Spring Breakers Declare Independence on Indy!!! My Review of our 5-night Indy Cruise

Good evening everyone, gotcha.

Spring breakers did not in fact declare independence. I just needed a catchy title.

Follow along and stay tuned for my review of our 5-night Western sailing on Indy :-)

I plan to follow along.

Keith

Looking forward to this :)

Sent from my iPhone using Forums

We were on Indy March 5 five night cruise. LOTS of spring breakers. They were overall well behaved, just having fun. No issues at all, we're already booked for the same week next year:)

Maybe the best part, with all the spring breakers there was almost no one in the Diamond Lounge at night!

Have a fun trip. When do you leave and where are you going?

We were on Indy March 5 five night cruise. LOTS of spring breakers. They were overall well behaved, just having fun. No issues at all, we're already booked for the same week next year:)

 

Maybe the best part, with all the spring breakers there was almost no one in the Diamond Lounge at night!

Yes, I agree with you. I was actually surprised! And we only had a few pier runners in Cozumel! I was expecting a late crew to come running from Senior Frogs.

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Pro

Don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten. Been swamped with work, will try to get Day 1 posted tomorrow.

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Pro

Howdy folks...Bryce here. It pains me to look at the date on this last post. Yikes. Well hell, at least I'm here now, right? Better late than never, all though my mother has always said "Early is on-time, on-time is late, and late is never". I actually prefer "It's better to be late to a party than to show up ugly". There is your humor for the evening :D

Now. I have written a couple reviews, well, one was a half-a$$ed attempt that never materialized much past a post or two. I expect a child could probably have written a better account. Time heals all wounds, and you folks all forget those awful reviews! In any case, I’m back, so now you have to deal with me. Took a bit of a break from cruising fora while, did some land-based trips. Living the dream as they say, although still trying to figure out what that is exactly. Graduated from college in 2011, mylast post was 2012. Since then I have changed careers, going from flying as acommercial pilot to an insurance broker for a wholesaler. Much happier now,after all since we spend most of life working, it’s best to be happy doing whatspend the majority of your time doing, right??

I kind of grew up cruising, after living in FL half my lifeand being an hour or less from cruise ports makes it easy. My DH (James) hadnever been on a cruise until we took a Cuba cruise on Empress. We are married,going on 2 years and live in Phoenix. He recently sold his company and is working on a PhD in biochemistry. Just the thought of that hurts my brain, science and math are NOT my thing! With Spring Break fast approaching, I suggestedthe idea of booking another cruise (this was the beginning of Feb). After muchsearching, I finally settled on Indy sailing out of Ft. Lauderdale, with apre-cruise night at the Marriott Harbor Beach Resort (booked with Marriott points). Your Floridians are so dang lucky to live so close to ports. Seriously. It's not even fair.

Cruising is appealing to us (me especially) for two mainreasons: Package deal and no small details to worry about on a day-to-daybasis. I travel weekly for work and spend a ridiculous amount of time inairplanes and hotel rooms racing from meeting to meeting. With that said, westill take land-based trips (most recently to Hong Kong in December, exceptthat was just a good deal and I needed 15k more AA miles to re-qualify for my status this year. Crazy? Yes. Worth it? Totally!)

I booked a balcony, deck 7 cabin 7518. It actually turned outto be a fantastic location as we found being away from public areas on thiscruise allowed for peace and quiet (more on that later). I don't consider myself high maintenance, but ask my hubby and he would be in fits of laughter. Ok ok ok, so maybe I am. Originally wanted to book a JS, but it was just way more than I fee they are worth. The balcony ended being FANTASTIC, and we were just fine.

I totally spaced outwith college spring break, wasn’t even thinking. While the college kiddos werebetter behaved than I expected, there were times they were obnoxiously loud andjust annoying. Indy is a big ship though, plenty of places to go to get away!

Are those suitcases I see??

And here is the view from our room at the Marriott, due to my status we got upgraded to an Oceanfront room which was AMAZING!

I'm going to turn in, but I PROMISE I will post more pics and installments tomorrow. Stay tuned...

Place holder

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Morning everyone! Now let's see, where were we...ahh yes!

