Cheapo dad's trip report on Freedom of the Seas

[harryfat1]

Harry,

 

I have been thoroughly enjoying your trip report. Your sense of humor translates well into text. I am extremely picky about which trip reports I read, so consider yourself lucky. How picky? Since you're a numbers guy, let me put this in terms you may understand:

 

* I open about 20% of trip report threads posted on the RCI board.

* Of those I actually attempt to read, about 5% hold my interest long enough to read a few posts/pages.

* Of those that hold my interest, about 10% will keep me reading to the end.

 

That means that...

 

[pretending to calculate percentages]

 

...you have made the 0.8% of trip reports that I actually enjoy to the end. Congratulations!

 

I also love that you acknowledge every poster who makes a comment or has a burning question about your daily elimination habits or attire choices. I dig that.

 

So thank you for sharing all of this with us. Beautiful family! I promise that I will keep reading your report...since you are one of the 1.68% and all. Or whatever the real number is.

 

[waiting for those with a 9.2 on the AS to correct my math]

 

Wendy

 

Hi, Wendy,

 

Wow, thank you very much for the high praise. I am honored and embarrassed the same time. Glad you are enjoying this trip report.

 

If you think about it, what is a trip report/cruise review? It’s just a summary of the everyone’s vacation and barring anything bad happened on the trip, the report should have a joyful tone. If I just go and list out what I did every minute, then it’s like doing a time sheet for work – I spent 2.5 hours working on this client’s tax return and 1.0 hour researching this tax law and blah blah – not very exciting. By adding “fluff” and some stupid jokes on the side, it makes it more of a fun story line.

 

I also have read many trip reports prior to my cruises and like you, I don’t always finish them after I get started with my ADHD. Of the reports that kept my interest throughout, it’s the ones that show what the writer is thinking that kept me bound.

 

It’s simple to say, we went, we took pictures and we left. But if you explain why you wanted to see whatever and the thought process involved before and during the event, then the reader has more of a connection as they would think “what would I do” and keep on reading.

 

I‘m probably the Howard Stern of CC where people think he is an idiot but they listen to show to hear what idiot has to say that may be funny or dumb.

 

Obviously having tons of pictures help as not everyone cares about my blah blah rambling as a picture is worth a thousand words and everyone loves eye candy. CC makes it very difficult to insert pictures into the reviews. I am embarrassed to admit how many times it took me to finally figure out what to trim from the URL from Flickr to make it work.

 

Many cruisers would probably like to add in some of their pictures from their cruises but without an account with Flickr or Photo bucket or some other 3rd party to store their pictures, they can’t do it. CC makes it way too hard to add in pictures as part of the review.

 

I was going to discuss this as part of my closing summary statement at the end of this report but I can start part of it now. In the beginning of this report (Seems like forever and a day ago), I have 3 categories in what I want in a cruise. The 3 ”E”s.

 

In that sense, I provide the same 3 “E”s in my trip report. Entertainment with my stupid jokes. Enrichment with my tips and mistakes to avoid for newbie cruisers. Experience with all the pictures so people felt like they came along with us on a cruise and see new sites.

 

Finally, as for replying to all the people that posts a meaningful comment. Just my Asian etiquette that says I should respond if people have questions or comment. If they care enough to comment on anything I have said, I should acknowledge that with a response one by one.

[harryfat1]

Loving your report. I'm never likely to cruise the Caribbean as I live in New Zealand and hate long flights but really enjoying this. Heading on my first cruise in the Pacific in March on Explorer of the Seas and picking up lots of cruise tips.

 

 

Well, you live in a very exotic region of the world that many people would love to visit, including yours truly. If somehow I can knock myself out and sleep for hours on the plane ride down there.

 

No need to go to the Caribbean. RCI should have pretty standardized cruise experience fleet wide – I think some minor tweaks here and there from the overall high level reading I have seen. Explorer of the Seas should be fairly similar to the Freedom so you will know the RP well by now from all my pictures. Hopefully other info I have provided can be useful on your cruise as well.

