Is The Gem Still A Gem? Almost live... 6-28-2024 sailing

[Laszlo]

Wednesday (sea day) we had some big seas 

 

 

[GALSews]

56 minutes ago, Laszlo said:

Walter

 

Walter is adorable. May he live a long life.

Goldens are the best. 

Edited July 5 by GALSews
fixed typo

[Laszlo]

45 minutes ago, GALSews said:

Walter is adorable. May he live a long life.

Goldens are the best. 

Thanks, we actually lost our Golden two months ago. Walter is our granddoggy. My son and his fiancé are on the west coast for two weeks so we are watching him

[GALSews]

4 minutes ago, Laszlo said:

Thanks, we actually lost our Golden two months ago. Walter is our granddoggy. My son and his fiancé are on the west coast for two weeks so we are watching him

So sorry for your loss. We lost ours back in October and I still miss her. She was the sweetest being.

 

Sorry for hijacking the topic, but Goldens are such a joy.

[Laszlo]

Photo dump of sorts, maybe some repeats....I have a number of videos to put together

Edited July 5 by Laszlo

[Laszlo]

Be sure to watch in 4K.....  

 

 

 

[Laszlo]

One more for today.....

 

 

[Laszlo]

 

[Laszlo]

Overall we like the cruise a lot. However our next trip to Bermuda will be by plane. My wife and I and our friends saw a number of cutbacks we didn't like. Biggest thing I noticed was the crew was overworked. Our butler and room steward both complained about how many cabins they had to take care of......

 

One thing that drives me crazy is the stupid little dining coupons. They are on our account so why do we need to bring them? I had forgotten one for dinner one night and almost got into a pissing match with the hostess, I really didn't feel like going back to our cabin to get it. I said it's on our account, can't you just look it up? I see it she says, you have the dining credit but you have to bring the coupon. Another thing that really pissed me off was we were charge not once but twice for laundry. We had a small batch of laundry picked up on Wednesday and dropped off at our cabin later Thursday, we told our room steward we had a coupon and I placed it in the bag. I just happened to check out account at 8pm last night and saw the charge..... *****.....Two charges. I went to guest services and talked to them about it after standing in line for 30 minutes. Two phone calls later and the charged was removed and I got a print out showing our account balance at zero. I just happened to look again at our account again this morning at 6 am. Sure enough the charges were still there, so I got to do the whole thing over again Lol

[Laszlo]

 

[goldmom]

For future reference, since you were in a suite you could have had the Concierge take care of removing the laundry charges instead of standing in line (twice!).  We've done this several times when we've seen a billing error and the Concierge was able to take care of it pretty much immediately.

Enjoyed your review and glad you had a good cruise!

[Laszlo]

17 minutes ago, goldmom said:

For future reference, since you were in a suite you could have had the Concierge take care of removing the laundry charges instead of standing in line (twice!).  We've done this several times when we've seen a billing error and the Concierge was able to take care of it pretty much immediately.

Enjoyed your review and glad you had a good cruise!

Thanks, yes. I have done that in the past, unfortunately the Concierge was not available at the time. Next time I was force the issue is a problem happens 

[Laszlo]

Our cabin, and a little tour video. Didn't turn out as well as I hoped but it's still OK. 

 

 

[Seanair]

I'm curious where you went for the snorkeling.  We rented a pontoon boat and went out

towards King's Point (out around the back of Dockyard).  Didn't run into a lot of fish

to see, but I suspect, unlike the snorkel trip boats, we weren't throwing food out to attract them.

Where did you end up?  

[Laszlo]

1 hour ago, Seanair said:

I'm curious where you went for the snorkeling.  We rented a pontoon boat and went out

towards King's Point (out around the back of Dockyard).  Didn't run into a lot of fish

to see, but I suspect, unlike the snorkel trip boats, we weren't throwing food out to attract them.

Where did you end up?  

We rented from H20 and hit a number of spots around the Vixen and Kings Point. There are a number of nice reefs to the east of kings point about a mile out? The last turtle, last 30 seconds is footage from Barbados, I love turtles and just had to throw that in Lol

Edited July 6 by Laszlo

[Laszlo]

And the sand is still pink!!!!

