Observations on My First Cruise Part II

Now that I've spent time reviewing our ports of call I'll dedicate a few paragraphs to my thoughts on the whole cruising experience itself. I'll go through some of the pros and cons based on my observations. I may write more about the negatives which happens to often be human nature but I have enjoyed the experience overall and am glad we have taken this most unusual route back to the US.

strolling in Barcelona

Let's see where can I start with my pros list of traveling by cruise. I guess first of all it is a ridiculously easy way of traveling which is why I guess it is so popular. I agree with what others have said in the past about the the convenience of traveling to different ports without having to worry about transporting from place to place. It so nice to spend the night in the same room while traveling to different cities.

tourist escalators in Cartagena, Spain - doesn't get much easier than this  :-)

An obvious positive item about cruising is the food. It is so nice to be able to eat three meals a day without having to go through a lot of of hassle. The quality and variety of the food have been pretty good in my opinion. The portion sizes weren't also as big as I thought they would be but the good thing is you can order as much as you want which I'll also address when I get to the negatives. I also like the options between restaurant and the buffet. In the restaurants they have a mix of open seating and reserved seating. Reserved seating with the same people was something that I absolutely did not want to do. Our seating was open. Most of the time we ate by ourselves but did have some nice meals with other passengers which was nice change of pace. Personally, I enjoyed the restaurants more than the buffet. I just like to have someone else to serve us plus it can help with portion control too.

crew member by a desert station on our kitchen tour

Another aspect that I like were all the activities. I enjoyed going to shows virtually each night or watching movies in the movie theater. We even checked out a few movies to play in our room's DVD player. Throughout the day there were numerous classes or presentations on various topics. We went to a few talks on subjects and a few classes but not too many. A couple other things I like was that the library which had over 5,000 books in it. I read a fascinating book on the CIA called Legacy of Ashes. I also enjoyed working out in the gym especially now that I have gained a few pounds in the nearly 3 months we have been traveling during this segment. After we were done with port calls we usually got up each morning around 8 am to work out.

book on how to make towel creations - we actually went to the class

Now let's talk about some of things I didn't like. The first one I'll talk about is food again. While I enjoyed the food I was also disgusted at times by a few things. The first was there was so much food and so many overweight people eating so much of it. I kind of expected that but what I really didn't like were times when people couldn't decide which main course or desert that they wanted so they just ordered two or three items while only eating a couple bites while then discarding some of items they didn't like. I will not go on too much about this but all the waste gets to me at times.

Alethea supervising the pulling out of port in Ajaccio, France

Next item that I didn't always enjoy was being confined to the ship. I guess I have become used to always being on the go that I sometimes struggled with being restricted to the ship at times. Good news was there were plenty of activities to keep things somewhat interesting. Having so many days of sea in a row wasn't always that enjoyable to me. I know it allowed Alethea an opportunity to catch up on her writing but I was getting kind of stir crazy. I was probably suffering from internet withdrawal a little. I can do without a TV but I miss being online just to research different things or just to entertain myself. Internet access was available for a cost of .75 per minute which was too steep a price for me. You could access Holland America's sites along with the New York Times site for free. Speeds were slow since we were connecting via satellite.

orange trees in a city park in Malaga, Spain

Only other somewhat major item that I didn't enjoy was that our ship and apparently many others in the area were struck by an increase in gastro intestinal or GI issues. This meant that certain things were adjusted or closed. For example, you couldn't use the self-serve laundry machines, serve yourself at the buffet, you couldn't touch salt & pepper containers, serve yourself drinks, and library books that were returned were quarantined for 14 days. Ironically enough the casino was never impacted by this. Imagine that! For some reason I didn't notate when they lifted all the restrictions but I would say it was around the 7^th or 8^th day of the cruise. I did more laundry than I was expecting in our sink but I am kind of used to it by now. We did eventually do one load of laundry. It only cost $2 to wash and $1 to dry in normal size washers and dryers. I was expecting it to cost more but then again a lot of people were on our ship for multiple cruises. Many got on in Athens or when the ship was in Rome previously. I spoke to multiple passengers that had been aboard for at least 20 days before we came aboard.  

our bathroom, where I did a fair amount of laundry :-)

One other thing I was kind of disappointed in was that there were a lot more areas you can smoke in than I was expecting. You could smoke in the casino obviously and some of the bars along with the wrap around deck that a lot of people walked on. Not sure if this has to do with what regulations we were under or maybe just the preferences of their customers.

selling stuff next to our ship in Tangier, Morocco

Hopefully that wasn't too many negatives. I have never been on any of the cruise critic websites for reviewing cruises but I plan on leaving some feedback when I have the time. I did enjoy myself and am glad we chose to come back this way. The positives far outweighed the negatives and I am open to additional cruising. It was also an interesting way to spend my birthday. Never thought I would celebrate a birthday in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Last year I was in the Jordanian desert. Alethea made it special by arranging for a steak and lobster meal along with a red velvet cake. The Indonesian crew members sang happy birthday to me in Bahasa which is the official language of Indonesia.

Alethea on the behind the scenes kitchen tour

As far as future cruising is concerned, I still would like to see Alaska and take some of the river cruises throughout central Europe as Alethea has done before. Since we've arrived here in Miami, Florida we have actually managed to book another cruise! We've got the time and found a great last minute deal. It is on a different line which will be a good comparison. It is a 7 night Caribbean Cruise on Norwegian leaving from Miami on Sunday the 27th. It will make port calls in the Bahamas, Ocho Rios Jamaica, Cayman Islands, and Cozumel Mexico. The starting price is only $349 per person. I've only been to the Bahamas before, so I'll be looking forward to these ports of call as well.

Happy Thanksgiving from Miami, Florida!

