Raenstoirm

Google cannot seem to help me. Where can i find a kids compass (adventure ocean) for a 5 night on Indy out of Ft Lauderdale? I found one for 2014 which wont work. 

I am thinking of booking a tour post cruise to see the Flamingo Gardens in Ft Lauderdale. The blurb says book flights after 4. Our flight is 3:38. Is that too tight? How much cushion do they build? We have clear and precheck so security *should* be quicker than your average guest. We are leaving from Miami and the tour drops us off at the airport. 

I will be traveling with my husband and my newly 5 year old twins on Indy out of FT Lauderdale. My son loves "crocagators" so I booked us one of the airboat tours through RCCL on departure day with airport drop off. The writeup says not to book a flight before 2:30. The next flight isn't till 6:47. Honestly I figure they will have us a the airport by 1:30 or so and that will be a lot of time to kill with 2 overstimulated overtired kids. My other option would be to fly in a day early and do the tour on my own (which flight wise is actually cheaper), so that makes the flight home at 1:45. I haven't cruised since the twins were born so I dont recall the day of departure details. What time do you have to be out of your room in the morning? Will the let us hang in our room till 8 or 9 and then go get some breakfast and then leave the boat 10ish? I figure a slow morning vs a "hurry up and wait" morning will cause less crankiness for all of us. 

Can i put it in the checked bags or do I have to physically carry it until the room is ready? The website implies the latter and Im hoping the former since I also have to wrangle two preschoolers. lol

I tried the search and it doesnt like me! lol. I have never brought food or drinks on board, but I am bringing my 4 year old twins on their first cruise. They are going to need their familiar snacks and drinks (goldfish, juice boxes, pouches... standard kid fare). I wasn't planning on bringing more than a backpack onboard, but the rccl website says it must be in carryon. How does this work?

My twins will be 4.5 when we sail. We are looking at disney, but as we all know, royal is half the price so we have to consider it. My husband and I are platinum on royal so we have know the ins and outs for adults pretty well, but kids are a whole new thing. Is there enough to keep 4.5 year olds happy in the kids club on royal ship? Or do we stick with disney till they are a bit older? Im assuming the newer ships have more by way of little kids stuff. Which ships should i be looking into? We are thinking late August of this year right before they enter 5 day a week pre-k.

The website says

Dedicated nursery

At our colorful Royal Babies & TotsSM Nursery, littlest guests (ages 6-36 months) are cared for by trained professionals while enjoying specially designed programs. Daytime and evening drop-off is offered; hourly fee of $6 in the daytime and $8 during the evening applies. Available on select ships.

But I can't find anything that says what ships. Might have to stick with Disney even though they are twice the price just because they actually give you information.

Debating cruising royal or disney with our two year old twins. I can't seem to find the list of ships with the nursery. Google is no use for some reason. Is there a list somewhere?

I am totally clueless. We are thinking of taking an impromptu cruise on Enchantment next month (4 day). Our twins will be 14 months at the time. How does the nursery work? Do you get to book so many hours or can you use it as much as you want? Is it drop off as needed or book ahead? What is the price per kid? Is there is discount for two? Can you leave kids on the ship at port (Cococay)? How do they contact you if there is an issue with one of the babies?

Are pack n plays/cribs included in the room fare or do you have to pay extra? What about toys? Do they still have the toy rental thing? (I think I saw something about a toy library a few years ago on freedom before the ships had the nurseries, but I didn't have kids so I didn't look into it).

I know they can't use the pools. Do the dinner meals have toddler friendly foods?

