Sailing the Es-cap-ay (Escape)- Western Caribbean Review June 24, 2017

Hi guys! I’m Katie and welcome to my Escape Western Caribbean Review! This is my first full week back to work after our glorious vacation so I figured it’s time to buckle down and write my review! This will be a long one because-

#1- I am a planner and I have already written a full daily outline of my review and I have lots trip details to share with you!

#2- I love photos so there will be lots of those to add

#3- I absorbed so many helpful tips and tricks from the reviews I read before I left, I’d like to pass on as many as I can.

Before we set sail, I studied all the reviews I could find prior to our cruise (thanks gambee, cruiseguys2009, CruiseLifeRick and many more!) and I’d like to pay it forward to anyone else who is counting the days until their own Escape cruise! You can also see tripleboom’s review of the same sailing for a totally different perspective! I hope you enjoy as I dive into our travel journey which best described as a relaxing vacation seeking sand, sloths, steak and sunsets- in no particular order.

Who We Are

My husband, Nathan, and I are in our mid-30s and the Escape was our 4th cruise. Nathan is a controls electrician and I’m a wedding photographer in South Carolina. Our two kids, Kasiah (10) and Patrick (7) have been on 3 cruises as well so they feel like they’re pretty much cruise experts. This cruise really was new territory for us because all our previous cruises have been with Royal Caribbean (check out my signature if you’d like to read those reviews) and this was our first attempt at jumping ship to Norwegian. So you’ll find that a lot of my comparisons are to Royal cruises and ships.

Why the Escape?

We had considered a few different vacation options from land-based all-inclusives in Cozemel, to rentals on Barbados, to fancy hotels in Puerto Rico, but we always came back to cruising. I love being able to explore 3-4 counties in a week long trip and there’s something magical about staring into that vast expanse of water and having the waves rock you to sleep. So, we decided on on the RC Oasis of the Sea Western Caribbean. Wait, you say. This isn’t a Oasis review! Well, things got a little more complicated.

My husband has been wanting to become scuba certified since our first Oasis cruise in 2010 and the Oasis offers an on-board PADI certification. But around the 100 day mark, some health issues threatened to banish him from scuba eligibility and that was pretty much our main reason for going back on the Oasis. I’ve been curious about NCL ever since the Blue Man group started performing on the Epic, so I checked the options, and the Escape had a similar Western Itinerary with one extra stop, so at the almost 90 day mark, we canceled our Oasis reservation and jumped on the Escape!

There’s so much to love about the Escape, lovingly called the “Es-Cap-ay, hey, it’s spelled just like Escape!” by the kids all week. Anyone with children around the ages of 5-12 probably has this Finding Nemo saying burn into their minds too, but in case you don't here's a short youtube clip.

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The first thing that drew me in about the Escape were the waterslides! None of the RC ships that we had been on up to this point had waterslides. I watched a youtube video of the Escape tube slide (Aqua Racer) and I was pretty much sold then. I also love big ships with lots to do, so the ropes course was a draw too.

The itinerary was interesting to me and my husband. The only port we’ve been to is Cozemel and we never did get to see the Mayan ruins that we wanted to tour on our first trip, so that was a plus!

Finally, the NCL deals for booking were very tempting. We chose to go with the Unlimited Dining package and the shore excursion credit. I sort of enjoy being “off the grid” on vacation so the free internet didn’t really interest me. I did, however, go back and forth about whether we should get the unlimited beverage package, even though my husband and I are not big drinkers. My reasoning is that it would be nice to grab a glass of wine with dinner without the mental cash register dinging.

What talked me out of the UBP, is that as I understood it, if you book the UBP special for the room, everyone in the cabin got it as well, or in the kid’s case, they got the soda package at full price since the UBP only covers two passengers. The gratuities for my husband and I would have been around $99 each, and the soda package for the kids was $41 each. Since I don’t encourage my kids to drink soda, this would have been a waste too so we decided to just pay for any drinks we ordered a la carte. And we only had 3 drinks the entire course, so you see why it made sense for us, but even with that in mind, it was still a tempting offer. FYI- I called NCL after the 90 day mark just to see if they’d allow us to change the special options and they would.

Now to pick a room! I love having a balcony for a few romantic reasons- you can step out of bed and feel the ocean breeze, you can sit and soak up the rays of a glowing orange sunset- and for a few practical reasons- swimsuits never seem to dry in the bathroom, sometimes there’s odors in a cabin where it would really be nice to crack a window. Come on, you know that’s true.

