Live from the Regal - July 2-23 - Med Cruise - R/T Barcelona

[tml1230]

Thanks much for the updates! following daily! .....GREAT photos!  

[vjmatty]

1 hour ago, Ken the cruiser said:

Just checked and the download speed in our cabin when we boarded was a whopping 168 kbps! But, on the bright side I had no problem uploading the above pictures. 

Glad to see you made it….we’re sailing Regal in October, Rome to Athens, so I’ll be following your journey with much interest. If you’re getting 168k while still in port that’s not very encouraging, although if the pictures loaded it can’t be too bad. 

[Ken the cruiser]

1 hour ago, Ken the cruiser said:

Just checked and the download speed in our cabin when we boarded was a whopping 168 kbps! But, on the bright side I had no problem uploading the above pictures. 

Just did another test after checking out the completely self-serve buffet, which I might add was quite tasty! The download speed was now an acceptable 3.21 mbps, which BTW is better than what we have experienced on most of our previous X and PCL cruises this year. I used Ookla’s speedtest.net this time with the primary server located in Miami.

[Ken the cruiser]

Day 1 - July 2 - Barcelona Embarkation Day

 

 

[Alcairns]

Happy to see you made it in good time especially with all the travel disruption at the moment. If you get a chance can you take a picture of the drinks price list. With the new premiere packages it will be interesting to know how many drinks now fall below the $12 Princess Plus limit? 

[Ken the cruiser]

24 minutes ago, Alcairns said:

Happy to see you made it in good time especially with all the travel disruption at the moment. If you get a chance can you take a picture of the drinks price list. With the new premiere packages it will be interesting to know how many drinks now fall below the $12 Princess Plus limit? 

I sure will, as soon as I figure out where they might be hiding it. I’m curious if my alcoholic drinks of choice, Riesling, Moscato and Baileys, fall into the “cheap” bracket. 😁

[Ken the cruiser]

59 minutes ago, Alcairns said:

Happy to see you made it in good time especially with all the travel disruption at the moment. If you get a chance can you take a picture of the drinks price list. With the new premiere packages it will be interesting to know how many drinks now fall below the $12 Princess Plus limit? 

Went to Crooners and here’s both pages of their price list. 

 

 

[Alcairns]

39 minutes ago, Ken the cruiser said:

Went to Crooners and here’s both pages of their price list. 

 

 

Thanks Ken. Looks like there had been little change in prices for now. Makes me wonder what you are paying for on the premiere package. Thanks again 

[Manderius]

Thank you for updates! We board on the 13th of Aug..following closely..

[Ken the cruiser]

This evening, after dinner in CC Dining, where there were maybe 10 other people eating when we left at 7 pm, we went in search of any resemblance of a partially covered promenade to get our 1 1/2 mile walk in every day to burn some calories. As you may have heard they have done away with the full promenades on the Royal class ships. However, we were able to find some shaded as well as uncovered areas to walk on deck 7 that should do nicely. 
 

 

Then we headed to the theater to watch a very funny British comedian, Josh Daniels. He was definitely worth going to see, even though jet lag is really starting to set in. 😁

 

[Ken the cruiser]

Day 2 - July 3 - Sea day

 

[Manderius]

Retreat pool cabanas are they worth it and what's the cost ?

[jasbo49]

Ken, have you checked out deck 18 for a walking track? There's little to no shade, but early or late it's a great track. At least once I remember them having little fruit skewers at a couple points around the track. 

 

Thanks for doing this thread. We board in October, so are following along and enjoying vicariously. 

 

Jim

[JimmyVWine]

7 hours ago, Alcairns said:

Looks like there had been little change in prices for now. Makes me wonder what you are paying for on the premiere package.

Based on what I have seen here and in other threads, the only people who will benefit from the Premier Package are people who enjoy fine wine. The offerings priced at $12 and under remain a mystery and there is probably a good reason for that. Seems like they are pouring generic low-end stuff for $9.00. More familiar brands that used to be priced in the $9-$12 range have been raised in price and placed beyond the limit of the Plus Package. So if you want to drink good wines and actually know what you will be receiving when you order it, you either have to pay the overage or level up to Premium. If you are fine ordering a generic Pinot Noir with no idea what you will be getting and likely receiving a low end NZ Pinot instead of something from Russian River or the Sonoma Coast, the Plus Package will work. But for cocktails and liquor, it appears that the Plus Package is still well represented. 