There doesn't seem to be any way to put in that I will be cruising with two infants less than a year old (twins). Their system is charging my over $1000 a baby. I totally understand they need a life jacket and take up a spot on a lifeboat (they would sit on a lap in an emergency, but I get the legal every soul counts thing) but they literally use no other amenity. They don't eat yet and can't use the pools since they aren't potty trained and are too young for the kids clubs. If I put them in the day-care that is a separate charge. Even Disney with their outrageous pricing, charges a very small amount per baby (the most I saw was $500). Are my just missing something or do they really charge that much? We thought it would be a nice getaway to take a last minute cruise from a local port, but because of the way they charge babies, Disney ends up being cheaper! And we have to fly to get to their ports! :rolleyes:

We sailed under a group deal a few years back and booked on open booking onboard. We had to use the TA for that particular trip so the next cruise cert was booked under that TA. We are not TA people so I would like to use the cert to book directly with royal. If I call, can they remove her name from it?

Dh and I are very experienced cruisers. I am currently planning our first cruise with our twins. They will be about 1 year old at cruise time. They have already been to WDW at 3 months and are going again at 10 months so they will have air travel under their belts by cruise time. We want to do Caribbean/Bahamas. At least 4 nights up to 7 or 8. The question is where? We have been to almost every island but as adult only travelers so I never really noticed how kid friendly each island was. What islands have the most options for the tiny munchkin set? (We tend to do a mix of cruise sponsored and self pay excursions)

I was under the impression that the MDR menu was set by corporate. I had download the generic MDR menus before our trip this month on Freedom and the actual selections matched the menus I had downloaded.

As for Grandeur, we brought her "home" to Baltimore last spring on her repositioning cruise from South America. She is tiny with very few bells and whistles, but the excellent staff more than makes up for that. We don't love her itinerary, so I don't see us sailing on her anytime soon, but if she adds new ports, we would jump on the chance to sail her again. :)

Wow, that is a pretty significant difference!

The price seems right on par with what Ive seen. We are huge Disney fans, but until this year I could never justify the price. Our first cruise was originally booked with Disney, but then I looked at Royal and it was LITERALLY half the price, so we went with Royal and have been loyal to them since. That said, we did honeymoon in WDW. I may go with royal for the cruise and then spend a few days in WDW for the price of just the DCL cruise. We just did that last week. 7 days on freedom and 36 hours in WDW.

I had an unnatural obsession with the cranberry white chocolate chip 2 weeks ago. I must have eaten 50 of them over the course of the week! :eek:

 

As far as everything else, we loved the ship. First time on this class ship and we fell in love. We did the eastern route and had some bad weather at the start, but the crew was amazing. I havent seen a crew so happy to be working 6 months straight without a day off like them. They made the trip for us.

 

One suggestion is to avoid Portofino on your sailing. It has gone downhill. We always eat at chps and portofinos each trip. Loved chops as usual, but was greatly disappointed in Portofino. Service was bad and the food was not adequate.

Thats kinda funny. We thought this was the worst staff we have encountered on Royal. It wasn't that they were bad, far from that, they were great, but we noticed a lack of "spark" in general. I don't have a word for it. We thought it was a ship size thing since we have only been on smaller ships and the entire staff and crew had been very engaging on those smaller ships. We came away broke on past cruises since we had given so many people cash tips on the last day. This trip we only gave cash to 2 crew. I have nothing negative to say about the crew this trip, but we didn't come home saying how much we loved Ricky or Melissa or Lynn (who are all crew from past trips that we still talk about). There was no one that stood out to us while we were on the ship, let alone weeks or years later. :(

There are no pool activities at night.

Besides a few scattered people the lido deck is dead.

Wow, two weeks ago there was stuff going on on the pool deck almost every night. Every night there was a movie and then there was the Dancing Under the Stars, the White Party and Twenty 20. That said, we were also on the 10th deck and we never heard noise from above except the one night they were draining the pool. That was very loud.

Hi, we have booked the Freedom for Nov next year. Can I ask, what rental car firm did you use? Heard that most if not all you can drop off the car near the port? Was worried about it being too far to walk back. Nice to see they shuttle you back to port. Was planning on doing the same as yourself, bag drop first then lose the car. Usually do everything through rccl, were coming from Scotland and booking this far in advance they over charge for flights/transfers imho. So we have booked cruise only, and see how we get on. Plan on hiring a car the day of returning also to do some shopping on our own prior to going back to Mco.

