Silver Spectre

Currently on the Spirit. Last night's formal attire was followed by the vast majority of guests, except for one male person who had the temerity to appear in the Dolce Vita in a short sleeved shirt.

Last I heard he was still with SS and living in London. Just checked with my oracle who has heard nothing, and they would know.

Atlantide lunch with seafood medley and a veggie leek tart

@ARDXXXsorry to hear that. So far have eaten dinner twice in Indochine, food good and to our liking, service ok, apart the coffee issue, and once on the grill where the service was patchy and looked understaffed. Lunch on the grill was poor, both fish and Camembert overcooked and returned. Better when replaced. The Arts Cafe is good, the bars also good and most wines that I like are onboard. Will be going to Silver Note tonight and will report further observations.

This morning, at 9:45, we had the express cappuccino delivery in La Terrazza, taking less than 60 seconds. Somewhat of a turn around from 2 days ago when 25 minutes and three requests failed to produce one. Perhaps it’s because almost all the guests are off the ship on safari.

My understanding is that the marine insurance situation changed as soon as the Houthis started attacking shipping. This dictated the ability of lines to travel through the Red Sea and thus re-routing of SS’s ships would have been decided weeks ago. All that has happened since is just poor corporate communication and cheese paring of compensation.

Valentines Day and we have just arrived in PE.

Joined in Cape Town on Sunday with gorgeous weather. Unfortunately the ship has a seriously weird vibe onboard. Many Grand Voyagers are not happy about being turfed off in Mahe, with the announcement letter only arriving a couple of days ago. There are also a significant number of very unhappy crew and service levels are pretty awful at times.

There appear to be a number of unhappy guests on this ship and a significant number of very unhappy crew. Service in some areas is to be frank, pretty awful. The way this has been handled by SS is very poor.

Glad to hear that the dress code is being adhered to.

Information posted on the ‘other place’ has SS indicating that a decision will be made about 30 days before the sailing date.

Good luck this evening

How’s your trip progressing @crusinbanjo

My butler tried but was poor. Tbh, I didn’t need much out of him.

For our last day at sea we had the nicest day of the cruise, blue skies, sunny and almost warm. We topped out with nice meal at La Dame, a special order of hot foie gras (and don’t ask, we were having dinner with someone who could swing it), the lobster salad and a real great Fillet de Boef. Some blue cheese to finish for me and a soufflé for one of the others. We washed it down with a Meursault, a special SA red from Stellenbosch and finished with some top end Burgandy. We went to bed happy. Dawn arrived in Copenhagen with the crap weather back, cold and raining. Our flight was on time and we were back in England by mid afternoon. All in all an excellent cruise.

Our final sea day on the way back to Copenhagen and to complete the full set we had rain yesterday in Bergen, luckily not all day. The cruise has been fun and Norway it’s usual spectacular self, with one big exception. No Northern Lights. Whilst the display this year has been outstanding in many places we didn’t even see a hint. Yesterday evening 243 out of the 325 Venetians were bussed to the Grieg concert hall and treated to a lovely reception with champagne and some delicious canapés, followed by 1.5 hours of various Grieg stuff. I’m pretty sure that most enjoyed it, but it’s not my cup of tea.

Hope you have better weather than us, rain, clouds, more rain and no NL’s

I hope you have better luck than us. The Wifi is actually ok, 1.5mbs for standard. If you need stream buy the premium which will run most things ok.

No problem, and I did check and Stumbles is correct.

No, this was done direct to the server using the ships Wifi, I am aware that there are VPN issues with StarLink. I will see if I can get an exact answer for you.

Deck 8 shoe sale

Oh I forgot, grumble 2. The Pressreader app is no longer supported, apparently it’s been RCL’d away. You can use a link to the Pressreader site to read for example the Daily Mail. What you can’t do is use the slow Wifi to download a newspaper from the local server when busy doing something else and read it later. You have to online and even Premium doesn’t seem to gell well with the website, it’s difficult to resize pages, they get stuck and have to be reloaded. Not surprisingly the ship isn’t advertising that Pressreader is accessible any more.

We have spent the night heading sort of south west with moderate seas and of overcast skies. Our chances of seeing the NLs are diminishing by the day. I had forgotten just how much these new ships creak in rough water. A grumble, with the removal of the clock unit there is no way to play your own music through anything in the room. There is a USB on the back of the TV but I cannot see any way to access the settings, so no idea if plugging my iPod in would work, and no I not asking the butler since he has enough trouble with simple requests.

I have an updated list now which will be winging it’s way to you soon. It will not be posted on here in the near future, just because!

I'm still working on the wine list stumbles