[Ken the cruiser]

11 hours ago, Manderius said:

Retreat pool cabanas are they worth it and what's the cost ?

Just checked out the cabanas on deck 17 aft. The price is $20 pp for 1/2 day and $40 pp for the full day. As far as if they are worth it, I’ll leave that up to you other than to say this is all you get. There is nothing extra included. 
 

[Ken the cruiser]

This morning after a well needed sleep and then going up to the buffet for breakfast, we headed to the theater for a Gibraltar port talk, which was quite entertaining! We remembered the port “expert”, Julio Delgado, from our Easter Island cruise in Jan 2020 and he is a hoot!

 

 

Afterwards while in search of the cabanas, we walked across the sky walk. 
 

[Ken the cruiser]

For those interested here’s the results of this morning’s internet speed test. But more to the point, I’ve been able to continually post to this thread with these blistering speeds! 😂

 

[Esprit]

Glad to see you are settling into ship life Ken.

How are you coping with the medallion?

 

[tml1230]

Ken, great stuff! the photos really make me feel as if I am along for the ride!

we stop at Gibraltar on the transatlantic in November..... any advice or your thoughts on tours there would be appreciated....thanks

[insidecabin]

2 hours ago, Ken the cruiser said:

For those interested here’s the results of this morning’s internet speed test. But more to the point, I’ve been able to continually post to this thread with these blistering speeds! 😂

 

I found(Emerald) you could do most things just had to accept tremendous latency and slow speeds.

 

Even princess.com suffered.

Some sites struggled and would hit timeouts.

 

[Ken the cruiser]

21 minutes ago, tml1230 said:

Ken, great stuff! the photos really make me feel as if I am along for the ride!

we stop at Gibraltar on the transatlantic in November..... any advice or your thoughts on tours there would be appreciated....thanks

Just so you stay in tune, here’s a picture from our balcony looking out over the Mediterranean on our way to Gibraltar. 😁
 

The Gibraltar port lecture this morning included discussions about a bunch of different excursions, that included a few tunnels inside the Rock which looked pretty cool. You may want to check those out. We love seeing animals, so we booked one of the tours that included the apes that live on the Rock that were originally brought over from Morocco.
 

As a side note, Gibraltar is the third smallest and one of the most densely populated countries in Europe, next to Vatican City and Monaco.

 

[Ken the cruiser]

When we went by Guest Services earlier today, after a tasty lunch at the International Cafe, we found out there are 2,508 passengers on this leg and 3,358 booked on the next one with around 1,300 crew members.

[Ken the cruiser]

Just thought I’d pass along a tip that a Celebrity Retreat Host taught me on a recent cruise when there wasn’t an opener in the cabin to pop a beer bottle top off. The key to this maneuver is to find a good spoon somewhere on the ship to use as a wedge between your hand and the bottle cap. Of course, on a Princess cruise if you’re not Elite or in a suite you’ll first have to find the nearest bar to get 2 capped bottles of beer to starting filling up your cabin frig. 😁

 

[Ken the cruiser]

1 hour ago, tml1230 said:

Ken, great stuff! the photos really make me feel as if I am along for the ride!

we stop at Gibraltar on the transatlantic in November..... any advice or your thoughts on tours there would be appreciated....thanks

Our Shore Excursions started working again on our app. Here is a list of all the Gibraltar excursions they are currently offering ( that aren’t sold out) on this cruise.

 

[kml246]

On 7/2/2022 at 7:16 AM, Anubi said:

We are on the Regal for the Transatlantic in November.  It will be our first cruise on the Royal class ships.  Looking forward to hearing your reviews.  Have a great cruise.  

 

We were always Grand Class ship fans, until sailing on two Royal Class ships - Majestic last Aug and Regal in Nov/Dec. Majestic was very different since it's designed for Asian market. Regal we very much enjoyed and will be on her for this identical trip starting Sep 24. In Feb and April this year we were back on Grand Class ships - Caribbean in Feb and Emerald in April. It may have been that they were both sorely in need of dry dock, but we are now Royal Class fans and look to book those if possible. We will be on Enchanted in three weeks!

 

Kevin