 

Great review btw, and pics!

We used Hertz coming in and Avis going out (deal shopping). There are no rentals walking distance from the port. They are all in the main part of Cocoa Beach (10 minute drive maybe). Each one has a free shuttle to and from the port though, so that is not an issue and if you stay at a hotel the night before, many of them have free or low cost shuttles to the port as well. We dropped our bags off at the port before returning the rental and getting on the hertz shuttle, but we did have them on the Avis shuttle coming back. We had 6 bags for 2 people! :eek: Packing is not a skill I have. The shuttle was packed to the max since we were not the only ones that had overpacked. But the driver didn't seem fazed, so I guess over packers are common. It really wasn't a big deal.

I thought you could only book that once on board the ship and not in advance.

Leaving on Explorer next Sat and planning on doing it (loved the AA Tour on Liberty) ... would love to book it in advance if possible.

Can u do this online or via phone ?

We just did this on FoS last saturday. Ours was from 10:30 till after 3. I had made the reservations on the planner online a few weeks before hand. There were 9 of us on the tour. It was a little too general for me. We saw the bridge and engine control room that I really found interesting as well as the kitchens, but the main focus seemed to be on the ice rink and theater. I didn't love those parts. (The same ice and theater tour could have been done at a land based establishment. It had very little to do with the ship). Next time we sail a smaller ship I plan on doing it again, so we can see some of the more ship relevant things such as the anchor area and crew areas and such. I heard some tours get to see the morgue and brig. That I would have preferred to the ice rink.

Great Review with wonderful pictures. Just a slight correction from your first post. The Concierge Lounge is for Suite Guests as well as Pinnacle Club Members and Diamond Plus Members. This is standard on all RCI ships.

Semantics! :D

There was some other sort of lounge upstairs that was diamond and above or something. We are not diamond so we couldn't go in. Oh and for those that care of such things, suite guests could eat meals in Portofino and diamond and above had Chops.

Thanks for the Great review!! I really loved all your pictures!

 

We have never sailed on Freedom and we have booked her for Fall of 2015. We have "snagged" room 1700 (a D1 almost the size of a JS on the aft). Now, I am thinking about upgrading to a GS before the BYGOHO sale is over.

 

What do you think?

We had originally booked a JS. We had been on a Cabin Crawl on Grandeur the year before and thought the extra space and double points were worth the little more. We had also seen a GS on the same crawl, but figured it was out of our price range. When we booked Freedom there were no GSs available and the OS was definitely out of our price range, so it wasn't even an option. A week before the cruise a GS opened up and it was only $1000 more than the JS so we snagged it. I wasn't sure the price tag was going to be worth it, but it really really was. We spent a lot of time in our room and balcony which we have never done before (besides all the other perks I highlighted in my review). We were actually talking last night about all the things we didn't do on board this trip (mini golfing for example) because we spent a lot of time just relaxing. Our first choice will always be a suite now, if we can find a good deal. (We are going on Disney Dream this fall and I looked to see what a suite would be....$8,000 for 4 nights! :eek: So we will not be in a suite for that cruise. :rolleyes:

Day 9

Monday May 19

Disney World

I had set an alarm, but I wound up getting up at 8 anyway, so I shut it off. The goal of the morning was getting the alcohol into the suitcases in such a way that the airline wouldn’t break them. I packed and repacked 3 times before I just gave up with a que sera sera. We picked up the car from the valet, loaded up our bags and headed to Hollywood Studios. Parking and trams were a pain in the bum, but soon enough we were in the park. It was crazy again, but not as bad as yesterday. We got to do everything we wanted within three hours except Toy Story since its only FP+ left was for late in the evening. We even got to ride ToT two times in a row.

