Momof3gurlz

Yes, we were on the NCL Encore and NCL Prima was there also. Prima guests had their own separate area.

+1 Greg. @dani negreanu and @Tree_skier also.

Love the video Greg. I’m not a Chiefs hater, I just don’t really care for Mahomes. There’s no denying his talent, but there’s just something about him that bothers me, and don’t even get me started on his wife & brother! I’ll be rooting for the Phillies mostly because my oldest & her family are. Good luck!

I meant to add… @dani negreanu I’m glad at least the tremors have let up. Hope that continues. @Tree_skier how many times does this make for you with Covid? I hope you recover quickly. @DaniDanielle 🙏 for your Charlie.

We’re babysitting our two granddaughters starting tonight until next Thursday. Middle DD Jessica has a work conference in Orlando Monday, Tuesday & 1/2 day Wednesday. Since her husband works from home, he’s flying down with her and will work from Orlando. Then they decided to add on this weekend, so they fly down early tomorrow morning & return Thursday morning. I spent all morning getting the last of our vacation stuff put away. Actually instead of putting it all away, I just laundered everything and put it back into the suitcases for next month! I’ll need to reorganize a bit but it’s all out of the way. Then I went grocery shopping and egads! Stocking up on all their snacks, yogurt, juice, lots of fresh fruit, etc. cost a small fortune. Then a stop at Target for a couple of new books and a stop at the Dollar Store (now the $1.25 store) for coloring books, stickers, etc. The weather is crazy, it was 63 degrees here. No complaints from me.

It sure did. I much prefer Coco Cay over Great Stirrup Cay.

Hard to believe it’s February. And 45 years ago at this time we were still trying to dig out from the Blizzard of ‘78.

That must be so frightening and worrisome. My thoughts and prayers are with you. 🙏

I was going through all my pictures last night and found this one I forgot to post, taken from our stop at Great Stirrup Cay. This is Oasis and Enchantment at CocoCay. I love how it shows the size difference.

We have this cruise booked also. We’re trying to figure out our options. 1. Take the train/commuter rail to Newark Airport the day before, stay overnight in a hotel and Uber to port. Fly home from San Juan to Providence. 2. Drive to Bayonne the morning of the cruise, park at the port, fly back to Newark from San Juan and Uber to the port to get our car. 3. Drive to Bayonne the day before, use a cruise stay-n-park hotel, fly back to Newark from San Juan and Uber to hotel to get our car. If anyone here has done something like this, input is greatly appreciated.

Not just the drinks, although they are amazing. For us it’s the beautiful beach & water. There are not many people there early in the day, just those that arrive by private boats, charters and excursions. It may get busier later in the day as I believe you can take a ferry from St Thomas, then bus or taxi to this particular beach which is White Bay.

Great picture and great song! I’m not sure if it’s recent or not and perhaps it’s one of those ship by ship things 🤷🏻‍♀️, but it sounds like @reallyitsmema had the same experience. Great video Andrew. I’m guessing this was a private charter from St Thomas? Was this before or after the hurricanes (in 2017 I think)?

You’ve got it. I received my post cruise survey today. Can’t wait to tell them to look at our account and note that every rum & coke purchased resulted in the rum on the side being wasted. Why not just let him have the soda package instead, we weren’t asking for money back. Dumb business decision that’s hurting them more than the customer.

It would be downright unhealthy for me to go cold turkey on cutting down the cocktails and eating healthy. Therefore it’s baked potatoes, steaks on the grill tonight and a Dark n Stormy.

It was very comfortable, even at the early hour. I’m guesstimating but I’d say around 25-30 people. They hand out bottled water on the trip over and serve rum punch on the return. One of the deck hands gave us an entertaining explanation of the neighboring islands and the ones we passed along the way. The Soggy Dollar also has a great gift shop with hats, t-shirts, mugs, magnets, etc.

More JVD pics. IMG_7755.MOV

We were in Tortola from 6 am to 2 pm. Our excursion to Jost Van Dyke departed at 7 am. We were on the Rebel Yell catamaran and they are great. The sail over to JVD is about 45 minutes. I highly recommend getting a spot on the front of the boat. We were told pickup time was 11 am so in total we had a little over 3 hours there. Although the Soggy Dollar was open and serving drinks already, we opted for coffee and light breakfast first, right next door. The weather was perfect, the water is gorgeous and the Painkillers were dee-licious!

I forgot the funniest part! We were parked next to an Aida ship in Tortola if I remember correctly. They had an interesting sun deck. (edited so I don’t play Monopoly)

I’ll try to wrap this up here. As I’ve mentioned before, Andy doesn’t drink alcohol. Our booking came with their Free At Sea promotion (free plus the gratuity on Free), so he ended up with a drink package anyway. Now we knew going in that this didn’t include soda or water as it does on Royal. So he could order a Diet Coke with rum on the side, leave the rum and just drink the soda. After the 2nd day of doing this, he says he doesn’t feel right about it and visits Guest Services to ask if they will swap him to the soda package without any monetary adjustment. Of course the answer was “no”. So (and I hope you’re paying attention here NCL) he continued to order his Diet Cokes with rum on side all week, probably 3 or 4 a day. We’ve had a couple of really nice cruises on NCL pre-Covid. And not every cruise on Royal has been perfect but they seem to be a little bit smarter and a little more willing to put in the effort to make customers happy. And THAT is service (to us anyway). So we will spend our cruising dollars on Royal going forward, although we would like to try Celebrity. It wasn’t all bad. We were at sea, our friends enjoyed it, we escaped some horribly cold weather and I got to visit my favorite place, Jost Van Dyke. Although I’m still feeling bad about missing @Sea Dog Greg’s surprise for me. How bad can it be when this is happening?

