LisaLisa87

I just looked at all the Dailies, and I see it offered in the evening on days 2, 3, 5, and 7. I’m going to post the Daily for day 2 in a moment and will post the others as I cover subsequent days.

I've decided that I will provide a summary of each day after all. I'll cover embarkation day and the first sea day in this post and save our first port day for the next one. Embarkation Day in a nutshell: As previously mentioned, embarkation was unexpectedly quick and easy. I'd be happy to answer any questions about the process. We had a short list of boarding day items to take care of, and we knocked most of them out before going to lunch at Garden Cafe. No muster drill! Instead you go to a designated location and have your room key scanned. Now I understand why I was asked three separate times before the cruise to watch the safety video! We went to Garden Cafe for lunch expecting big crowds and a lack of seating, but again we were pleasantly surprised. Maybe the key is to go in with low expectations?? Look for the "Compound Salad" station, which has a different made-and-mixed to order salad each day (e.g., steak and blue cheese, Greek, Cobb, etc.). We had an early reservation at La Cucina for dinner, which we enjoyed very much. There are lots of bars and lounges on the ship and we tried most of them at least once, but Shaker's Martini Bar was our go-to for most of the cruise. Sea Day #1: We slept in on our first sea day and then ate breakfast at Garden Cafe. By the time we got out to the pool deck, it was a madhouse. People soup in the pool and pretty much all deck chairs occupied. We tried deck 16 and did two full laps before we got lucky and came upon two people who were packing up to leave. Then we had to do that awkward hovering thing where you don't want to be too close, but you also want to make sure anyone coming from the other direction knows those chairs are OURS. Interestingly, there were very few chairs being saved with towels/flip flops/etc. -- most were occupied! The public sundeck on 17 was closed because it was really windy, and that contributed to the lack of available lounge chairs. We had a reservation at Cagney's for dinner, and once again we had a positive experience. Both the service and the food were great. We went to the 7:30 showing of Burn the Floor, which was surprisingly entertaining. We didn't really know what to expect, and even DH enjoyed it! That's a wrap for now. I'll post about our experience in the Dominican Republic (with lots of pics) tomorrow.

There is a lot of overlap in our observations! I would categorize our overall cruise experience as "very good," but that's primarily because we were in port for 4 days and had planned some really cool activities. If we had booked this one intending to spend more of our time on the ship, we would have been disappointed. It took a long time for us to tender over to GSC, but tendering back was a piece of cake. Without really intending to, we ended up on the last tender. We boarded, sat for about 5 minutes, and headed for the ship. I would have been upset if we'd had a bad experience getting back as well.

Interestingly enough, I was able to get a BBC on GSC...

I knew I would need to explain this one! I should have been more specific. There was lots of entertainment all over the ship: live music by the pool, dueling pianos and comedy at Headliners, a pianist/singer at Shaker's martini bar, game shows in the atrium, etc. I'm talking specifically about evening shows in the Breakaway Theater. We loved Burn the Floor and Six (especially the latter), but the only other main theater show during our sailing was a magician/comedian named Jean Pierre who was there on two nights. We went to his second show and didn't care for him (his magic was decent, but I found his humor lame and mildly offensive -- and I'm not easily offended). We've cruised with our daughter since she was 7, and we have always enjoyed going to a show after dinner, even if that "show" is a movie. (Bonus if the ship has a dedicated movie theater.) There were movies most nights, but not until 11pm. Sadly we were always in bed by then! So this one is probably pretty specific to us. I would imagine that many passengers were perfectly happy with the slate of entertainment that was offered.

It's too late to edit my summary post, but I have one more item to add to my list of negatives: -No Bailey's on the ship, so no BBCs! 😭

Agreed - I would not want to be on either of those ships at 100% capacity! Even at somewhat reduced capacity, we were only able to get in the pool after returning to the ship while docked in the DR.

As is so often the case after a vacation, re-entry to real life has been rough. I’m going to be swamped with work today, but I’ll plan to share some details about the cruise this evening. In the meantime, here’s a summary: This was an Eastern Caribbean sailing with stops in the Dominican Republic, St. Thomas, Tortola, and Great Stirrup Cay. These were all new ports for us, with the exception of St. Thomas which we have visited multiple times (including two land vacations). We had great weather, and the seas were calm almost the whole time. We were very happy to make it to GSC – especially since we had booked a villa at Silver Cove (more on that later). I’m not sure what the ship’s capacity was on our sailing, but I overheard a woman telling someone next to me that she had spoken with an officer who said it was 70%. I don't know how reliable that information is, but that number felt intuitively right to me. We did encounter crowding here and there, but for the most part it was manageable. I think the crowd level and availability of seating at the Garden Café was a good indicator. Service was generally pretty good, although getting a drink at some of the bars was challenging at times. It looked to us like most of the bars could have used at least one extra bartender. We chose not to eat dinner in the MDRs this sailing. Instead, we ate at 4 of the specialty restaurants (La Cucina, Cagney’s, Teppanyaki, and Ocean Blue), Garden Café, and O’Sheehan’s. We thought the food was good to very good overall, with a few disappointing items and lots of surprisingly good ones! We were happy about our decision to skip the MDRs every time we passed by Taste & Savor or the Manhattan Room as there were always long lines to get in at prime dinner time. I’ll go ahead and list some of the high and low points of the cruise here, and I’ll elaborate on some of these later. Keep in mind that these are my opinions based on what my family experienced during our sailing. Your mileage may vary! Highlights - Quick, easy embarkation - Six and Burn the Floor - The specialty restaurants - Garden Café (both the lack of crowds and the quality of the food) - The Rebel Yell excursion to Jost Van Dyke/White Bay - Our independent excursion with Country World in the Dominican Republic - Our day at GSC (once we finally got there) and our villa at Silver Cove Challenges - The lack of communication about what was going on, especially getting off the ship - The small, crowded pool deck - Unfortunate port times in St. Thomas and Tortola - Disembarkation at St. Thomas (a total cluster) - The long wait to tender to GSC - Slow, inconsistent (non-Premium) WiFi - Lack of entertainment

