The time I took my kids on a 90's cruise LIVE Grandeur of the Seas April 2-7th

JaneRetired · April 10, 2023

On 4/9/2023 at 6:28 AM, mandyleighflies said:

Good Morning!!

Laundry is almost complete and kids go back to school tomorrow!

Continuing our review on Lady G with some thoughts good and bad on our vacation.

Good

Staff is excellent and service was usually very fast. The bar service at the main pool and Solarium bars was slow, but that’s going to happen on busy days.

Lady G is showing her age in a few places. We were informed she is going into dry dock for a full refit next year. We were on Deck 8 and my dad found a massive leak from the ceiling walking from his room to ours.

This was the result. I am not sure if those interior cabins were affected or if they were offered any kind of compensation but it for sure smelled “wet” in that corridor.

If you look closely at the ship you’re going to find signs of aging. The places I saw it the most were in the Solarium and the outdoor spaces. There was visible rust in the solarium pool and portions of the jogging track were wearing out and previous layers of paint were visible.

In our own stateroom, the bar around our bar area came loose. I was leaning on it slightly to put my heeled shoe on and the whole thing “jumped” out of its fittings. I was not hurt and upon further inspection, it had clearly been glued in place previously. I mentioned this to my room steward and Concierge and they both immediately asked about my health, they did not seem concerned with anything else, which was refreshing. It was fixed immediately.

In fact, our Concierge surprised us with a 15% of this cruise value credit to use for another sailing valid for one year for our “troubles”. I thought she was handing me a bill for damages 😂. Very sweet and we will for sure book with this certificate soon, we have a gap year of sailings so far for 2024 so guess it’s time to start looking for something.

Bad

Other People’s Children (OPC’s as we call them) There were 600 kids on this sailing and we saw MANY examples of “freestyle” parenting. This is NOT RCL’s problem, in fact, the poor staff were doing their best to manage situations, but they are not the parents so little they can do. Since my kids are older and prefer quiet spaces to noise, we hung out in the solarium the majority of the time. My son is 16 so “legal” for the solarium but my daughter is 14 so technically breaking the rules there but all she did was sit on a lounger and read her book so I doubt it really bothered anyone. Children were running a muck on sea days, that was the only time we heard or encountered them. We saw one group of adults traveling with at least 5 children under 6 who were using Schooner Lounge and Viking Crown Lounge as their own personal Adventure Ocean. One evening, my mom and I stayed up late to listen to the live music, this group was still at Schooner Bar drinking and carrying on while their poor kids were literally sleeping on the floor below their bar tables. Awful. We knew it was Spring Break so we dealt with it and luckily had suites so we had our space to hang out away from the crowd, but my own children were even asking about Virgin Voyages LOL.

We had lunch in Izumi one sea day and it took nearly 3 hours due to some kind of inspection in the kitchen? They comped our meal which was nice but it did take up a majority of our sea day afternoon and aforementioned group was using Viking Crown as Adventure Ocean so 3 hours of waiting on food and screaming children was not an ideal way to spend an afternoon.

Overall we had a great spring break!! Disembarkation was a BREEZE but being a suite guest that is probably the norm. We had our last breakfast at Chops, went to the suites “lounge” and was then escorted off the ship to the front of the lines. The entire process from leaving our stateroom to waiting for the Uber took an hour.

I ALWAYS strip my beds and leave the space clean when we depart. Not pictured is the bathroom where I place all our used towels into the bathtub. I like to leave the room as easy for them to flip as possible, I know how quick that turnaround is for them and how busy they are on that day.

Our farewell gift as well as a thank you card and additional tip for our room steward. He was amazing.

He even made us Guinea Pig towel animals, which he said we could keep.

They now reside in our upstairs hallway.

Happy Easter from our “bunnies” to your family and that concludes this *Live* review!! Stay tuned for my next one!! December 2023 on Allure!!