To go a little extra OCD, I also looked at the ship's travel path and picked the side of the ship that would be showing the coast as we sailed from port to port (which happened to be left or port), so that, and limited 4-person room availability at the almost 90 day mark, set us with room 9284 if you’re curious.

We booked through AAA because we have a membership and they offer good travel insurance. It was the exact same price as booking ourselves online. Our office didn’t have discounts on NCL, but they did take care of all the reminders and they printed our luggage tags and documents for us. It also made me feel better that if we had any issues, our local agent would be there to help and they sent me travel books on Florida so that we could plan a post-cruise fun stop on the way back home.

Now comes the part that I love and the part that may bore other people to tears- planning! If you’re already starting to zone out, just skip this section- I promise I’ll get to the Es-cap-ay part soon! For those who share my deep appreciation for tripadvisor, spreadsheets, and checklists, jump on in!

Kids- to passport or not to passport. That is the question.

Our kids have been on 2 Caribbean cruises prior to this one with just birth certificates including one out of San Juan, so I didn’t plan on getting them passports until my travel agent pointed out in a lot of foreign countries, if you get sick while you’re there, you cannot fly back home until arrangements for a passport are made, which could potentially delay you getting appropriate medical care. Eek, that’s a scary thought. Considering a few years back when my son was very close to requiring emergency hernia surgery, I figured that I’d rather be safe than sorry. It’s pricey but we went to the post office right after the reservation was booked and filed the paperwork to get the kid’s passports. The passports arrive in 3 weeks.

Excursions- use ship or not use ship. That is the other question.

I’m having too much fun with my new info-graphic app (Adobe Spark) so here’s another one!

So, our promotional shore excursion credit gave us a whopping $50 per port to use on shore excursions so you’d think we’d book all our trips through the ship, right? Let’s do some research! My main starting point for research was the Ports of Call forums and google. I found a list of place we might want to go for each port and then researched the reviews for the places/excursion companies on trip advisor as well as the potential timelines (did they give us plenty of time to get back to the ship on time), stress levels (would I be jumping on buses in a country that I didn’t speak the language, etc.), and cost. I’ll talk about it more as I review each port but I looked at the pros and cons and costs of independent vs ship excursions at every port, except Harvest Caye where it’s go ship or go home.

So that I can ease you slowing into my neurotical cruise planning world, I’ll just start with the daily chart that I make for each vacation that includes the ports we’ll visit, times in port and what excursion we plan to take (organize level beginning). If you want to totally geek out, also add in the times of all the dinners that you pre-booked (organized level medium) because even though it has freestyle dining, it’s good to plan ahead, and finally the possible activity times based on all the past freestyle dailies that you’ve dug through cruise critic to find like Gollum looking for “my precious” (organized level expert)- double geek points for that one!

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Let me know if you want a copy of this Word document template and I’ll send it your way!

Very impressed with how organized you were with planning everything! Great job!

Sent from my iPhone using Forums

Packing- cram it in or plan it out?

Now there’s really no question there. I always plan it out. My daughter has joined me in my love of lists and we’ve had a clothing packing system that works great on our other cruises and we call it our “clothing chart”. Want to join the insanity? It’s easy with this step-by-step guide.

Step 1- Take pictures of all the outfits that you think you might wear on the trip. Heck, try a few of them on and model them.

“Try this on, Mom said. It’ll be fun, she said.”

Goggles are for authenticity.

Step 2- Create a document with all the activities that you have planned for the day and anything that might require a wardrobe change and start adding the photos under each day. Feel free to use photos more than once or mix and match tops and bottoms to save room in the suitcase. (Or be like me and just keep adding more bags!)

Step 3- Pack all your garments according to date! For my DS, we’ve always packaged his outfits into gallon sized zip lock bags marked with the day of the week so it’s super organized, but I decided to try out packing cubes for myself. I saw a few recommendations on a forum post on the topic, and decided to go with the Bagail 6 assorted packing cube set on amazon because it looked like it was well made, it had lots of sizes that I could try so I could see which I liked best, and the price was under $25 for a set of 6.

