badvector

We purchased a USB charging station since that's what we use the most. Only uses one plug up but gives us multiple charging slots. We purchased one similar to this: USB Charging Station

Thanks! We really like the smaller ships in and out of Tampa. Freedom is probably our favorite class and we really liked Odyssey as well. It is pretty cool when you pass under the bridge. We like the aft balconies on that class.

For us, we could always hear when it was really windy out. We're in a ocean view right now and are sleeping great. We also normally have a balcony but were happy to give it up for the free cruise.

Well, I'll close out here from the Imperial lounge listening to karaoke with the house band. Giovanni's was awesome. Probably one of the best meals we've had in a while. The filet was prepared perfectly and melted in your mouth. The coffee machine in the Crown Lounge was still down whe we checked after dinner. Hope they can get it back up for next week. We had a wonderful week and really enjoyed our first time on the Adventure. We still prefer Freedom over Adventure but wouldn't think twice about booking her again. Looking forward to the next week with our group on here and In fact, we'll be on again in December for the NYE cruise with our immediate family. Thanks to everyone for checking in and following along. I enjoyed doing my first live on board.

It is still Capt. Jaret. Not sure of the spelling but it is correct.

Day 6 at sea – Good morning from somewhere in the Caribbean. It’s a mighty windy day out there this morning and there’s a bit of a chill in the air. Well, we managed to make it this far into the cruise before tragedy finally struck. The coffee machine in the Crown Lounge has given up and is refusing to provide its caffeine imbibed sustenance to us weary travelers. Here’s to hoping that it can be repaired prior to everyone getting on tomorrow. I had heard a nasty rumor that the machine in the Suite Lounge was also out earlier in the week but I could not confirm it. Today we plan to catch the Love and Marriage game show that is slated for 2:00. This is always one of our favorite shows as it never seems to disappoint when it comes to laughter. They completely emptied one of the pools yesterday but it is all good and refilled this morning. Dinner last night was probably the most disappointing of the trip so far. My wife wanted to try the sole but what she received was not flaky fish at all but more of a gelatinous mush. I had the mushroom risotto, one of my normal favorites, and it was a little mushy as well. Tonight we’re at Giovanni’s and I’m looking forward to the filet that I’ve heard so much about.

Day 5 Labadee – Good afternoon from Labadee. It’s currently 84 degrees and mostly sunny. It was an absolutely B-E-A-Utiful day out there today. We hopped off around 8:45 this morning to get some exploring in before it got too hot out there. We spent about 2 ½ hours walking around the island before heading back to the ship for lunch. It really didn’t get too busy out there until around 10:45 and you could have had your choice of sitting anywhere if you were out before then. The dragon wasn’t breathing too much this morning at all but the little crabs were out and moving and they’re so fun to watch. I don’t think much has changed since the last time we were here and we seem to enjoy the laid-back atmosphere here versus the business of Coco Cay. The gym was pretty slow this morning and it seems to have gotten slower every day that has passed. Not sure if it gets busy later or if folks have just kicked into vacation mode. I took the opportunity to grab some quick pics there this morning to share though. Tonight’s menu is Italian and the headliner show is Can't Stop the Rock with the singers and dancers.

Day 4 Puerto Plata update - Forgot to post earlier. We asked at the Crown Lounge and there are 626 kids on the ship. We haven't seen any issues with elevator button pushers or kids in general. In fact, you would hardly realize there are that many kids on the ship. I really enjoyed dinner tonight. I had the jumbo coconut shrimp with the Caribbean roasted chicken and the wife had Pork Bao tacos and jerk porkchop. I'm not a big fan of chicken but I'm trying to add it to my diet and I'm glad I tried it tonight. The chicken was full of flavor and cooked perfectly. Not dry at all and I can see it becoming my go to on Caribbean night. My wife said the tacos were really good again(they were not so good back in September on Serenade) and the pork chop was excellent. My only complaint is how their definition of Jumbo and mine are so different. The shrimp were barely normal let alone jumbo. If the coconut shrimp are your thing, plan a double 😋

They do have lockers for a fee. I don't know how much as we didn't need one.

Honestly, I don't know. I would never assume it's the same on every ship though. I've read way too many times that each ship has their own policy on different things. Best to just ask up front.

We asked and the employee double checked with their manager. No gluten free cookies st the cafe. I do know that I've seen a gluten free dessert in the jammer every day so far. It hasn't been cookies however.