 

Have a great first cruise. Always exciting t know it’s people first cruise.

[harryfat1]

Great Review. Do you happen to have a copy of the menu for the MDR?

 

Thank You!

 

Hi,

 

Sorry, I didn’t take pictures of menus other than day 6 as that was a “special holiday” dinner so I took a picture of it but it probably won’t apply to your sailing.

 

 

 

 

Check out ckroybn’s review as she had pics of menus. That was the first time I had heard about the food cutbacks in reading her review as part of my cruise research so I told the family to tamper their expectations.

[harryfat1]

Challenge accepted. 20% X 5% X 10% = 0.1%. Harry deserves even more credit than you gave him.:)

 

And my AS rating is 8.734 (rounded to the nearest thousandth), not 9.2

 

Hehe, you are too funny.

 

Only question I have is if you actually did the calculation and is giddy about posting the results, shouldn’t that raise your anal score to 9+ range?

 

It’s like the golf handicaps that keeps changing every time you play and get a hole in one…

 

Every trip report takes on the personality of the readers. Seems like this crowd gravitates toward the anal scale more than the cheap scale. I may need to change the name of the report to anal dad instead of cheapo dad.

[harryfat1]

Happy Friday to everyone.

 

I’m tell you – there is no happier feeling in life than walking out of work on a Friday night after a stressful week with the car keys in your hand. I wish I can bottle this happiness and sell it. I would make billions.

 

You know you are getting old or just geekier when the biggest thing you have planned for a Friday night is to upload vacation pictures into CC. Gone are the old days of hot dates or going out with friends on a Friday night. Nowadays, it’s “Thank goodness I made it to Friday. Go home and look at vacation videos tonight”. That’s about exciting as life get for me.

 

Of course, the flip side is that you know you are old/geeky also when your biggest excitement tonight is getting a notification on your cell phone that that cheapo dad has uploaded more pictures – hey, look, more bacon…

Edited January 14, 2017 by harryfat1

[harryfat1]

Day 4 – Costa Maya

 

Here’s the daily compass

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[cpshaye]

Happy Friday to everyone.

 

I’m tell you – there is no happier feeling in life than walking out of work on a Friday night after a stressful week with the car keys in your hand.

 

No ,there's no happier feeling than knowing you DON'T have to work in your busy ER on Friday the 13th during a full moon..... I've been doing a happy dance (and staying in the house, away from potential lunatics, and being careful not to end up a patient in said-ER) all day....

 

Trust me, what they say is true.... Stay away from from the ER during a full moon! It's brutal... :eek:

 

Now, back to your entertaining trip review, Harry! I'm enjoying every moment.

[BLat55]

We haven't been there yet, I sail there next week

 

This is what i have booked

 

http://www.thenfordgreytours.com/capital-city-tour---beach-splash-on-st.-kitts.html

 

We took this tour a year or so ago and I highly recommend it. We stopped at many historic sights and the driver was very knowledgeable! I'll see if I can find a few pictures and edit this post.

[harryfat1]

No ,there's no happier feeling than knowing you DON'T have to work in your busy ER on Friday the 13th during a full moon..... I've been doing a happy dance (and staying in the house, away from potential lunatics, and being careful not to end up a patient in said-ER) all day....

 

Trust me, what they say is true.... Stay away from from the ER during a full moon! It's brutal... :eek:

 

Now, back to your entertaining trip review, Harry! I'm enjoying every moment.

 

Hi,

 

Good thing you got the night off then. I almost forgot today was Friday the 13th.

 

Ah, I see you are another Adventure of the Seas cruiser. I’m getting more tempted to book the southern Caribbean cruise. Might have to pull a Ken and double book it just to have something than decide later. Do you plan to stay an extra day or so pre and post cruise to see the sights in SJ?

 

Thanks for continually to follow along.