After that, it was back to the car and over to the Magic Kingdom. This time we had to ride the tram and the monorail to get to the park. It was slightly less crazy, but not by much. We could not get on any of the mountains, but we had ridden them multiple times the night before so that wasn’t that big of a deal (and we will be back in 4 months anyway). I made sure we got to see the new Festival of Fantasy Parade, but we did not get to ride the new mine train.(They started allowing guest s to ride it a few days after we left). The park was very hot and surprisingly crowded, so it was actually pretty easy to say goodbye to my favorite place this day. We hopped on the monorail and then the tram and then back into the rental car. Finding the airport was relatively easy, but I definitely miss the convenience of the magical express! We will not be using a car again anytime soon! Car drop off was a disaster, but the platinum amex gives us some sort of priority something or other, so it only took 5 minutes. The flight was uneventful, as was the drive home. We walked in our door a little after midnight and totally crashed!

Disney World continued…

Next stop was Epcot. We had fastpasses for Nemo, Soarin, and Spaceshp Earth and surprisingly we needed them for everything but Nemo. We booked dinner at Les Chefs de France and circled the world showcase twice. We got our 4th FP+ for Maelstorm, but after dinner I decided to head back to the room for a quick nap. Stephen stayed in the park and used that fastpass plus road Test Track single rider before heading over to get me.

I was already awake when he came in so we were all set to head to Magic Kingdom. Lines were really nutty at MK as well up until 10:30, when people just disappeared. Everything was walk on for hours. We got to ride every ride in the park multiple times between 10:30 and 2 am when the park closed. It was great.

Day 8

Sunday May 18

Disney World

Since we were flying in and out of MCO and we are Disney people, we couldn’t not go to Disney at least for a few hours. Because of a huge price difference in flying home Sunday vs Monday, 36 hours in Disney only “cost” us $150.

We did not get up as early as we had planned, but we still managed to get off the ship by 8:30. We grabbed a porter and then found all of our bags, skirted through customs (who couldn’t believe we hadn’t bought any jewelry) and then over to wait for our rental car shuttle. We must have just missed the Avis shuttle since it was the last one to arrive, but it wasn’t a big deal. We weren’t the only ones with tons of bags getting on the shuttle either. And once we got to Avis, the car was waiting (amex platinum perk), so it took all of 5 minutes and then we were off.

The ride to Disney was a bit crazy. Stephen insisted that the GPS on his ipad was wrong and took his own road. Turns out the ipad was right, but we only added a few miles to the trip with our little detour. Checking into the Swan was a breeze and our room was ready so we brought all 6 bags up to it so we could rearrange things for flight.

First stop was Hollywood Studio for Star Wars weekend. I had wanted a picture with the fab 5 in Star Wars outfits, but the line was taking forever so I gave up on that idea and we left the line. I did buy a pin though. We rode the Great Movie Ride and then bailed on the park since it was packed.

Sea Day continued…

Stephen had this incredible urge to be outside, but it was so windy, the crew kept closing decks. Eventually he gave up, so we went to the concierge lounge for the last time, got our last free strawberry margarita and gave Bertie and my favorite waiter/bartender a few extra dollars for their help over the week. Then it was off to dinner. We opted for the MDR for our last night and then went to pack so our bags could be put out for the porters before 11. Then it was off to the farewell show and another stroll around the ship before late night comedy and finally calling it a night since we had to get up early for disembarkation.

Sea Day continued…

All Access Tour continued…

The fuel is thick and sticky.

Who would have thought there would be snow on a Caribbean cruise??

Then we headed back to the room so Stephen could attempt to fix a little real estate wrinkle that had developed back home (he's a realtor) and then to the promenade to grab a snack. (Stephen had gotten a little sea sick on some of the smaller places during the All Access tour, so he hadn’t eaten much at lunch.) After that, we picked up our stack of photos (I lamented on the ones we never got to take..the big red couch being one, the beach shots on Labadee and we only got 1 character pic) and brought them up to the room. We lay on the balcony for 20 minutes and then we were off to the Dreamworks Parade. I guess I am used to Disney quality, because I just found this odd. It was chaos set to weird music.