Desertbelle

Michael's Club was never this dark on Summit.

 

 

 

We are cruising with friends in December, their 1st cruise. We are all booked in Royal Suites, wonder if he can get an engine room tour. He would like that more than a bridge tour.

My husband, who is a waste water chemist, and has worked for 25 years at the Las Vegas Environmental Waste Water Treatment Plant as a chemist, has been trying to get a tour of the waste water treatment plant on a ship for more than 15 years and has been turned down every time. Plus we are Diamond and Elite, which would seem to count for something. Twice the main engineer has met with him to tell him what their procedures are and to answer any questions. One time my husband even made a request, months in advance, with a referral from the governor's office and the mayor's office and he still got a polite decline. My husband finally gave up a few cruises ago. They seem to hold the inter workings of the ship under very serious security.

We were on a cruise once (transpacific to Hawaii fro San Diego, on the Legend of the Seas) where they were actively trying to get people to stay on and do the next cruise back to San Diego...and the prices were rather incredible. We would have loved to but we had 3 nights planned in Honolulu and as it was we were getting home on the 22nd of December....almost any other holiday we would have stayed on the ship.

They usualy offer a great mosturizingt treatment combined with scalp massage in the salon..it was priced ok..not sure if still offered..

Frangipani Conditioning Hair and Scalp Ritual ....my sister loves them!!

Funny thing happened to me....twice.

On two different cruises, while blow drying my hair with my powerful hair dryer the smoke/fire alarm has been triggered. :eek: I guess it's one of the disadvantages of having the vanity next to the closet wall where the detector is.

Both times the phone rang within a few seconds and someone asking me if there is a fire. I tell them no, I think it was that my hair dryer is very hot...they remotely turn off the alarm. Each time a minute or so later there were two security people at the door. They ask if everything is OK and ask to come in and look around. I think they are looking for signs of cigarettes/cigars/pipes/etc. When they see nothing, they apologize for disturbing me and leave.

It makes me feel a lot safer knowing how fast the ship responds to an alarm going off!! And now, I am very careful to aim the hair dryer away from the smoke/heat detector and to have the balcony door open if weather permits. :)

After 20+ cruises I am so over cruise ship "entertainment". We still take a peek if it sounds interesting but we walk out more than half the time. We will be on the Reflection for the transatlantic in April and I can only imagine what they will do for 8 sea days! I'm not worried, plenty of other things to keep me busy. Thanks for your great review!

I always bring my own hair dryer also. I think those little hair dryers provided are next to useless.

I always bring my own hair shampoo and conditioner, never going to risk it! Get some of those little gotoobs and it's easy to tuck in an ounce or two of your products in your toiletry bag.

I was on the Equinox in October and for the first time on Celebrity the refrigerator was actually cold. I kept water and sodas in it, and they were always cold. I was a happy cruiser.

 

Carolyn

Crossing my fingers for the Reflection in April!! :)

We have also asked to have the cooler to be emptied but frankly I can't remember the last cruise we had a refrigerator that was cool enough to actually keep anything cold or from going bad. I think the AC in the room is colder at times than the refrigerator. Have we had bad luck or is this fairly common?

That's my hubs and me!!! We are ASTONISHED at what some of the cabins look like. Fortunately we are both equally addicted to keeping the cabin neat.

Us too! I'm sure our stewards love taking care of us....in and out in a few minutes.

I so agree with you, who cares??? And then I thumped myself on the head for even clicking on another tipping thread. :p

You made me laugh because you plucked the exact words out of my head!!

It's not the size of the card that matters, but how many massages I can get and how many watches I can buy on it that counts.:D

On New Year's Reflection cruise we got off went to a rooftop bar had mufongo, mojitos and sangria as the sunset. Beautiful. Made our way back to ship and brought some snacks up to the sunset bar sat there for an hour or so and then enjoyed on of the most beautiful sail aways in the Caribbean.

Mufongo! Yes, yes, yes, that is what we had and it was delicious!!

I would agree with the others. We cruised out of SanJuan once and flew in late afternoon the day before and we had the best time exploring the town after dark! Stumbled onto a restaurant that was still packed at 9 pm and had the best Caribbean meal ever! Have fun!

You have spent much thought and effort in your voluntary role to organize a Poker Run. Kudos.:)

 

I must admit I had participated in one several years ago and was lucky enough to use that information as my baseline to create my first Poker Run.

 

You might want to give some additional thought to possible (although not probable) 5 cards hands a player may end up with using your plan. This takes you beyond the standard Poker Hands. For example, not just 5 of a kind...but 5 Queens of clubs.

 

The best thing about a Poker Run is that at each bar people have an opportunity to mingle with others they may not have met...it is a very SOCIAL event.

 

Becky

Thanks, it's fun to do.

I have thought of the possible hands, such as 4 Queens of Clubs, that could happen, and that in itself could be fun. :D But, in order to prevent that, we will have players redraw a card if they get a duplicate.

I wanted to share the document I put together for our Pub Crawl/Poker Run, it might help others to run their Crawl. When they draw a card my husband or I will write the card down on the sheet and the card will go back into the stack. We will bring Red and Black Sharpies to help make it easier to read. Hope it helps.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B90MrPJsaBCVSGNQN3JyXzg1cW8/view?usp=sharing

I think relying on the posted "open times" of the various bars can be misleading. It does not account for events potentially being held there, something you would not know before boarding.