Not my photo- from amazon

I love these cubes. The small ones were perfect for shoes and I used one of them for all the electronics cords. The medium one was good for about 4-5 outfits rolled up. The large ones were good for lots of clothes and took up about half of this large suitcase. I added a few photos below so you can see how they worked (not to scale). I even ended up ordering a second set in purple for my DD.

Not the best photo but this shows how they fit in my suitcase. I used one big cube for days 1-4 and the other for all the rest of my outfits so I only needed one cube out at a time.

One of the medium sized bags was used to house my “medicine cabinet.” Sadly, at the start of our cruise, I was getting a summer cold and I know from experience that medication on the ship costs an arm and a leg. Here’s what was included in our medicine cabinet and just a few things you might want to consider bringing along.

For motion sickness- since my first cruise, I’ve always been way over-prepared in this category, so I’ll mark what we actually used too.

• Bonine- I take one every night before bed, sleep like a baby and never have had any motion sickness even though I have slight trouble in cars/buses without medication (used)
  
• Motion sickness Patch- never used this but my husband got the prescription for one just in case
  
• Seabands for me and the kids (used)
  
• Kids Dramamine- because they’re not old enough to take Bonine (used)
  
• Motion Ease- I bought it because it said it was safe for kids and I’m not an expert but I think it’s a few essential oils. Instructions say to dab a few drops behind your ear to help with the inner ear but I personally think just the smell helped with nausea. I was glad we brought it. (used)
  
• Nausea drops
  

For general ailments-

• First aid kit with bandaids (used), moleskin for blisters (used), scissors to cut moleskin (used), benadryl for unexpected allergies
  
• Zantac (used)
  
• Anti-itch spray or cream (used)
  
• Claritin (used)
  
• Motrin (used)
  
• Anti-diarrheal- just in case
  
• Dayquil- I brought the pills and liquid since I had a feeling my husband might catch the cold- spoiler alert, he did (used)
  
• Throat lozenges- brought these mostly because I already had a cold (used)
  
• Solarcaine- we made friends on our first cruise with this :)
  
• Nail clippers
  

For kids-

• Kids claritin (used)
  
• Kids benadryl- we’ve been having a lot of seasonal allergy issues lately
  
• Kids tylenol
  
• Thermometer- because the kids have run a fever on the ship before and it’s so much more reassuring to know how under control it is
  
• Swimmer's ear medicine- just in case
  

Really like the format of this!

Looks great, just wondering how you went about booking Daniel Johnson's as can only seem to find the fb page

TIA

Travel Apps

i-concierge

I was looking for NCL apps so I downloaded the i-concierge app before the cruise and was very disappointed to see that it didn’t do anything until we got on the ship. Once on the boat though, this app showed us the daily schedule, ship activities and let you book events like the comedy show.

NEWBIE NCL CRUISE TIP- Download this app before you get on the ship or before you embark so that you don’t have to use ship’s internet to get it.

TripRider

Another app that I love is called TripRider. This is a travel app setup to handle my packing list, schedule and travel documents! I can schedule things on the calendar day by day and mark some “must do”s like “try the gelato shop on the Waterfront” so that I don’t miss anything that I meant to check out! It also stores pdf documents like excursion receipts, plan expenses, saves maps, has a place to enter people that we meet and their contact info, and my favorite part is that is has a password protected area to save things like photos of our passports, medical insurance cards, etc. You can access everything without internet so it worked for my off-the-grid plan too. It also had a diary section where I took notes of what we did every day- which I used for this review! It even makes a "trip book" with any details you select, so I used that to print our packing list and send our itinerary to our family before we left so they’d know our travel dates, hotels, and when we fly, flight numbers. Here’s a few screenshots of the packing list and schedule.

My Standard Pre-cruise checklist includes:

• Call credit card companies, which apparently you don’t need to anymore because both companies said they didn’t need that information
  
• Get cash for tips and excursions. NEWBIE CRUISE TIP- I’ve found that $50 in ones, $50 in fives, $100 in tens, several $20s more than covers most of what we need. For the large bills ($20), I figured what I needed to spend on excursions and tips (with some thick padding for just in case situations) and take about that much.
  
• Print luggage tags and documents- Thanks to AAA for covering this one for me
  
• Print excursion confirmations (NCL and independent) because you never know when you’ll need proof that you paid for something.
  
• Pay bills due while on vacation
  

After all that and asking the neighbors to grab the mail for us, we were all set!