Now for flights. I had booked our outbound from Phoenix onDelta using miles. We wound up taking a late evening departure connecting inSLC to the red-eye to FLL. Remember my note about all you lucky folks living within an hour of a port??? This is when it comes in handy. Flying from the west coast to FL to catch a cruise just SUCKS. Maybe i'm a little biased since I fly weekly for work, but when you throw a red-eye into the mix, even worse! But alas, we're going on vacation! Buckle in, and suck it up Sally!

I stayed at the office until about 3PM, getting mostlycaught up. Murphy’s law dictates S!@$ always hits the fan when you are leavingto go on vacation. Without fail. Every. Single. Time. So we just roll with it. My clients don't have to know I'm sitting in the solarium with my laptop drinking a margarita! Due to the nature of my job, I did spend quite a bit of timeworking on this cruise, but it was still great to get away!

Planned to leave for the airport at 5PM, but were running a bit behind. Finally got out the door about 6:20, and dropped off our two wiener dogs (P A X I L and P R O Z A C, yes those are their names haha) at with a friend who always watches them. Traffic on the 51 and 202 was not terrible, normal rush hour, and we made it to the Parking Spot about 20 minutes later. I had been using the Parking Spot exclusively for work travel, so I had a mound of points to burn and we got our parking F R E E. However, I've since gone back to parking in the terminal garage. For those of you that live in Phoenix, or have flown in/out of PHX, our airport can be a bit crazy. There's nothing worse than landing at 11PM, and then missing the parking shuttle, having to wait another 10-15 mins, only to have a 10 minute ride. It's worth it to me to pay the premium to park in the garage.

Airport was chaos, especially since Spring Training started.Perks of TSAPre and priority lines. We were on a brand new A321 to Salt Lake,and a 737-900ER to FLL. All I can say is with each new plane, there isseemingly less and less space. Oh to go back to flying in the 80’s and 90’s!

Flights

Delta 2946 PHX-SLC depart 7:44PM arrive 9:25PM

Delta 819 SLC-FLL depart 11:15PM arrive 5:39AM

Flights we're completely full, no upgrades to first or Comfort+ this time, but managed to get exit rows at booking. Next best thing to sliced Wonder bread! The red-eye to FLL was rough. Really rough. The new seats are just not conducive to sleeping. Well, not that economy class airplane seats ever were, but you catch my drift. I don't know how people survive flying red-eyes on Spirit or Frontier. Bless your hearts.

We landed a bit early in FLL, and caught an Uber to the hotel. I wasn't expecting to be able to check-in so early, but they had our room ready! And got upgraded to oceanfront. We dropped our bags and crashed for a couple hours, woke up around 9AM eastern feeling refreshed and ready for the day. See, red-eyes aren't SO bad :D

I'll give you another installment tonight, stay tuned! Here are some pics to tide you over :cool:

Yours Truly

This is from a walk down the beach, toward the inlet where the ships sail out of the port

I see you're doing the Greek Isles next year...tune in for my report this September on the Jewel.

 

 

 

 

 

Anxious to see your thoughts on Indy as I'm looking at booking her for March.

I certainly will! Are you doing the same itinerary? I wish ours was on a Radiance-class ship. We’re in an aft balcony JS on Vision [emoji16]

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Hi there, what a day. Is it Friday yet? Can someone rescue me? Didn't think so.

So where were we? Oh right, just woke up from a nap at the Marriott. The weather was absolutely gorgeous that day, perfect beach/pool day. We ate. We drank. We ate some more. You know, typical vacation stuff. I didn't take too many photos of the hotel, but it's your typical Marriott resort property. I looked at the cash rate, and it was $699 for the night we booked. I'm not sure who in their right mind would pay that much to stay there, I mean it was nice, but nothing special. I redeemed 40k Marriott points and that seemed like a good redemption rate to me.

The food on property was decent, there is a great restaurant with a deck that overlooks the ocean. Had some great drinks there and shared some tasty eats. Later on we showered and dressed and took an Uber up to Bubba Gumps and walked around for a while. Now, we're not really chain restaurant people, but it seemed like a great place to eat before a cruise. We waited a good hour for a table...at the bar of course. I had some sort of grilled fish, cannot remember. And we did share the big shrimp basket with three different kinds. All in all a good meal, definitely ate too much LOL :D

Made our way back to the hotel, had a nice romantic walk on the beach. Grabbed a drink at the hotel bar, and eventually turned in...tomorrow is CRUISE DAY!