[harryfat1]

Before we get too much into the details of the day, let me digress and talk about getting off the ship. This is exactly the halfway point of the cruise as we just finished day 3 of a 6 day cruise. It’s technically more than half over as we started with a 2 day pre cruise but whatever.

 

Few months before the cruise, we had originally opted for a post cruise tour to see the Everglades and the swamps and alligator’s tour since we have a very late night time flight to go home and we had time to kill. Looking at our belly buttons and feet while sitting with our luggage in tow entire afternoon didn’t sound that attractive.

 

We actually signed and paid for this excursion with RCI online from home when RCI had a $5/pp off sale for the tour. But after reading various reviews online many people not seeing any alligators and the fact that the ends before 1 PM still would leave us hours at the airport with nothing to do.

 

So in comes plan B – they have a Miami Hop On Hop Off tour option that will end around 3 something and drop you off at the airport. That sounded promising. This time I thought I would wait until we get on the ship to book it as we had OBC to burn off since we had already prepaid our gratuities with final payment since we were “grandfathered” at the old rate of $12/day instead of $13.50 of current rate.

 

So let’s fast forward to the arrival onto the ship. Per the RCI web site, the Miami tour was to start at 8:30. But then you get on the ship and the ship wants to kick you off by 7:30 for ALL the tours. That’s the difference of “corporate time” versus the”ship time”.

 

Not being a morning family, we didn’t like the extra one hour early time and considering we have a late flight home and then still have to drive home after landing in SFO, that would just make the last day too miserably long.

 

So we opted for plan C on day 7 instead – which we will get to later on (another shameless teaser).

 

Here is the excursion time and info for post cruise. I seldom see this in other trip reports but I have seen many people asking questions on what to do after the cruise so I scanned this.

 

At least for the Freedom, they want you off the ship EARLY.

 

 

[harryfat1]

Woke up and opened the curtain and took a picture of the neighbors. Looks like no one is being sociable this morning in opening their curtains to say hi. After everyone is up, the 4 of us made our way to WJ for breakfast at 9:45.

 

 

 

 

Oh, I typically take a picture of the days of the week inside the elevator for the slideshow I make for our collection. It’s a good daily intro for slideshow so people watching it will know you have moved onto the next day. Here on CC, because we are anal people, we prefer daily compass with all the detail more than we care about some silly old sign that says days of the week. People only care if it’s day 2 as that’s formal night and they try to wear clean underwear that night…

 

 

 

 

For our cruise, I think it’s not the typical route as every time I go into RCI to do a mock reservation to see the current prices, I had to click on the box that displays the itinerary to say I understand the difference in itinerary for our cruise. I think maybe other western Caribbean sailings flips the Cozumel and Costa Maya? Not sure, but I am sure someone will tell me soon enough.

 

 

 

 

Anyway, as it’s much later in the morning, WJ is much more crowded. Remember what I showed yesterday at 7 AM at WJ? Nobody was there. Key is to get up early to breakfast at WJ as you want to avoid the crowd, Two years ago, I was being super anal in trying to calculate the seating capacity of Allure’s WJ versus other ship’s WJ in percentages and trying to understand why it was so crowded on the Allure and so on. Too lazy to care this time. Been there, done that.

 

Just know WJ can be crowded at the popular meal times. I recall on the Allure 2 years ago, they used to limit the number of people going into the WJ such that if there were open table, they force you to stand in line and wait outside so you don’t just walk round and round without a place to eat. On the Freedom, they don’t care. The workers just let everyone in and find their own seats. Do they still do this on the Allure?

[BLat55]

We took this tour a year or so ago and I highly recommend it. We stopped at many historic sights and the driver was very knowledgeable! I'll see if I can find a few pictures and edit this post.

 

Won't let me edit, but here are a couple of pics from one of the Forts on St Kitts, the overlook where you can see the Atlantic and the Caribbean Sea(Carambola Beach Club is bottom left of the pic).