We did not use Splash Academy, so unfortunately I don't have any info to share. I will say that there were very, very few young kids on our sailing. Lots of college age kids, though!

Here's Day 1 (minus the inserts) to get you started. I'm knee deep trying to catch up at work, but I'll try to post the rest this evening!

Hello! We returned yesterday from the May 22-29 Breakaway sailing, and I thought I’d share my impressions while they’re fresh in my mind. This cruise was a long time coming. It started as an early April 2020 sailing on the Epic over DD’s spring break, when she was 16 and a junior in high school. Not that the past couple of years have gone quickly, but I still find it hard to believe she’ll turn 19 next week! We originally pushed the cruise out a full year, thinking that would be plenty of time. We all know how that turned out! Several more cancellations and reschedules later, we decided a few months ago that it was time. We were a little apprehensive about getting on a ship again, but we figured NCL had had our money for long enough! I’ll provide a quick pre-cruise rundown here and then share my thoughts about the cruise itself in another post. PRE-CRUISE & EMBARKATION DAY DH and I would be sailing with DD, as originally planned. If possible, I wanted the cost of this cruise to be right around what we paid for the original cruise, so I booked a balcony room and hoped to be upgraded during the bidding process. I bid on 5 categories: the regular (non-spa) club balcony suite and 4 Haven categories. I bid at the low end of Fair for all categories and did not get an upgrade. In retrospect, I wish that I had coughed up the extra $300 for a club balcony suite to begin with. I did try to upgrade when prices dropped, but sadly the cost of the club balcony was about $20 lower than we had paid for our balcony room. Denied! We used eMed for our Covid tests. I found the process a little confusing at first, but we got through it without too much difficulty and I added printouts of our negative results to the rest of our cruise documents. We live in St. Augustine, FL and drove down the morning of the cruise. I had selected 12:00-12:30pm as our boarding time, and we pulled into the parking garage at the terminal at about 12:10pm. We were onboard by 1:00pm. (More about the embarkation process later.) I had hoped to get Vibe passes for the three of us, but they were gone by the time we boarded. A note for upcoming Breakaway cruisers: The passes were at Headliners, but make sure you don’t get in the big line on the left. That is for dining reservations only. I found that out the hard way after waiting in line for about 25 minutes, after two different NCL employees told me that was the correct line. The line you want is to the right, next to the table for beverage packages. While we’re talking about Headliners… Don’t get in line there to make dinner reservations unless it’s really short. You can make reservations more quickly using the touch screens outside of the elevator lobbies on every deck, at the podium for any open restaurant, or by calling the number provided in the Freestyle Daily (x050). I called and was able to adjust the times of two of our specialty restaurant reservations after a few minutes on hold. You can make reservations for the shows using the touch screens. Once I figured out how the card scanner worked, I was able book both Burn the Floor and Six in just a few minutes. I had booked the dining package add-on for DH and me, which gave us two additional dinners for $70.80/person (including tax). We ate lunch at Garden Cafe and were pleasantly surprised with the lack of crowding. We were able to get our food easily and had no trouble finding a table. That would prove to be the case pretty much every time we went. During lunch, we heard the announcement that the rooms were ready, so we headed toward our room on deck 11. We had that moment when we walked in and looked around -- Where are we going to put all our stuff and how on Earth are we not going to get on each other's last nerve in this confined space?? It passed though, like it always does! I’ll post again tomorrow with my thoughts about the cruise, including our activities in port. Rather than share a detailed recap of each day, I’ll probably focus on the aspects of the cruise we enjoyed the most and least. Until then...

OP, I know what you’re talking about. We’ve sailed on RCCL a few times, and each time we were approached with deals for the specialty restaurants. We just returned from a sailing on the Breakaway, and not only did we not encounter anything like that, but we heard from multiple people that it was almost impossible to get a reservation at a specialty restaurant after day two. So make your reservations either ahead of time or soon after boarding!