 

 

[Laszlo]

Just wanted to wrap up my short review of sorts. We had a great time on this cruise. I think most of it was due to having friends sailing with us who had never been to Bermuda. Sailing out of Boston was a 6 hour drive for us and I'll probably never do it again. The timing worked out so we could have dinner with family and friends the night before the cruise

 

Cruising out of Boston was easy peasy. We arrived at 9am, they opened at 10am and we were checked in and on the ship about 10:45.I had dropped our luggage off with the porters and parked about a block away which was great, ($178) for the week. Cabins were not ready until 2:00pm. I should really say thats when the announcement was made. We later found out from our room steward our cabin was ready at 11:00am. She was fantastic and over worked. Our butler was good but was out to lunch many days. Cookies.... we got cookies every afternoon, so many I said don't bring anymore. They didn't stop so about two dozen went home with us in zip lock bags Lol

 

Our cabin (10502) was nice, the forward balcony is huge. We could have had a party for 20 on it. Food, only had one bad meal in La Cucina, I got a Caprese Salad and I could not eat the tomatoes, I swear they were frozen and had zero taste. The sliced tomatoes in the buffet tasted great. And no, having a forward balcony was not too windy on sea days. If you stand at the railing yes it windy, but if you are sitting in a chair a few feet back its a nice breeze 

 

The shows, one magic - mentalist type act was pretty good, the other show we went to was a 70's song and dance thing. It was just OK we thought

 

Bermuda, what can you say about Bermuda? It was beautiful as usual, we went to HSB twice. Once in the 7 dollar bus (never again) and once via taxi (four of us). The 7 dollar bus had us packed like sardines, the taxi is the way to go however it can get a little pricy. It was $38 to get there because the driver forgot to start the meter and on the way back it was $48

 

The people of Bermuda are nice, happy and proud. Nobody trying to sell you junk on the beach. Beach chairs and umbrellas were $20 for each, so we spent $120 for chairs and umbrellas our two days there.

 

Tuesday the last day we rented a boat for 5 hours from H20 Sports, it was our 4th time there. We used 4 gallons of gas at $11.00? a gallon. 

 

Portland Maine.....Well Portland is not Bar Harbor lets leave it at that. The town had zero going on for the 4th of July. Our next cruise will be in the Med in one to two years. Next time we go to Bermuda we will fly and stay for 4-5 nights

 

In case anyone missed them below are some videos I did

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited July 8 by Laszlo

[graphicguy]

Thanks so much.  It's been a while since I sailed the GEM and your pics/vids brought back very fond memories.

 

And, your balcony.....OH MY!

 

 OF course, Bermuda is beautiful.

 

Quick question, does it take you a while to upload vids to CC?  I can't seem to get mine to upload, or at least without stopping or taking forever to complete.

Edited July 8 by graphicguy

[Laszlo]

39 minutes ago, graphicguy said:

Thanks so much.  It's been a while since I sailed the GEM and your pics/vids brought back very fond memories.

 

And, your balcony.....OH MY!

 

 OF course, Bermuda is beautiful.

 

Quick question, does it take you a while to upload vids to CC?  I can't seem to get mine to upload, or at least without stopping or taking forever to complete.

I had a number of videos I tried to upload directly to CC. I gave up because it was just taking so long. This where 1-2 minute videos. I thought it was because I was using the ships Wifi but when I got home I tried it again and gave up

Edited July 8 by Laszlo

[Laszlo]

And just an FYI.... my wife walked off the ship Friday feeling crappy, she just tested positive for covid

[zqvol]

12 minutes ago, Laszlo said:

And just an FYI.... my wife walked off the ship Friday feeling crappy, she just tested positive for covid

Hope she feels better soon. The summer version is going around now.

[Laszlo]

Rainy Afternoon in Bermuda

 

 

[Ruskincruiser]

On 7/6/2024 at 8:27 AM, Laszlo said:

 

OMG! Great footage!  Thank you so much for sharing. I’m impressed that you got all this snorkeling.  The turtle footage is fantastic!

[Laszlo]

34 minutes ago, Ruskincruiser said:

OMG! Great footage!  Thank you so much for sharing. I’m impressed that you got all this snorkeling.  The turtle footage is fantastic!

Thank you, it was a lot of luck. It started out as a pretty cloudy day. I knew going out no sun means terrible underwater video and photos. We luck the sun came out for about 2 hours in the late morning

[mking8288]

On 7/8/2024 at 1:18 PM, Laszlo said:

.... my wife walked off the ship Friday feeling crappy, she just tested positive for covid

Thanks for sharing, hope she's feeling better by now & recovering and let those immunity booster do the work to minimize discomfort.  Reminds me of checking with my PCP to see whether we should get the "annual" booster ??  before we get going again with late summer/fall cruising - the seasonal (summer) surge apparently is real but not life threatening for most, doctors aren't as worrisome.  

 

Great videos - bookmarked them to watch later.  Thank you.