Link to photo album:

Cruise Pics (same album as Part I post)

Observations on My First Cruise Part I

As expected my first cruise experience was an interesting cultural experience. I'll breakdown my review in two parts since it is quite a long post. I'm writing it while in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean during one of our days at sea.

our cruise ship the ms Rotterdam docked in Cartagena, Spain

I'll start my review with some of the basics about our cruise. Our cruise was a total of 15 nights starting on Sunday, November 5^th in Rome, Italy and ending on Monday, November 21^st in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. Technically Rome's port is about a solid hour train ride away in the city of Civitavecchia. Civitavecchia is a difficult name to pronounce but not that hard to get too from Rome's Termini train station. We sailed on Holland America's ms Rotterdam. The ship can hold a little over 1,300 passengers and has around 600 crew members. The ship was built in 1997 and is considered the flagship of their feet. They do have larger and newer ships. It is the 7^th ship named Rotterdam Holland American with first dating back to the 1870s. We had 6 ports of call in the Mediterranean before crossing the Atlantic. I'll get into ports of call next. Alethea and I had a basic inner stateroom with no window on the 2^nd deck. Other key stats were that the average age of the passengers was 65 years old per our cruise director. I also heard by the way of two different conversations with passengers that we had about 900 Americans, 300 Canadians, and the rest were European and few Aussies. Now on to the ports of call.

room 2613 on the ms Rotterdam

One of the reasons we chose this transatlantic repositioning cruise over others that were departing around the same time were because of the ports of call. The 6 ports of call we visited in order were Ajaccio, France on the island of Corsica, Barcelona, Spain, Cartagena, Spain, Malaga, Spain, Tangier, Morocco, and Funchal, Portugal on the island of Madeira. We visited a port of call each of the 1^st five days before having a full day of sea when we reached our last port of call in Funchal. My favorite port of call was Malaga, Spain. Malaga is in southern Spain. It is a well kept city with beautiful architecture, churches, and made for a good day of walking. I was surprised at this because I had not even heard of Malaga before the cruise. Barcelona probably would have actually been number one except that Alethea (along with Diane & Ronnie) and I had just spent three full days there back in April. Good news is that we weren't suffering from sinus issues this time around! We did just a little sightseeing by walking around the Latin Quarter before stopping at a bar for a beer and some free wi-fi. We bought some toiletries and stocked up on wine since we could bring as much on board as we could carry. If we brought beer, liquor, or champagne it would have been confiscated and returned to us on the last night of the cruise. Alethea actually also got a haircut in Barcelona when we stumbled upon a rather cheap salon while walking around town. 

Alethea @ our 1st port of call in Ajaccio, France

Two other ports of call that I enjoyed were Funchal, Portugal and Tangier, Morocco. Tangier was the port of call that I was most interested in when we were making the decision on which cruise to take. We had wanted to go to Morocco on our round the world trip back in the spring but decided against it because we were running out of travel energy and there had been a bombing that killed I believe 6 tourists at one of the cities we wanted to go to about a week before we would have visited. I enjoyed our stop in Tangier although it was a little taxing which is what I was expecting. We weren't completely off the boat before someone was asking us to buy something. We received many solicitations throughout our stop. It kind of wears on you after a while or at least it does to me since this isn't common in American but can be pretty common elsewhere in the world. Not too long after we made it to the start of the old town area we were picked up by two pre-teen boys who walked around and showed us different parts of town that we probably wouldn't have found without them since our map from the ship was so bad. The quality of the maps we received on board for our ports of call weren't that great. We found better maps at Traveler Information offices once on land. Our adopted tour guides did take us to a a shop where a gentleman gave us a sales pitch on carpets and other items. He did let us go up on the roof top of the store where we experienced some good views of the city. The sales pitch wasn't too aggressive and we were pretty much used to it by now. At the end of the day we gave our two tour guides the remaining amount of euros that I had in my pocket which was only a 5 euro note and about 80 euro cents. Alethea told them in French, which they spoke, in the beginning that we didn't have any money. They did ask for more but I'm pretty sure they were satisfied with what they got.

Alethea with our two Tangier tour guides

We did experience an interesting event while in Tangier. Toward the end of our walk we noticed a crowd of mostly men and shouting in Arabic. I quickly noticed they were carrying a body on wood stilts that was wrapped in a green decorated blanket. I knew right away it was a funeral procession and wasn't too alarmed. We moved over to the side of the street and watched it go by. One American lady that was probably around 70 turned to us and wondered what they were shouting, she then said “probably death to Americans”. It was a classical stereotypical incident. Alethea told her they were shouting tributes to the person whose funeral they were celebrating. In all the countries I've been where Islam is the predominant religion I've never heard a bad word about Americans.

roof top view of Tangier, Morocco

Another port of call I enjoyed was Funchal, Portugal on the island of Madeira. Funchal has a tropical feel to it. It has some traditional Portuguese architecture with some pedestrian only streets to wonder around. It is a popular place for Europeans to visit since it a relatively close destination with a tropical climate. Winston Churchill used to visit here quite often back in the 30's and 40's according to a brochure. It would have been nice to do a little more exploring throughout the island. It was overcast and it rained a little bit while we were there. It was the only port that we didn't walk into town from on our ship. We could have but it would have taken at least 30 minutes. The cruise ship arranged buses to take us closer into town. Of course, there was some arguing over people jumping in front of other people in line as we boarded the bus on the way into town.

church in Funchal, Portugal

I did enjoyed our visits to Cartagena, Spain and Ajaccio, France. These two didn't stand out that much to me. There wasn't anything really bad about them they were just small or there wasn't much to see. The weather was nice in Cartagena and there were some pretty views overlooking the city. In Ajaccio we got to see the house where Napoleon was born and the church he was baptized.

To be continued........

Link to photo album:

Cruise Pics