengers...which is just as crowded as the rest of the terminal.
We go through a 1990s-airport-security-like checkpoint (X-ray machine/metal detector only, no shoes and jackets nonsense) and into the lounge, which has luxurious bottled water and Panera-ish cookies, and not nearly enough couches and seats for everyone. Apparently 80% of Oasis' passengers are traveling in suites. We check in with a young lady who I'm 90% sure is actually in 8th grade, but who is nonetheless competent and wholly professional, including politely asking us to take off our masks so she can take pictures of us to help feed the NSA dystopian surveillance state/identify us to our MDR waiters that evening.
Then we're on the boat!
There's a brief argument between my SIL and mother, who have chosen to watch DIFFERENT cruise ship YouTube channels, one recommending your first meal be at the Windjammer (WJ) buffet and one recommending the Park Cafe instead. Much like pre-Nicean-Creed Christianity, this turns into a heated and only somewhat passive-aggressive row before my mom wins out and we head to the Windjammer.
Note: this is my first time going to a legitimate buffet restaurant since pre-COVID.
A nice young lady says "Washy-washy" at the entrance and directs us to hand-washing stations. Over the course of the cruise, I will wash my hands with soap and water approximately 8,000 times/day, because I'm deathly afraid of norovirus and alcohol-based sanitizers do NOT kill norovirus. I recommend you do the same. Norovirus is baaaad, people.
I recall on my first day on my last Carnival cruise, a young gentleman snidely mentioned "The food here's good, if you've never been on Royal before" and am eagerly looking forward to seeing how much better Royal Caribbean can do for a buffet.
The buffet items I recommend:
-Chicken nuggets. Despite my skepticism, I take a bite of one at my father's recommendation, and discover these chicken nuggets are unearthly delicious: perfect ratio of crunchy breading to white meat, not dried out under a sunlamp, and spiced with just the right amount of salt and herbs and something that I'm pretty sure we send drug dealers to prison for in the US. These are the chicken nuggets that appear in glossy Chick-Fil-A ads; these are the chicken nuggets that small children dream of and yet never manage to find; these are the Platonic ideal of chicken nuggets, that real nuggets will never live up to. I did not have "chicken nuggets as top buffet food item" on my 2022 Bingo card, but here we are.
-Any of the meat carving stations. I believe (don't quote me on this) that the first day's carving station was roast beef, but my experience over the course of the week was that all of the meats were pretty good when carved fresh.
-Salad bar. My wife believes in a bunch of Communist nonsense ideas like "eating vegetables regularly" and "wearing sunscreen", so I dutifully trudge over to the salad section and hope nobody's coughed on it recently. The freshness and crispness of the vegetables surprises me, and while I still don't like vegetables, these aren't bad. (Note: for our cruise the WJ veggies were SIGNIFICANTLY better than the Solarium Bistro veggies)
-Chocolate dessert parfait. This wasn't the actual name of the dessert but I cannot for the life of me remember what it was- whipped fluffy chocolate filling topped with whipped cream in a little shotglass-like plastic container. Delightful, and also gluten free.
The rest of the food is not a standout but at least average. (Note: As per my own personal policy, I skip foods that are either easy to make at home or easy to fill up on with empty calories: pasta, breads, sandwiches, soups, etc. If elected President, I will ban these from buffet restaurants).
We still have to wait for our rooms to be opened, so my wife and I wander the ship for a bit. Oasis of the Seas had a similar effect on me as Denis Villenueve's Dune Part 1: I spent most of the time goggling at how ENORMOUS everything is. The ship is divided into "neighborhoods" of shops, restaurants, bars, and attractions (pools, etc.) that feel reasonably distinctive and use the space extremely efficiently. While the usable public space is comparable to a decent size mall, because of the way it's divided and the usage of skylights and open areas, it feels like it's roughly the size of Maryland.
The size of the ship is also a help for my mother's motion sickness: my father keeps quoting the size of Oasis v. the piddly little sailboat we rode on with Carnival, and I don't know much about nautical displacement, but I do get "big v. little". And the advantage of big is that it's harder to feel both the motion when we're cruising and the waves, both of which contribute significantly to motion sickness. More on this in a bit.