Day 4 Puerto Plata – Good afternoon from Puerto Plata, Dominican Republic where it is currently 82 degrees and mostly sunny. We didn’t have any specific plans for the day and since we have an excursion planned for next week, we thought we would just take a walk and get the lay of the land. We’ve never ported here before so we really didn’t know what to expect in regards to the area. Inside of the port, I am reminded of the port in Costa Maya. The port contains the normal mix of cheap souvenir stores (that aren’t really cheap), specialty stores (chocolate, coffee, etc.) and name brands (Del Sol, Hardrock). There are bars located throughout the port and the locally brewed beer is Presidente for the folks that like to try the local stuff. Based on the prices I saw at one of the small bars, you can drink cheaper on the ship than at the port. The port does have a really cool lazy river set up that is completely free to use. It meanders throughout the complex and is a great way to spend some time if that’s your thing. We did pick up some hot chocolate latte mix and honey for our kids because we like to bring them back something local. After exploring the port for a bit, we made our way to the exit to explore the local area. If you are not a fan of being pressured and can’t say no, this is not the place for you. At one point I actually had to tell a guy to quit following us and just leave us alone, we did not need a tour guide. I understand that this is the livelihood for these folks but there is a point when they really should take no for an answer. We’ve walked through several of the port cities and this is one that I honestly wasn’t comfortable. Might have just been us, but it left a bad taste in our mouth from the start and I wasn’t really willing to give it much more of a chance after that. When walking towards the city center, definitely use caution as traffic is a complete crap show and I’m pretty sure there are no rules. We walked to Umbrella Street and back and in our opinion didn’t see or find anything worth our walk and really didn’t feel like walking much farther. We’re looking forward to our excursion next week and seeing more of the countryside than just outside of the port. Tonight’s theme for dinner is Caribbean and the headliner show is Paul Boland.

That's awesome. Congratulations on their graduation! Our daughter just graduated in December. We'll be back on Adventure with our 20 something kids for the New Years eve cruise. It will be the first time in 10 years that we cruise together again.

Day 3 At Sea continued– Grabbed a little lunch after the spa and realized a couple of things I forgot to post earlier. If you’re not familiar with the Adventure, it has one of the handwashing stations at each side of the entrance. It’s a one-way street to enter (at least they have been maintaining that so far) and that is part of the reason for the back-ups. The other thing I realized today is that there is no pizza in the windjammer. The only place you can grab a slice on the ship is at the café’ on Deck 5. There also is really cream in the cream container I posted the pic of earlier. Just had to throw that in after some of the previous discussions I’ve seen on here. The couple’s thermal spa suite was definitely worth the $45 in our opinion. I still think the gratuity charge is complete crap but we enjoyed our time in there and felt completely refreshed and relaxed afterwards. Dress to impress night is tonight and this evening’s entertainment is the singers and dancers doing “Invitation to Dance”. We’ve got no set plans for Puerto Plata tomorrow. I think we’re just going to walk around and explore a bit. Might take the cable car up and back. Also threw in a pic of the chef's amenity for those wondering. It's a couple of rum balls, peanut butter-chocolate crispy bar, chocolate covered strawberry and cake.

Here's the pics. Hope it helps.

Numbers for the cruise from the top tier: Pins-53 D+-248 D-246 Em-110 Plat-195 G-709 Top 3 in points: 1784, 1681, 1562

Ours holds 2 in 1856. The gentleman next to us leaves his in the hallway. If it fits through the door, I believe there would be space if the room is similar to ours. I'll try to remember and take a pic for you.

Day 3 At Sea – Good morning from Adventure of the Seas. We are almost halfway between Nassau and Puerto Plata currently heading southeast at 16.5 knots. Congratulations to the Chiefs on their B2B superbowl wins. I didn’t have a dog in the fight but it was still a great match up. The gym wasn’t as busy this morning since it is a sea day. Had no wait to use any of the equipment. Walking over for breakfast we noticed that there was still a lot of availability for seating around both the pool and in the solarium. The pics attached are from around 7:45 am. Taking a more in depth look around the ship one will notice what I would consider the normal rust spots outside and banisters that need refinished. There’s also some stained furniture and carpet spots but honestly, given how much activity goes on, I feel like the ship is in good overall condition. We have definitely seen worse. When we took Serenade from Tampa to Boston back in September she was in pretty rough shape and definitely needed some work. We did dinner last night in the MDR and opted for the pulled pork enchilada. The pork itself was a little dry but the flavor was delicious. The waiter warned that it might be a little spicy because of the sauce and he was spot on. It was a good amount of spice in my opinion but if you don’t like spicy food, you will definitely want to try something different. I wasn’t a fan of the rice on the dish especially on its own. Mixed with the enchilada and sauce it was just okay in my opinion so I pretty much skipped the rice. Superbowl was available for viewing pretty much anywhere on the ship including the staterooms. ESPN carried a simulcast so you got the game but not the million-dollar commercials. I’m sipping one of the fu-fu lattes from the wonderful coffee machine in the Crown lounge waiting to head down to the spa in about 15 minutes. The lounge is nice but not real big. I can see it filling up in no time for happy hour and even for breakfast snacks and coffee on a sea day. If anybody wondered you can get the machine on-line for around $8k. It’s a Melita Kafina XT4. We plan to try and get down to the top tier event later today to get the numbers for this sailing.