Now for the not so good. The biggest thing for us was the service, or lack thereof. And I don’t believe this was due to staffing problems. As Andy said, their service consists of lip service, there’s no actual substance to it or effort to resolve issues and answer questions. Crew members saying good morning as they pass you is nice, but that’s not really service. I never once met our room steward. Andy only bumped into him once when he ran back to the cabin to grab his Kindle and the steward who was making up the room just stepped out, never introduced himself. We visited many of the bars in the ship and while we were waited on, there was never a greeting or any effort to engage, even a bar with only one or two other customers. There were just a lot of unsmiling, sour faces on many of the crew. Guest services was a joke. First trip was embarkation evening to advise them we never received our excursion tickets. We had a clamshell reserved the next day at GSC and needed the tix. They said we had to visit the Excursions Desk and they would open at 5pm the next day. So we ended up paying for the clamshell and having to request a refund which took 3 days. Then I stopped at Guest Services to ask where I could view the MDR menus for the week. They didn’t know and sent me to the restaurant reservations desk. She tells me. “Oh, it’s not in our app but you can see it on the TV in your room”. We couldn’t find it anywhere on the TV so asked the MDR head waiter/maitre’d. He says the only way is to look day by day at the menus posted outside the MDR 🙄. We had booked a ship excursion for St Thomas. A two hour tour of the island with a 2:30 start time. (We did eventually get our excursion tix). Meeting time was was 2:15 on the pier just off the ship. We arrived just before 2pm to learn our excursion had already departed! What?! Now more folks start arriving, just as surprised as us. There were a total of 12 of us, all yelling & arguing with the Shore Excursions guy. Lots of finger pointing between him and whoever was running excursions from the island. No one could explain why a 2:30 trip left before 2:00 and short 12 booked passengers. Shore excursion guy finally days he’s sorry but what he “can do for us” is refund the cost of the tour. We all not so politely tell him that’s not doing anything for us, he has to do that because he didn’t provide the service. We also tell him we’ll be showing up en masse at the shore exc desk when they open at 5 pm and expect some OBC for this fiasco. A woman from one of the taxi co’s heard what was going on and arranged an island tour for us. One couple had already walked away in frustration and two other ladies weren’t comfortable not being on a ship sponsored trip, so it ended up just eight of us. We asked her only to promise we’d be back on time. It was a great tour with stops at all the highlights and lots of history & background provided. Probably better than what we booked, but shhhh. We also all got 50% off our remaining booked excursions which worked out to about $200 so ultimately they did the right thing there.

Okay, grocery shopping complete, suitcases emptied and two loads of laundry done. I’m ready to summarize our cruise on the NCL Encore. The ship is beautiful. Very sleek and modern looking. For fun stuff they have two water slides, a go-kart type track, a whole gaming/virtual realty area and laser tag. There’s also something called The Waterfront that consists of outdoor seating for some of the bars and restaurants. We didn’t utilize this much but I like the concept. There are lots of options for pay as you go dining. We had two free specialty meals and chose their Teppanyaki hibachi restaurant and their Italian restaurant called Onda. Both were excellent. We also paid to eat in the Texas barbecue restaurant one night and it was pretty good. Two dinners in the MDR’s and two in the buffet - these were “fine”, nothing great but nothing terrible. Breakfast each morning in the buffet was good but the layout there is terrible. It’s just too narrow all the way around and we all know how crowded these places get. There’s an Atrium where they do a lot of the game shows and trivia contests. Guest Services, Excursions, Starbucks and a bar are also in the Atrium so it’s convenient to all be in one spot but I much prefer a royal promenade or esplanade. We did make all our port stops which hasn’t been the case recently from what I’ve read on the NCL boards. They were Great Stirrup Cay, St Thomas, Tortola and Puerto Plata, DR. That’s my report on the positive stuff 🙂.

It wasn’t initially the weather. We were on Southwest scheduled to depart MIA at 1:45 pm, arriving in Baltimore at 4:20, then departing Baltimore at 7:25 pm. We boarded on time in MIA while planes were still taking off. At 2:00, I looked out my window to see ONE baggage handler loading luggage into our plane. And this guy couldn’t possibly have moved slower. The pilot comes on and informs us we now just need to wait for the forward luggage hold to be loaded. Again, same slow motion guy does the loading as the skies start looking worse. We finally push back from the gate and taxi when the captain advises there are 18 planes ahead of us, so we wait some more. Next thing, the pilot powers down the engines to conserve fuel because now they’ve stopped departures while the storm passes. We finally took off around 3:30. Our flight from Baltimore to Boston was fine. Seems to me the baggage loading caused our delay.

Good morning! I’ve just spent the last 2 hours catching up on this thread while enjoying my coffee. Sorry for being m.i.a. last week but internet on the ship was cr@p. Yesterday was a tiring travel day, lots of delays but we made it home around 11:00 last night. I need to go out for groceries but I’ll be back later today to post about our experience once I’ve had time to put my thoughts together. Spoiler alert: we won’t be sailing on NCL again.

See my other post. Such a dummy, I did miss it 😢. Even though I didn’t get “your” Painkiller, I did have two. As proof, here’s a pirate picture of me on the catamaran ride back.

Oh, no Greg I can’t believe I missed it!! I saw people looking at poster boards with names on them but the first couple of pages were dated 1/23 and 1/24. I feel terrible I didn’t get your drink but what a cool and very thoughtful thing for you to do! I most definitely owe you one in Miami!