A Note About (Many) Cameras

Ok, one last topic to cover before our adventure begins- cameras! Of course there’s more than one. Ok, there was 5 cameras on this trip if you’re counting (wait, 6 if you count my husbands phone...) but I digress.

Again a warning. My sister is a photographer as well so we can get into some pretty involved shop talk over dinner while my husband is falling asleep on his empty dinner plate, so if you feel like you’re going to get mashed potatoes on your forehead, feel free to excuse yourself. Otherwise here goes!

Camera #1- My main camera which came with me pretty much everywhere except in the water was my trusty Nikon d800 full-frame digital camera. I use this body for weddings too and I usually don’t bring along my wedding workhorse but I’ve gotten spoiled by having the d800’s dual card slots and I have a fear of card failure so it graduated from ladies in white dresses to children in snorkels.

My lens of choice was the Nikon 24-120 VR 3.5-5.6. While it’s not as fast as some of my other lenses (talking about widest apertures, not running shoes), it’s lightweight, versatile (wide angle to telephoto) and just a good lens for any daytime lighting conditions. If you’re shopping for lenses, I think this one is now just available in the constant 4.0 aperture version and it’s pricier than the original, but it’s still a great travel lens! I also brought my 14-24 2.8 lens because it’s great for indoor available light and architecture type shots, but it stayed mostly on the boat. I grabbed it in the evenings when I wanted to get photos of the pool deck with the lights on or when I wanted to get a wide view of our tiny bathroom.

Wide angle pool deck

Camera #2- The newest addition to my camera gang is the Gopro 4 Silver bought just for this trip- and I can use it for time lapses at weddings. I was so impressed with the video and photo quality of this camera. On the beach days, I’d take a few photos with the big camera and when it was time for playtime, I’d put the big camera in the locker and we’d all head out to the water with the gopro! I like having the option of video or still photos (and time lapse or burst for fast action stills. The wide angle is really fun!

Gopro shot on Harvest Caye

Camera #3- Infrared converted d200. This camera is really fun because it captures infrared light (which is usually out of the realm of visible light). The effect that has is it generally makes any foliage look white and glowing and skies can be really dark. It gives scenery an otherworldly, dreamlike quality that I really love to experiment with. Because infrared can focus at a different plane than visible light so getting sharp shots can be a little unpredictable, I chose a wide angle 15 fisheye as my default lens because it has a wide depth of field.

Infrared photo from Costa Maya

Camera #4- My trusty iphone. Not the fanciest camera but I love how easy it is to make panoramas on the fly and it’s unobtrusive, so I like using my iphone for food photos instead pulling out the big camera.

Pano of Parrot Tree Beach in Honduras

Camera #5- Since we have the go pro now, our older underwater camera Pansonic Lumix DMC-TS2 didn’t get as much use, but since it’s small and durable, it became the perfect camera to give to the kids so they can take some fun photos on their own. My daughter was a little nervous about climbing the lighthouse in St Augustine’s until I reminded her that she could get some cool photos from the top.

Well-written review. Very interesting to follow!

Sent from my iPhone using Forums

Really like the format of this!

Very impressed with how organized you were with planning everything! Great job!

Looks great, just wondering how you went about booking Daniel Johnson's as can only seem to find the fb page

 

Camera #1- My main camera which came with me pretty much everywhere except in the water was my trusty Nikon d800 full-frame digital camera. I use this body for weddings too and I usually don’t bring along my wedding workhorse but I’ve gotten spoiled by having the d800’s dual card slots and I have a fear of card failure so it graduated from ladies in white dresses to children in snorkels.

 

My lens of choice was the Nikon 24-120 VR 3.5-5.6. While it’s not as fast as some of my other lenses (talking about widest apertures, not running shoes), it’s lightweight, versatile (wide angle to telephoto) and just a good lens for any daytime lighting conditions. If you’re shopping for lenses, I think this one is now just available in the constant 4.0 aperture version and it’s pricier than the original, but it’s still a great travel lens! I also brought my 14-24 2.8 lens because it’s great for indoor available light and architecture type shots, but it stayed mostly on the boat. I grabbed it in the evenings when I wanted to get photos of the pool deck with the lights on or when I wanted to get a wide view of our tiny bathroom.

Thanks for the great review. Your pics are beautiful. I really appreciate the info about your choice of cameras and lenses. I've been thinking for weeks about which lens/es to bring on our Escape trip next month. Your thoughts on which to bring has helped me decide what is getting packed and what is not.

