Photo Review: RCCL Serenade of the Seas 10/9/16 New England & Canada

Hello all, It's been a few months since I've returned from my cruise, and haven't found the time to get started on this photo review until now. I feel compelled to do this review because prior to this cruise it was particularly difficult to find many photo reviews of this itinerary. I love to read photo reviews prior to doing a cruise to find things I might also enjoy doing in port, pre-cruise, or while onboard.

This was my 17th cruise overall (11 Carnival, 4 Celebrity, 1 NCL, and first Royal Caribbean). So, I guess one could conclude that I love cruising! I also love taking pictures, therefore my review style tends to include ALOT of pictures with some commentary as I go. I thoroughly enjoyed my first Royal Caribbean cruise, and I have no doubt that will not be my last with the cruise line!

While I typically cruise with my husband, this cruise was with my cruising buddy Alaina. As she likes to say, she goes on all the cruises with me that my husband doesn't want to. She also posted a photo review to cruise critic a few weeks after our return, so some of this may sound familiar to anyone who religiously reads photo reviews on here.

Here's the overview of our itinerary:

Friday - Oct 7th - fly into Boston

Saturday - Oct 8th - Boston

Sunday - Oct 9th - board Serenade of the Seas

Monday - Oct 10th - Portland, Maine

Tuesday - Oct 11th - Bar Harbor, Maine

Wednesday - Oct 12th - Saint John, New Brunswick

Thursday - Oct 13th - Sea Day

Friday - Oct 14th - Halifax, Nova Scotia

Saturday - Oct 15th - Sea Day

Sunday - Oct 16th - return to Boston

Here's a picture of me (Heather) and my cruise buddy (Alaina). Thanks in advance for anyone who reads along with our cruising adventure! Enjoy! :)

My flight from Pittsburgh arrived in Boston shortly after 8am, whereas Alaina's flight from New Orleans didn't arrive until after noon. After collecting my luggage, I took a cab to our hotel. I knew it was literally hours before proper check-in time, but was hoping they could hold my luggage until later in the day (which they were happy to do). So I basically had about 3-4 hours to kill until Alaina's arrival. I spent much of the time walking around the vicinity near our hotel. I thoroughly enjoyed the Public Gardens. Here's some pictures from that morning. It was really nice & peaceful.

What great pictures...thank you for sharing. DH and I are taking this cruise next September. We have never been in the New England area before and we are so excited about going. We are looking for a hotel for a day or two before the cruise so we can explore Boston. Where did you stay? Your help would be appreciated.

After the few hours of walking around the city, I received a text from Alaina that "the eagle has landed". Then I headed back to the hotel to meet her, so that she could drop off her luggage as well. We then headed to grab some lunch. Afterwards, we had made our way to Boston Duck tours to get our tickets (against my better judgement). Alaina had heard some several people all who had strong recommendations for the Duck tour stating it was a "must do" in Boston. I'll give the benefit of the doubt that a strong recommendation might have been due to them having a better tour guide? I don't know, but I'm pretty sure this will be my first and last duck tour!

Anyways, upon our arrival there wasn't another duck tour available for another hour, so it gave us just enough time to head to Cheers for a drink. Well, at least that was our intent at the time. It ended up being a quick walk through since it was so busy there literally wasn't an open seat in the house. Therefore, we took a quick walk though and took a few photos before heading back to our duck tour. If we had more time before our duck tour tickets, it would have been nice to grab a drink. Unfortunately, our time schedule just didn't allow. Also, I was surprised at how small the place actually was!

The following day we did do the Hop-on, Hop-off tour in Boston. This and the duck tour included many of the same spots, the only part that the duck tour seemed to include that we didn't also see the next day was the Charles River.

What great pictures...thank you for sharing. DH and I are taking this cruise next September. We have never been in the New England area before and we are so excited about going. We are looking for a hotel for a day or two before the cruise so we can explore Boston. Where did you stay? Your help would be appreciated.

Thank you! Yes, I guess I forgot to mention that. We stayed at the Courtyard Marriot Copley Square. We had a difficult time finding anything in Boston for that Friday & Saturday night under the $300 price point. I think we paid about $350/night here. It was a great location, very walkable to various areas. I don't think I took any pictures of the hotel room, but I did take this picture showing the view from our room.

This was also both mine and Alaina's first trip to Boston. I will say that I thoroughly enjoyed the city. It was very clean and there was a ton of options of things to do! Enjoy your cruise & time in Boston next September!

Here's a link to Alaina's review where she included a few pictures of our room:

http://boards.cruisecritic.com/showthread.php?t=2415091

We decided to get the Boston Go Card one day pass. The first stop we had on day 2 in Boston was the Boston Aquarium. Being a Saturday morning, it was pretty busy. It didn't take long for us to walk through and see the exhibits.