I feel like the ship is in really good condition overall. It has the normal wear and tear but it's definitely not the worst I've seen. Having said that, there are some large windows around the ship that could be replaced and many more that could just use a good cleaning. I'll try to grab some pics around the ship today since we're at sea.

Day 2 Nassau – Good afternoon from the Crown Lounge where I’m having my second latte of the day. This reminded me that I forgot to post earlier that there are no restrictions for the Crown Lounge this sailing. All diamond and above are welcome. It’s a beautiful day outside with clear blue skies, a temperature of 79 degrees and a light sea breeze. We’re parked amongst family in the bustling little island of Nassau. One new realization with our stateroom is that you can hear the winds battering against the windows through the night. (Well at least I could). I also can’t say I experienced the rock you to sleep motion as much as a shake you to wake you up motion. Again, it may just be me but I may have changed my mind about booking this room in the future. We’ll see how it goes the rest of the cruise. I really like the view and location but I’m not sold on how well I’ll sleep. The gym was pretty busy at the weight machines this morning. One of the two multi-use machines was broken which caused a little wait for the machines but it didn’t take too long. Lots of room available on the treadmills, ellipticals, bikes, rowers and climbers at 7am. We grabbed breakfast at the windjammer around 8:30 and the line to get in wasn’t too bad. Having said that, It’s been a long time since we’ve had to wait in line to get into it. I’m not sure if it’s because of the layout or if it’s just that busy or a combination of the two. I like the layout in the Radiance class better but maybe it’s because that’s what we’re so accustomed to. I ordered an omelet this morning and was given a pager to alert me when it was ready. This is the first time we’ve seen this and I really think it’s a great idea. No more wandering around checking on the status of my order. Lots of room available around the pool as it looks like a good percentage of the passengers disembarked to visit the island today. Based on the response of the crowd at the show last night it sounded like there are a lot of first-time cruisers on board so it’s not surprising. The solarium was completely full by noon though. Well, we may have run into our first disappointing glitch of the cruise. I noticed on my statement that we are being charged $64 for our $45 spa special. I fully expected it to be $54 when the gratuity was added but I am being told that the gratuity is based on the non-discounted price. I am trying to figure out how you can be charged a gratuity on a price that you aren’t paying. This was not explained this way and I’ll have to take it up with guest services as if we cancel now, we have to still pay 50% of the cost. Just a heads up so others can be aware of the practice. It may be the norm but as I said, it wasn’t explained this way and we’ve not really used the spa before. Tonight’s show is the skating show at Studio B but we’ll probably opt for the Superbowl. MDR menu for tonight is a taste of Mexico so not sure if we’ll do it or hit the jammer for Tex-Mex night.

It was a single order. Whoever cut it kind of butchered it so it was more like one and a half. It really was good.