The disadvantage of size is that Oasis is crowded. There are lines for everything and bottlenecks exactly where and when you'd expect them: when boarding/disembarking, in the buffet (at WJ we were constantly searching for tables), at My Time Dining (which we thankfully did not do), for all the shows, for all the good trivia (but not the "Flags of the World" trivia my father went to), for the Freestyle Soda Pop machines, and for the two soft-serve ice cream stations. On a scale of 1-10, where 10 is Disneyworld on spring break and 1 is the Museum of Modern Art on a Tuesday, Oasis with a full crew complement is about a 6 or a 7, pretty much all the time. This is clearly all Joe Biden's fault.
As such, my wife and I spend some time pushing through crowds and end up in the ship's library, which has about six seats and a roughly 1:1 books : chair ratio. I have more books in my bookcase at home than the ship's library does; I might have more books with me in my carry-on than the ship's library does. But it is quiet and nicely maintained. If you're looking for Proust or Nabokov you're going to be disappointed, but there's a few recent James Pattersons and Lee Childs in stock.
Then the crew open the giant fire doors that allow access to staterooms and we pour into the corridors like rats through a maze. There's an envelope on our stateroom door with our SeaPass cards, about the size of a VISA and just as dangerous to your credit score.
Our room has a balcony that overlooks the ocean, with two chairs and a little table protected from neighboring balconies by partitions. Inside the sliding door from the balcony is a couch long enough for my wife to nap on without crunching up, a vanity/mirror/desk that has 3 (or possibly four) outlets that are the only usable outlets we can find, a mounted TV on the wall, and a surprisingly large number of cabinets. Then, the bed and closet, which included several levels of shelving, a safe, and probably a dozen clothes hangars, and finally the bathroom.
The bathroom is only a little larger than a typical airplane lavatory, with a comically small sink and skinny countertop, some built-in shelving, and a mirror. The shower has a single dispenser for "body wash/shampoo", which I use and my wife avoids (she brought her own), and the showerhead is low enough that at 5'10" I am just barely able to make it under. The water pressure, however, is excellent, and the hot water is immediately and satisfyingly hot.
Overall, while Oasis is an older ship, the fixtures and cleanliness are on par with any good hotel (think Hyatt, not Holiday Inn or Ritz Carlton).
We eat dinner in the Main Dining Room (MDR) at the early seating. Generally, MDR food is higher-quality than what I recall from Carnival. Before the cruise, I talked to a few coworkers who had been on Royal before, all of whom had faint praise for the MDR ("Oh, it's better than like a TGI Friday's..."), so my expectations were low, and they were well exceeded throughout the cruise. Service is much faster than I remember on Carnival (though this might be because we have a group of 6 rather than a group of 18 as we did on Carnival). Tonight I have a Caesar salad, prime rib, and some dessert I cannot recall. I order the prime rib rare, as I recall meats being overcooked in Carnival's MDR; I am pleasantly surprised to find that our waiter delivers a perfect-cooked rare piece in front of me.
Our waiters are two Ukranian gentlemen, M and V, who address each of us by name despite us not introducing ourselves (I'm 99% certain this is due to the pictures taken by the 8th grader/boarding agent/NSA operative at embarkation). Both are attentive and extremely proficient at their jobs; like all of Oasis' crew that I meet (with one exception), they go about their jobs with the kind of coldblooded competence that you would expect from a retired hitman going after the mobsters who killed the dog that was a gift from his dead wife.
There is a table next to us with small children that M and V also wait on; out of the corner of my eye I watch M ham it up for the couple's ~5 year old daughter, treating her like she's the Queen of England ("May I bring you more chocolate milk, madame?") which after four or five cartons leads to her mother covering her daughter's mouth and saying, "No more for her, M, I'm not carrying her back to the room because she's chocolate milk wasted".
We are supposed to go see the Aqua 80 show, having reserved seats the week before (make sure you reserve seats for any shows you want to watch in advance; they are very crowded and "sell out" quickly), but V informs us that the show is being moved to later in the week due to an equipment breakdown. Instead, I spend the evening walking around the ship some more with my wife, unpacking, and then checking out the casino (more thoughts to come there).
Next up: Coco Cay, the Arcade, and Poker!