Next, we used our Boston Go card for the Constitution Cruise. We got a ticket for the 11:30 cruise. During the cruise, all of the seats are facing one direction. If you're lucky enough to get in the front row, this would have been enjoyable (for me) because you could take unobstructed pictures. However, if you have people sitting in front of you taking pictures over their heads it can be difficult to see (and take pictures). It was a relatively quick cruise at approximately 45 minutes, but I enjoyed being able to see the city of Boston from the water vantage point.

Agree with you on the duck tours in Boston. I did a duck tour in Cincinnati (where I live) a few years ago and was pleasantly surprised. I learned things and saw things that I didn't know about the place that I lived! I therefore had high hopes for the Boston duck tour given the history in Boston. Definitely was not worth it. I used the company has their tour guides dressed up as comedic versions of people related to Boston history. Can't recall the name.

Looking forward to the rest of your review. Great start!

We did the Hop-on, Hop-off tour next. We did the full loop without hopping off. The only downfall of these tours are being able to get any good pictures. I literally only have a couple pictures from the whole tour and they're not even worth showing (which says a lot for me). Many of the places that were included we had also seen the day before on the Duck tour.

Next on the agenda was lunch at Wahlburgers! I told Alaina I was up for pretty much anything she wanted to do in Boston as long as we ate one meal at Wahlburgers (I'm not going to lie, I was hoping we'd run into Mark or Donnie while there). No such luck on the Wahlberg sightings, but the lunch was probably the best meal we had in Boston (at least in my opinion). We ate at the Fenway location that was literally only a few blocks from our next stop on the agenda (the Fenway park tour).

Thank you! Yes, I guess I forgot to mention that. We stayed at the Courtyard Marriot Copley Square. We had a difficult time finding anything in Boston for that Friday & Saturday night under the $300 price point. I think we paid about $350/night here. It was a great location, very walkable to various areas. I don't think I took any pictures of the hotel room, but I did take this picture showing the view from our room.

 

This was also both mine and Alaina's first trip to Boston. I will say that I thoroughly enjoyed the city. It was very clean and there was a ton of options of things to do! Enjoy your cruise & time in Boston next September!

 

Here's a link to Alaina's review where she included a few pictures of our room:

http://boards.cruisecritic.com/showthread.php?t=2415091

 

Thank you for the info. I really appreciate it and I am enjoying your review.

Next up, the Fenway Park Tour. This was another attraction included in our Go card. We had some time to kill before the next tour started at 4:00 so we strolled the gift shop. Neither Alaina nor I are huge baseball fans, but this seemed like an iconic thing to do in the city. We lucked out in that the Red Sox were practicing that day while our tour was going on. We both had a few gripes about this tour. First, there were literally 200 people on this tour (and at least half of them were kids). Second, since battling practice was going on, there was loud music being played through the sound system which wouldn't have been bad, except most of the time we were unable to hear our tour guide on his microphone. Most of the tour was spent ushering the 200+ people from one area in the ballpark to the next (and everything that goes along with that). I did enjoy the tour, but it was just a bit "much". It would have been more enjoyable with say 30 people? If you're a baseball fan, it's definitely worth checking out though.

Here's what you get when you put Alaina and I on a tour with over 100 kids (I couldn't resist posting). Maybe my favorite picture of the trip! lol

The Skywalk Observatory was atop the Prudential Center. It was included in our Go card and had panoramic views of the city. It was great to get a birds-eye view of many of the places we had visited during our 2 days in Boston.

While I was a little bit skeptical at first about the Boston Go card. This one day pass for $54, really was a great value. It was a long day in Boston, but I feel we got a comprehensive overview of what the city has to offer.

Next up, Cruise day!

We left our hotel the next morning shortly after 10am. By the time we arrived at the cruise ship terminal it wasn't long before we made our way onboard. The embarkation process was seamless and we were enjoying our first drink onboard in no time! We explored this ship until we had access to our stateroom at 1pm.

We had forward facing ocean-view cabin 7000, that had views of the helipad out our window. We were pleasantly surprised that there was adequate room for all of our things. No reported issues with this cabin. The larger window area made the room feel larger than it was. I wouldn't hesitate to book this cabin again. Here's some pictures of it.

Basically from the time we got onboard the ship through sail-away was raining, so there was no waiving goodbye to port from the top decks for us. We made the most of the day and explored the ship.

One feature on this ship I haven't seen on previous cruises (that I really liked) was the interactive ship menus near the elevators!