We cruise: Rome, Messina, Malta, Mykonos, Santorini, Athens, Naples, Rome

 

I got an email offering upgrade to JS for $675...I didn’t realize they have some aft! Ugh. I would have taken that hands down!

That’s a good deal! We paid $6600 for our aft JS in March (booked onboard Indy), and now suites are sold out but before that prices had risen to $12k for a JS!! Crazy!

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Should have another installment tonight, stay tuned!

Surprised no replies yet!

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Enjoying your review....we were on Indy last spring break march 5 and booked it again for the same week next year!

Doing this cruise in Jan! Looking forward to more review:)

Thanks! I’m working on the next, will try to get some posted tonight

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Following! We sail on Independence during our Spring Break, 3/23/19. ONLY 233 days away :cool:

Tomorrow everyone, promise. I just got back from a biz trip to Portland. Stay tuned

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Hi everyone, sorry for the lack of follow through. In any case, here we go: CRUISE DAY :cool:

After grabbing a coffee and breakfast in the hotel restaurant, I ordered an UBER and we waited in the lobby until it arrived. From the Marriott, I would say it was maybe a 12-15 minute drive? Not bad at all. However, Port Everglades seems to be a mess...like I remember from 2012. Our UBER driver could not have been more disinterested in life, and she was on the phone WITH HEADPHONES! Twice I said, "we are on Independence of the Seas, Terminal 29". Did she listen? Of course not :loudcry: So here we are sitting in line for Terminal 18 as Harmony was also sailing that day. Took me at least a minute to get her to stop talking and hear me out...WE ARE IN THE WRONG LINE!!!

Now that we are heading in the right direction, I can relax a bit! We pull up at around 10:15AM, and of course there are still folks getting off of the previous 5-nighter. This Terminal is atrocious. No signage, no one directing anyone (yes the terminal was open for check-in and they were letting people in). We ended up waiting 5-minutes in the airport transfer line until some behind asked if this was the line to get in the terminal, and then we figured out we were in the wrong line DOH. Security was pretty quick, thankfully we arrived early because the line got SO LONG. I would say we were through security within 5 minutes of getting into the correct line? Check-in was also super quick, and before we knew it we were sitting and waiting. They made us wait a while, at least an 45 minutes on the lower level of the terminal, and then another 30-35 minutes on the upper level. Oh well. Talked to a few folks and had some laughs.

I will say this: People, listen to the boarding announcements. Don't get up unless you are called. There were hoards of folks blocking the way and no one could get through. Then a port employee started yelling and that seemed to work. Ha.

I'm going to post a bunch of pics for now, and I'll let those do the talking. We headed to the windjammer and had no issue finding a table. Food was meh.

Not the greatest weather day, it was chilly and windy. We wound up being last to sail out of the port, so it was neat watching all the other ships leave.

I'm on the left in the red hat, James is on the right :)

Let me just say, LOVE having an actual shower door. The bathroom is certainly nothing to write home about, looking forward to comparing it to our JS on Oasis next week :D Might never be able to go back to a regular balcony cabin!

We were on Deck 7, Cabin 7518. As you can see, two down from the very front. We liked the location, it was quiet and easy to get around. Seas were calm, so we didn't feel too much movement

Now I will say, Indy was showing her age here...which is sad because she's not THAT old. I would say well-used is a good way to describe it. Things looked worn and tired, but I didn't find any part of the ship unkempt or overly dirty. She just needed some TLC...which hopefully she got at drydock. I'm curious to see all the places they put in extra cabins.

This ship does Great Lakes cruises, seems she was getting some work done. There was all sorts of cleaning, pressure washing, painting, etc going on. I looked up the ship, and the sailings aren't cheap...accommodations seem a bit spartan too.

Ahhhh, first drink of the day. We have purchased the drink package, most recently on our Cuba cruise on Empress last July. We just find it's really not a good deal for us. We're pretty healthy, and on that cruise I just drank and drank to get my money's worth...and by the end of the cruise I think I gained 12-15 pounds....moreso from the alcohol. I looked GROSS! Yikes.

James doesn't drink much, not his thing. But we do enjoy nice wines (I'm a wine connoisseur), and sometimes a cocktail before. I think for both of us, we spent maybe $150 on individual drinks? We do bring two nice bottles of wine onboard as well.