DH, DD, and I are sailing on Sunday and did our proctored eMed tests this morning. I'm pretty tech savvy, and I actually thought the process was somewhat confusing! I fumbled through mine and then helped DD and DH with theirs. A few take-aways that may help others: 1. We had each downloaded the Navica app and set up accounts last night. I opened the app this morning and started the testing process. At one point I was taken to the eMed web site and asked to log in. Somehow I had missed that you need an account on the eMed site in addition to a Navica account. I kept trying to log in and getting an error saying my email address or password was incorrect. I finally realized I needed to create an eMed account as well. Once I figured this out, it was very easy to set up the account. Be aware that you will log in to the Navica app, then the eMed site, and finally to Navica again (if you want the results to appear in the app) before the testing starts. You will be prompted each time, but the process was pretty clunky. 2. Like many others have reported, a proctor came online after only a minute or so. All three of our proctors spoke very quickly and didn't wait until we had completed one step before going on to the next. Each time, we had to ask them to slow down and wait before moving on. This probably goes without saying for some people, but make sure you look at the diagrams on your screen during the process. A couple of parts would have been confusing without the visual cues. 3. If you're using a phone or a tablet, each time the small window in which you can see yourself goes black, you are expected to pick up the phone/tablet and hold it over the item being discussed (i.e., driver's license, test expiration date, test card QR code, etc.). The rest of the time we had our phones propped against something so the proctor could see both us and our test kits. For some of you this info may be really basic and therefore not helpful. This is really for those who might have qualms about this new type of testing. 🙂

I really feel for you. We did an extended family cruise on POA in June 2019, and we spent months planning and anticipating. We would have been beyond disappointed if this had happened to us. Have you called the airline yet? They may refund the cost of the upgrade due to the circumstances.

Wouldn't those arrangements have been made some time ago? I know when we sailed on POA with the air promo, we received our flight details and were ticketed through the airline about 45 days out. We had logged in on the airline's site and upgraded to economy plus. That piece may not be done as far out these days, but the OP was only 10 days out! I'd be curious to know whether they had been ticketed.

Thank you for this. The comparison was very helpful! We've been in the YC (Seaside) but have not splurged on the Haven yet. We sailed on MSC a few years ago, when prices for the YC were very reasonable. Like you, we loved the YC, but didn't care as much for the areas outside of the YC -- the pool deck in particular. We would only sail in the YC if we were to book another MSC cruise.

Thanks for this info! Given the cost of the villas, we're definitely looking to maximize our time on the island. Now let's just hope we get to go!

My understanding is that they refund the original form of payment. The absolute last thing I need at this point is more FCC!

Thank you, @bookbabe. That's good advice!

Thanks, @ggTexasGal! I quickly skimmed through that thread, but I didn't see answers to my specific questions. I'm fine with not choosing a specific villa -- we're super excited at the prospect of having one for the day! I'm more curious about the tendering process. Do they include those instructions with the tix?

Hi everyone. We're in the final countdown (6 days) until our cruise on Breakaway, and we're starting to get excited about our plans! We reserved a lagoon villa at Silver Cove and I'm curious about the tendering process. Do they have everyone who booked an excursion of any kind on GSC meet in one spot, or are there different meeting times and locations? I'm wondering how long it'll take us to get to the island and how much hassle it will involve. I so wish they had a dock there! And a related question: We booked a studio lagoon villa. Are specific villas assigned in advance, or will we choose from the available villas of that type when we arrive? Thanks in advance for any insight! 🙂

The price for a balcony room on our upcoming sailing had dropped quite a bit, so I called to try to upgrade to a club balcony suite. I wasn't able to do it because the price of the club balcony was about $20 lower than what we had paid for the balcony. (Very frustrating, but that's a different topic!) We booked this cruise with FCC, and I was told that I could get the difference between what we paid and the current balcony price back in FCC. At the time, that would have been around $400. I didn't do it at the time because I mistakenly assumed the price would continue to go down. It did not. I'm not really upset about it because we're not planning to take another cruise this year anyway. Your mileage may vary, of course.

Thanks everyone. I'll bring our cards and keep them with our passports. I was a little reluctant because the states (we moved recently) where we've had our shots do not keep official records that can be downloaded any time. On top of that, we've gotten all our shots at Walgreens, and they were a pain when we wanted a new card for DD. The person at the pharmacy who filled out her card for her second Pfizer shot wrote in orange ink, which faded to the point where the writing was barely legible, and they didn't want to give us a new card.

I'm really enjoying your report! Thanks so much for sharing your experience. I'm especially grateful as my family and I will be boarding the Breakaway in 13 days! I'm so happy to hear that Six is running. My daughter and I are so excited to see that show! Your photos are great, and the professional photos turned out so well -- you've inspired me to drag DH and DD to at least several of the photo ops onboard. Looking forward to the rest of your report!

Thanks, @jamadeliz. That's a good idea. I also realized after I posted that I could just take photos of our cards now, before we get the second boosters. (Doh!)