 

I coordinated a pub/poker crawl on a recent cruise. I only chose the first location and published the time and place on our roll call. Those participating do not need to know the others ahead of time. This way once I boarded I could scout out the venues and make my decision. As we left the first bar I announced the next stop to the group and we moved on. Same with the rest.

 

Just a thought.

I could see this being a problem for someone joining late because of a conflicting event. They wouldn't know where to find you.

The majority of my participants have requested an early afternoon crawl, we are starting at 1:30 pm and ending at 4-4:30 pm (giving people plenty of time to dress for dinner...or a nap before dinner) and there are only some bars open at that time, so I have chosen 5 that will work for us. The day, times and locations will be announced way before we leave for our cruise, which should make it easier on our folks.

Did one on Reflection last November. Due to the number of participants, (20), we did it late afternoon. Started at pool bar, went to sunset bar, passport bar, martini bar, and finished at the casino bar and pulled poker hands for jackpot winner. The organizer got the hotel manager to make a round of drinks that all came out together at the pool bar to start things off...if you have a big group, I would definitely recommend afternoon due to difficulty getting that many drinks quick enough to keep moving on...Have fun

I was going to ask for some prizes or a round of drinks, good to know they are cooperative. We have around 40 people signed up so far! I thought the Martini bar didn't open until 5 pm? So I didn't include it on our list.

I am planning a poker bar hop for on the Silhouette in April. So I would like to know how yours goes :) Have fun!

Ours is in April also, so I won't be much help to you, sorry. I hope yours goes great!

I spent some time in the iLounge on the Solstice on our recent cruise because I needed to print something out from my laptop....while waiting to find out how to do it I heard a number of people complaining bitterly after they bought iPhones or iPads on board and could not get them properly provisioned on the ship because the internet is so bad. One guy got his started, it disabled his old phone and would not complete his new photo set up. Soooo, if you are thinking about, don't plan on using it until you get home...

This is exactly what I was concerned about. Yep, buying an iPad this week and it will be plenty synced up by my cruise in April!:)

Slighty off topic but, I think, relevant ... a few years ago, a fellow passenger broke my camera (a whole 'nother story, lol) so we bought a new one while on the cruise. The very DAY that we stepped off the ship, the brand new camera stopped working; when we got home, we enquired with the manufacturer about having it fixed/replaced. We found out that we had to pay to ship it back to Celebrity and then Celebrity had to ship it back to the manufacturer for repair/replacement.

 

It ended up taking forever to get the camera back and the whole process was a HUGE pain in the neck. We will never again buy electronics on a cruise. Just a heads up ...

My thought is that your local Apple store would take care of any issues you had with an Apple product. Though I can understand having a problem with a camera could be a big hassle. Good heads up!

They gave me six hours when I bought mine on Constellation in September, but I still waited until I got home to set it up. I did have my old iPad with me though.

 

Phil

6 hours does make more sense, especially with less than stellar internet.

Just curious as to why you'd wait till you were onboard to buy an iPad? I'm a first time cruiser in about a week, and see they have the Apple store, but was wondering why. Less taxes? Cheaper?

 

Thanks for the clarity! (maybe I need to plan on buying one too!) haha

My first thought was it would be something fun to look forward to doing on our long cruise (16 days, 8 at sea) and the no sales tax was a bonus....our state is nearly 9%.

I have heard the prices are the same as all the other Apple stores, so an 8.75% discount sounded pretty good....$100 would pay for a couple of Specialty restaurants! :)

I hadn't really thought about things like them being out of stock or what to do with the packaging. I'm glad I asked.

I have another thought...

If you have your old iPad with you, then maybe the following would work. a. Sign on to one of the iMacs in the iLounge. b. Plug in your old iPad. c. Link it to the iMac, do a full encrypted backup. d. Plug in your new iPad. e. Chose the option of setting up the new iPad via a Restore from your backup.

 

All of the above is the way to go on your home computer. What I am not sure about is whether you can do this on a computer where you just have visitor privileges. Apple does have built-in roadblocks designed to keep people from sharing purchased music etc. and you could well run into such roadblocks.

 

Of course the above would work if you have your laptop with you as well...

 

Apart from the potential problems with synching your content, there are a few disadvantages to buying onboard. You may not get the exact model you wanted due to inventory limitations, you would be stuck with the packaging to throw away or carry home, and you would miss out on the free engraving that you can get when you order online direct from Apple.

LOL, now it's sounding way too complicated for my 64 year old brain. :DThanks for the possible work around though.

When you buy the iPad they will give you an hour free internet access. Which will probably not be enough time for the synch to happen. Explain, they may give you additional time. But they will have no way around the physical limitations of the onboard connection to the satellite connection to the web. If it were me, I would avoid synching photos and music, leave those for when you have a solid shore-based connection.

Thank you so much for the quick reply. It's good to know that they at least try to get your new product synced up.

I am thinking that I will buy the new iPad now and not bother with it on the cruise. With 8 sea days I thought it would be a little bit of a thing to do but I would be sad if I couldn't get all my apps and information synced up because of slow and spotty internet connection.