Good morning from the Adventure of the Seas as we currently sit at port in Nassau on a 6-night cruise vacation. I debated whether to do a live from thread as writing is definitely not one of my hidden talents but figured I would force myself to expand my horizons as they say. We are currently on leg one of a B2B trip that has to be one of the best deals we’ve gotten since we first cruised with Royal in 1997 on Sovereign of the Seas; a cruise we won on a scratch off lottery ticket. Sadly, we didn’t get back to cruising until around 2007 when we decided it was cheaper to take our family of four on a cruise than go to Disney another time. We are cruising by ourselves this leg so I figured I would have the time to put words to paper or in this case to a screen. We are being joined by family for the second leg so I’ll sign off after the current one. Leg one of our trip we are in a casino comp ocean view room on the 12th floor and leg two we are in an ocean view room on the second floor. We were originally in an aft balcony for the second leg but since Royal oversold their balconies, we were one of a group of folks that gave up our balconies for an ocean view and a refund of our cruise fare. Not a bad deal at all in my humble opinion. For a brief history on us, we are in our mid-late 50’s (Okay, I’m late and my wonderful wife is just this year entering the mid) and retired. We have around 20 cruises under our belt with Royal and have done pretty much all of the different ship classes at this point (other than Icon). This is our first on the Adventure and Voyager class in general. Most of our cruises have been on the Radiance class of ships as we often sail in/out of Tampa. We are definitely not the most experienced cruisers by far but we have spent many nights at sea. Let’s get to this. Day 1 and embarkation – We had a 10:30 arrival time at the pier and received several reminders that we needed to stick to our assigned time. We got to the port around 9:55 and unloaded our bags and proceeded to parking. Yes, parking at the port is stupid expensive, but when we do get back we need to be able to head directly to our car and start our trip back north ASAP as we also have a couple of stops on the way home to Michigan. Upon entering the port and going through security they had three seating areas set up for the key, the 10:30 slot and the 11:00 slot. The suite guests and Pins also had their own area. Not sure what they were doing with anyone that had a different arrival slot and they really weren’t checking anything. They just asked what time slot you had and assigned you to the corresponding section. They opened up boarding shortly after 10:30 and started with the Suites/Pins and then went in order of times after the “key” folks. Boarding was quick and we didn’t experience any issues at all. The staff was directing everyone to their muster stations once on board and folks actually seemed to be following directions. I think we only heard one announcement that a few folks needed to finish their safety briefing. We grabbed some lunch in the windjammer and decided to schedule dinner at Giovani’s for the first time using one of our BOGO coupons. They didn’t require us to use it for any specific night and allowed us to schedule dinner for night six. I have seen different reports indicating that some had to use these only on nights one or two but we were pleased we could use it later. Not sure if it’s an indication that the specialty dining isn’t a big seller this sailing or if it’s just the ship policy. Lunch was the standard fare in the jammer and it was a combination of pretty good to meh, I’ll pass on this item the next time. I get that the food is extremely subjective and opinions vary far and wide. All I can say is the food really wasn’t any different than our last cruise in September. It was standard buffet fare and the quality/taste was the same that what we’ve experienced the last few sailings. After lunch we did a tour of the spa since this is our first time on this class. I feel that the exercise room is smaller than what I’m used to seeing on the Radiance class and surprisingly, no thermal suite. They do have a couples room that has salt scrub and seaweed skin cream with a steam room that you could book for $45 (plus 20% gratuity) for an hour per couple. Being the adventurous types, we decided to give it a rip and scheduled it for our first sea day (day 3). Honestly though, this is something we’ve never done but figured we’d try it since we really haven’t spent anything for this vacation other than port fees/taxes and eventually gratuities. I am surprised though that the whole spa and gym area does seem considerably smaller for a larger ship than what we usually sail on. Maybe it’s just me. Had dinner in the MDR this evening and I went with the prime rib while the Mrs. went with the fried chicken. The prime rib was very good. It was tender and very flavorful. The chicken on the other hand was a won’t get it again item. The chicken was more the size of a Cornish hen, dry and the coating was really not that crispy. They serve the honey/tabasco sauce on the side so that’s not an excuse for the not so crispy chicken. The waiter did warn though that folks had complained that the chicken was dry so we had fair warning. As with recent past experiences for us, service was excellent and we were also visited by the head waiter and given his card. The card is something we haven’t seen before so not sure when they started it. Maybe it’s because of the recent complaints regarding food and or service but again, our service was great. Dinner service was quick and efficient for the first night and we did have early seating for dinner so I’m not sure how MTD went for decks 4 and 5. There wasn’t a giant line waiting outside of deck 3 when we left so I’ll assume it was going okay. After dinner we walked around for a bit and made our way to the theatre for the opening show. The orchestra started things out with a couple of numbers and then were joined by the singers and dancers for a quick number. I’m always amazed at the talent in the orchestra. I don’t think we’ve ever seen a bad performance from them. The main entertainment for the night was comedian Bruce Gold and he had a good show. It was family friendly and he was quite entertaining. Great participation with the audience and we’re looking forward to seeing him again. After the show we did a brief run through the casino which was packed to the brim. Only played for about 15 minutes and left because it was just too tightly packed and smoky for us. You could barely move through the machines and many times you would have to turn back around and leave the way you came in because the rows were just too tight. We finished the evening watching karaoke in the Imperial lounge. Some general observations from the day. Saw a family walking around with a 35-bottle case of water so it appears no policing of that policy. We also walked on with four bottles of wine and nobody questioned us about it at all. I’m sure they didn’t know we were doing a B2B so no policing of that either. Now I’m not recommending anything, just sharing our experience. The ship is almost full and you can definitely tell. This is the first time since the restart where we have encountered crowds this big. I imagine next week will be even crazier. You can also tell Royal has constantly been running the kids sail free promo. For the most part, we haven’t seen too many kids on the rampage and running solo through the ship but it is day one.

lol. Read it and it never registered with me. You pretty much nailed that one.

Just wondering if anyone else finds humor in the OP starting a thread complaining about complainers.

We sailed her in March and she was still looking pretty good. Our head waiter said she was going to dry dock prior to her European sailings for general maintenance and upkeep. Not sure how much they did, but he said they were replacing all the dining room carpeting. We're leaving for Rome today to bring her back over on Nov 5th. Looking forward to see if we notice any changes.