 

[Ourusualbeach]

Hey, Ken,

 

You back already from your cruise? I thought you were on the Allure this week? Or was it last week?

 

I lose track of time when I am doing one of these marathon trip reports. When I get home from work and sit in front of the computer, I’m just zoned into cruise talk and think “Now I’m in day 3 at this portion of the tour – what was I doing when I took these 3 pictures?”

 

Oh, please, by all means, interrupt or digress all you like. You are talking to the king of digression here. If there’s one thing I know I’m good at in these trip reports is my mind flies off to all tangents of life.

 

If my brain works in a straight line fashion, this trip report would have been done in 3 days. Instead, it’s 2 plus weeks since I started this and I’m still on day 3 of the cruise blabbering about artworks on the wall that nobody cares about…

 

Speaking of Meatloaf (the band, not the food), I KNOW for sure I have that “Bat out of Hell” record album somewhere in the garage – Two out of Three Ain’t Bad. Of course, I would need to buy a new record player to play it but I know I have it somewhere. That’s going to be my weekend project to see if I can find my old record collection – there’s further digression. Instead spending time uploading pictures, I am spending it looking in my messy garage for my old LP (and for those of you know what LP is or have a ton of them from your younger days, you are old…)

 

And that digression is part of what makes your reviews so enjoyable. You just never know what's going to happen next.

 

We got home to the cold this last Monday. Great cruise, great weather just found the 6 days too short.

 

All my LP's are long gone but as I'm sure is common with a lot of people I have now paid again to download some of the songs from iTunes. I may have even bought that album on CD at one point.

 

Edit. Just read your last post and yes they have you line up and wait for an empty table once it gets busy at the WJ on Allure.

Edited January 14, 2017 by Ourusualbeach

[cpshaye]

Do you plan to stay an extra day or so pre and post cruise to see the sights in SJ?

 

Yes. 1 day pre and 2 days post. It will be our 2nd time in San Juan. We loved it! El Yunque Rain Forest is a must-see beauty with photo-ops galore! The forts were nice, too.

 

You must do a Southern cruise at some point. And, even if you don't want to fly to San Juan, there are other cruises going there out of Florida. We are going as far as Aruba on an 8 day out of Port Canaveral next January....

 

Just saying....

[harryfat1]

Won't let me edit, but here are a couple of pics from one of the Forts on St Kitts, the overlook where you can see the Atlantic and the Caribbean Sea(Carambola Beach Club is bottom left of the pic).

 

 

Yes, the software limits when you can go back and edit within a certain time period - think it's 1 hour only.

 

Very nice pictures. The second one looks familiar to me as that's what RCI was using on their front page to promote the island. Of course, they added in an attractive blonde wearing shorts showing her behind. So you need to photoshop some pretty girl in your picture as well to compete...

[harryfat1]

And that digression is part of what makes your reviews so enjoyable. You just never know what's going to happen next.

 

We got home to the cold this last Monday. Great cruise, great weather just found the 6 days too short.

 

All my LP's are long gone but as I'm sure is common with a lot of people I have now paid again to download some of the songs from iTunes. I may have even bought that album on CD at one point.

 

Edit. Just read your last post and yes they have you line up and wait for an empty table once it gets busy at the WJ on Allure.

 

Yes, I hear you on the 6 day cruise being too short. You know our Freedom was 6 day also. I won't do another 6 day cruise again if I can help it. The cost and effort to fly that far out, I need to stay longer if I could.

 

Allure has it right. The Freedom was a mad house at times when WJ gets busy. Much better to have people wait outside.

[harryfat1]

Yes. 1 day pre and 2 days post. It will be our 2nd time in San Juan. We loved it! El Yunque Rain Forest is a must-see beauty with photo-ops galore! The forts were nice, too.

 

You must do a Southern cruise at some point. And, even if you don't want to fly to San Juan, there are other cruises going there out of Florida. We are going as far as Aruba on an 8 day out of Port Canaveral next January....

