mahdnc

Thanks. I like making the name tags and I know from the very beginning that less than half will show. The people that do receive them seem to like them so that’s good enough for me. My blackjack luck cannot be worse next time.

I presume your problem is from using the room supplied USB outlets? We have mainly have been using our AC charging adapters which means we have been plugging in directly to the electrical socket (both the USA socket and the Euro socket with an adapter). We have not had a problem with that. My wife has been using the USB outlet at the desk wall to charge her watch. The power draw on that is pretty low; we have not had any problems with that either.

Sorry, that it took me a minute to understand that. My reading skills seem to deteriorate when I am at sea and that's why my wife is in charge of reading the "Be back onboard by...." sign at the gangway. The spaghetti bolognese does not appear to be on the everyday menu. I cannot comment about the children's menu. Back in the day, our son used to order it for room service every late night.

Tomorrow begins the intense phase of the itinerary--3 ports + Panama Canal during the next 5 days.

We had a total of 139 people in our roll call which included partners and friends. Here are some demographic information (note the data is raw and unweighted).

Thank you very much.

Tonight was our first Evening Chic Night. The food was very good. I had the Chilled Pear and Honey Soup, Baby Spinach and Treviso Salad (photo), and the Shrimp Scampi (photo). The dessert course took a long time and consequently we decided to skip the show. When we got back to the room, our cabin steward hadn't turned the room down yet. We could have gone to the casino to give him some time to get the room made up, but that could be expensive so we just told him to skip it tonight. No big deal. I always drag my suit/ties with me for EC nights including our last cruise to Asia this past Dec. This time was no different. I will say that I saw very few suits tonight--probably the fewest I have seen.

I could not really comment on your post until now because I am on the ship. I think the use of the words "rust bucket" aren't consistent with the electrical outages that you suffered--I would not be happy about extended or multiple outages of power either however. I have been on Summit for 3 days now with another 12 days to go. I have seen about 2/3 of the ship by now and I am very impressed with her physical condition so far. I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that Summit underwent her extensive Revolution makeover which took a month to perform back in 2019. So she doesn't look like a 25 year old ship at all but rather a 5 year old ship because of her makeover. Now I have seen some rust out on our balcony: But that is a closeup view (1 foot way). here is the same rust from 10 feet: My wife and I are quite satisfied with our balcony. I have seen only two other issues: 1. minor water leak in the utility corridor that connects our cabin to the hallway. We pointed it out to our room steward and maintenance came out to fix it immediately. 2. One of the mirrored panels in the hallway ceiling had a crack in it with duct tape over it. These mirrored panels are clearly part of the original ship. The ship's passenger elevator interiors--which are one of the first things on a ship to take a beating (and sometimes vandalism)--are in immaculate shape.

The other two blackjack tournaments will be held on Fri Apr 26 (At Sea Day 3 of 8 ) and Thu May 2 (At Sea Day 7 of 8). Including today, all 3 blackjack tournaments are being held on all three Evening Chic days. at 3 pm.

Are you talking about the Spaghetti Bolognese?

Our fifth round table took the option of having the cards reshuffled after watching Round 4 go down in flames. It didn’t matter. By the time we got to the next to last hand, four of us were already out including me. And the remaining two didn’t have enough to place among the current top six scores (6th score was $2400).

I’ll be playing in Round 5. So there are at least five rounds of players. Six players per round. Six hands played. Players start with $500 in play money chips. The dealer only busted once in the first round and so the high score was only $1100. Second round did much better (photos). The high score was $4300.

It's time to run off to the first of 3 blackjack tournaments that the ship's casino is holding on this sailing.....

Some comments about our roll call sail away. We scheduled it for 3:30 pm at the Sunset Bar (Deck 10, aft) in preparation for our schedule 4:00 pm departure. The Sunset Bar is a very popular place to watch the sail away--whether you are part of a roll call or not. Consequently is was difficult to set up any sitting/table space for the group also because many people were eating their lunch out there. So I spent most of the sail away inside the Ocean View Cafe just by the sliding doors to the rear deck. One of my hobbies has been to make name tags for our roll call. It was more useful when Celebrity sponsored the official Cruise Critic Connections gatherings. The name tags that Celebrity had for those that registered for the connections party were small pieces of paper with a safety pin or something like that. People would write only their first names on it and I found it difficult to figure out who was who because I knew them more from their screen name. So that is why I began making custom name tags and setting up table space inside the Ocean View Cafe to lay out the name tags is much easier than doing it outdoors with a breeze and strong sunlight. It is nice to be able to meet the actual people behind the Cruise Critic screen names we have been posting with over the many months. However the amount time you have to meet so many people is not sufficient. For me, I had to duck out of the sail away for a short period of time because my contact lens was acting up in my left eye and it looked like I was crying each time someone came up to introduce themself. Judging from the number of name tags not taken, we had a 44% turnout of our roll call for the sail away which is about average.

A good place to watch the canal crossing from if we don't feel like leaving our cabin. But we will be roaming around the ship during the actual crossing, but it's good to know that we will always have this rail space available to us.

The weather during the past two sea days has been terrific. Smooth seas and blue skies!

Celebrity Today Day 3 At Sea 2 of 8 Celebrity Today Day 2 At Sea 1 of 8 Celebrity Today Day 1 Miami

Lunch today at the MDR: I took the chef’s recommendations.

The good news is that we gained an extra hour of sleep last night! The bad news is that we still woke up too late to make it for breakfast (closes at 10:30 am)!! We decided to have lunch at the MDR which doesn’t open until noon. So we sat down near the art auction. As everyone knows, the Park West art auctions are alive and well. And well attended today (unless these passengers were waiting for lunch to begin, too). During our Chef’s Table dinner two nights ago, one of the couples were big Park West fans and buyers. They told us that they have been comp’ed by Park West with free cruises. I didn’t realize that was a thing.

Here are some photos of the heavy cook book (Daniel, My French Cuisine, Nov 2013) which had a list price of $60 printed on the dustcover:

The next morning (Day 2, yesterday) a crew member hand delivered to our stateroom a signed copy of the menu, a group photo of the dinner guests, and a single copy of the Daniel Boulud cook book. I have a feeling that if I wanted to get a second copy of the book since two of us paid for the dinner, I could have but it would require some work that I wasn’t willing to do.

Good morning from the Atlantic! What was the date of your equator crossing?

The fifth and final course was dessert, Java:

Fourth course was the Duo of Beef Filet (left) and Short Rib (right). There was some type of potato or vegetable in between the two meats. None of us liked it.

Third course was the Seabass with Za'atar.