Thanks for the great review. Your pics are beautiful. I really appreciate the info about your choice of cameras and lenses. I've been thinking for weeks about which lens/es to bring on our Escape trip next month. Your thoughts on which to bring has helped me decide what is getting packed and what is not.

Glad to help!

I'm working on posting our Miami sailaway this evening so stay tuned!

 

“Try this on, Mom said. It’ll be fun, she said.”

Goggles are for authenticity.

 

 

 

Best picture!!!! Loving your review and all your pics, but this one is so cute :)

LOL...I just spit water all over my laptop when I saw that picture of your son. Freakin' hilarious.

Great review so far! We fancy ourselves as planners, but you take it to a whole new dimension. :)

Awesome start! Love the idea of taking pics of outfits!

This review is GREAT so far. I checked out your others but cannot see the pics. Any way for you to update your photo bucket?

Thank you guys for commenting and following along!

LOL...I just spit water all over my laptop when I saw that picture of your son. Freakin' hilarious.

Thanks! He cracks me up!

This review is GREAT so far. I checked out your others but cannot see the pics. Any way for you to update your photo bucket?

I'll check that out. I think they changed their billing from monthly to annual, which is really a pain because I only use it for reviews. That's why I switched to flickr. I'll see if I can get it straightened out though! Thanks for letting me know!

With limited vacation days, we decided to split our road trip travel from SC to Florida into two days so we didn’t have to take Friday off. The plan was to start the 4 hr drive to Jacksonville right after work, get some sleep and finish the last 5 hrs to Miami early Saturday morning. The drive was pretty uneventful and the kids were well entertained with movies.

FAMILY CRUISE TIP- Movies make traveling kids happy.

When we went on our first family cruise, we found this awesome device, Seagate Wireless, that allowed us to load videos to a drive and then drive itself creates a streaming wireless network that you can link your devices to and play movies from anywhere. The trickier part was having movies in digital format, but lots of the DVDs now include a digital copy already which is awesome. We tried the Seagate at home running 4 movies (1 on the iphone, 1 on the kindle, 1 on the TV and 1 on ipad) simultaneously and it worked fine (so each kid can watch their own movie in the car). I thought it was pretty neat for something the same price as a car DVD player. We also used this gizmo in the stateroom occasionally to play a movie around bedtime to help everyone wind down. Sidenote- Netflix also now allows you to download a few episodes of existing shows (but not movies) so if your kid loves Sophia the First, you can download a few episodes at home and then watch them without needing internet. #floridaisareallylongstate #moviesforsanity

After about 3 hours, we made a quick stop at Red Lobster somewhere off the highway. Then we headed to our crash pad for the night, the Baymont Inn and Suites, Jacksonville. No photos of the hotel/motel (my husband said if you can park in front of your door, it’s not a hotel) because for the most part because I cannot recommend it. The staff was very helpful, but there was so much road noise (the hotel was right off i-295 which was sort of out of our way in the first place) that my husband had a hard time sleeping and the hotel itself was showing quite a bit of age. Oops, planning fail. The only good news was it was only $74/night and the kids were REALLY impressed with how much better our next hotel was. There’s something to be said about setting the bar low.

Cruise day adrenaline had the whole family up and ready to hit the road by 6:00am Saturday morning. We still had a 5 hour journey to reach the Port of Miami. The drive wasn’t too bad until we started to hit Miami at which point my husband decided that plane tickets would be worth avoiding the aggravations of Miami downtown traffic. Amazingly, we survived and the fact that it was CRUISE DAY finally started feeling real as we drove through the tunnel to Port of Miami!

I’m not going to lie, the whole Port-of-Miami-at-peak-hours thing was a little overwhelming. In the past, I’ve always liked to get to the port way early, like around 9:30-10:00am. Where I know I’m going to have to sit and wait but it avoids some of that hustle and bustle rush. With our tighter travel schedule for this course, though it was unavoidable. We arrived at port about noon.

We did compare parking options and decided to make the splurge to park the car at the Port for the convenience factor even though the $20/day price was high compared to the remote lots. It was just one less thing to stress about on the start of our vacation. So Nathan pulled up to the curb at Terminal B/C and dropped myself, the kids and our many bags on the curb and headed to the garage straight ahead. The porter at the curb noticed that we had a tag on the big bag, so they quickly threw it in with a pile of other bags and ran away before I could even offer them a tip. Nathan was wondering if they’d be able to print him a luggage tag for his bag on the curb like they did with RC at Port Canaveral but I didn’t see that happening the way the porters were running back and forth without even taking time to take the money out of my hand so we moved ourselves and the bags to the terminals to wait for DH’s return in the shade.