 

Just saying....

 

Because we cruise in December just before Christmas when the kids are out of school, it's not always easy to find those 8 day cruises that we don't have to take them out of school and still finish before Christmas Day.

 

I'll keep looking for cruise options...

[harryfat1]

For the Freedom, during the crowded time I typically walk in and find some “manager” looking guy standing in the back. You can tell he is the manager type as he is not really working, just standing around telling other people what to do – you know, being the typical manager type. I then tell him the number of people we have and with his help, we typically can get a table fairly quickly. So try this trick if you can’t find an empty table. Our sailing was just super crowded due to large families on board for the pre holidays but If you are sailing in the popular times like Spring Break and summer season, you might have similar problem. Seek out assistance if you need it. I know Teresa from our roll call had issues with WJ seating from her review so just want to point that out.

 

Anyway, my favorite section of WJ is the back on the side with the window view of the back and partitions. Not as noisy as the other wide open sections of WJ. Get there early in the morning and you can have a peaceful breakfast at WJ with a nice water view.

 

 

 

 

 

Here is the view of the ocean for those who are big on the view of the sea. Unlike others that are super big sea view fans, I like it well enough but after 3 pictures of the same blue water, I am ready to move onto taking pictures of something else like…

 

 

 

 

Chocolate donut and BACON and of course, Salmon (For the record, the donut is on my son’s plate, not mine)

 

 

 

 

This is mine

 

 

[cpshaye]

Because we cruise in December just before Christmas when the kids are out of school, it's not always easy to find those 8 day cruises that we don't have to take them out of school and still finish before Christmas Day.

 

I'll keep looking for cruise options...

 

There's a December 14, 8 day (same one we're doing) from Port Canaveral worth checking out...

[harryfat1]

______

 

I guess for CC people, seeing salmon again out in the open for all to consume freely at WJ is a rare sighting so I made sure I took a picture of it to document such existence. I made this picture into a much bigger size so there's no doubt these are indeed salmon sizes and not salami.

 

 

 

 

 

Thus let the record show that on December 21, 2016 on day 4 of the Western Caribbean voyage of Freedom of the Seas at 9:49 AM, there was sighting of an entire slab of salmon for any & all to consume without having to submit a verbal request with the windjammer worker. So documented.

 

 

 

Oh, since Google map tracks where I took every picture, the phone shows a spot on Google map where all my pictures were taken. So the red arrow is where the ship was located when this picture was taken – not too far away from the Costa Maya or Mahahual region. Such documentation make the sighting of salmon even more official as it now has the time and location of the sighting – off the coast of Mexico.

 

 

[JamesEM]

When in PR this Nov. we made use of the free Ho Ho trolley, worked out great, first we did a few laps around the city, (my wife loved window shopping via air conditioned trolley) then we got off and saw the sights we wanted to see. About St Kitts and the monkeys, be aware that some folks have caught fleas from these guys.

Edited January 14, 2017 by JamesEM

[Sheebee]

Hi Harry ,

I'm one of those newbie lurkers . I just wanted to tell you I'm loving your review .

I was getting disappointed not seeing anyone posting about the salmon on RCI . Our 1st

Cruise on them will be this March , my retirement celebration ! Thanks for the tips !

[Coralc]

About St Kitts and the monkeys, be aware that some folks have caught flee from these guys.

Fleas? Actually, another CC poster developed a staph infection from holding them for photos. I am not a fan of touching or holding monkeys.

[JamesEM]

Forgot to add - http://www.sanjuanpuertorico.com/trolley-old-san-juan/ for more info.

Edited January 14, 2017 by JamesEM

[sg1phileshipper]

Harry, you keep cracking me up [emoji3]. I love your wicked sence of humor. You got me. Hook, line and sinker. You Sir, are my new favorite male writer [emoji335][emoji425]. And you have every right to be proud of your family, they are wonderful.

 

 

Cindy