The hustle and bustle was already increasing my anxiety level and I blanked out and started frantically wondering which terminal we were supposed to check into- B or C? Fortunately, I took a few deep breathes, told the kids to please stop running laps around the bags, and found our terminal assignment was clearly printed on our NCL travel documents. Crisis averted. Once DH returned from the garage about 10 minutes later, we held our passports and cruise documents in our hands and jumped in the security line.

Security line was wrapped around outside, but it only took about 15 minutes to get through. After they scanned all our bags, we jumping into line # 2 to get to the check-in counter. The check in line was all the way full, but we did move quickly so we filled out our health forms while walking and slowly zig zagged to the front counter!

On the wait, I noticed soooo many matching clothes. Of course there were the coordinated family reunion t-shirts, that I expect, but I saw more than one set of matching couples! They must have been wives who were best friend and bought matching dresses and then forced their husbands to put on matching Hawaiian print shirts as well. It’s a fun idea, really, but I couldn’t stop thinking Doublemint twins married Doublemint brothers or something. This is how my brain works in boring situations, so fortunately it only took about 25 minutes to get to the front but it was just enough time to imagine Doublemint secret agent lives for my twinsie couples while waiting.

After taking some photos at the counter, we got our fancy orange key cards and headed to wait for it...another line! They ran out of boarding group 16 tags but we joined that group in line up the ramps to boarding the ship. As I heard many other people mention, the entrance into the ship lacks the wow factor and I have to agree. You start walking through a crew entrance in an area where you don’t think you should be and I can’t even remember what floor we ended up on after that. We found our way to the aft elevators and by some miracle, they weren’t even busy so we went up to floor 9 to see if the rooms were open.

There was a sign on the door that the room stewards were still preparing rooms which wasn’t a big surprise, but I felt like we had too much luggage to wander around much more (maybe those extra outfits weren’t such a good idea after all). After about 5 minutes of waiting, they opened the doors and announced that most rooms are ready! That was about 1:00pm. Our rooms steward said that he had a few more things to take care of in our room, but we were welcome to leave our luggage on the bed while we grabbed some lunch. Perfect solution!

NCL NEWBIE CRUISE TIP- Go to Taste or Savor for a relaxing lunch on embarkation day.

I wasn’t sure if Taste and Savor would still be seating at 1:00 or if they went with stricter hours because of muster drill, but we were able to check in with the hostess and were seated for lunch at Savor immediately! What a great start to our cruise. I apologize because I never even thought to grab photos of the menus and I am terrible at remembering to get photos of my food before I dive in but in this case, I grabbed a photo of the kid’s cheese pizza, spinach caesar salad, and grouper sandwich- all very delicious. DH chose the duck and gave it a thumbs up.

It’s random but I really love the lighting fixtures in Taste.

We had a few signups to take care of, so we started at Splash Academy on deck 5 to sign DS & DD up for kids club! Here’s a photo of one of the rooms that the younger kids hang out in. So colorful!

Next we signed up for Escape the Big Top at the box office. The guest services gentleman said the recommended age was 13 and up but everyone is welcome, so I signed the 3 of us (DH, DD and I) up for escape room, just in case she chose to come. She’s pretty mature for a 10 yr old and she loves logic puzzles and games.

NCL NEWBIE CRUISE TIP-You can purchase the soda package for a single person on the ship, instead of the whole room.

This is another tip that I got off the forums. Everywhere I looked online, it made us get the drink packages for everyone in the room if one person got it, but sure enough we stopped by the Atrium bar and they were able to ring up the soda package for just my husband. They added a coke sticker to his key card and we were on our way! It felt good to check so many to dos off my Day 1 list before we even got to 3:00.

With only a little bit of time until muster drill, we headed back to the room to unpack a little. Here’s the Freestyle Daily for Day 1.

Stateroom

Our room felt pretty much the same size as any other cabin we’ve stay in on RC ships. Every day, our steward brought more of those blue towels to use on the pool deck or take on excursions.

Other side of the room

Balcony

Pre-sail away view from the balcony

Bathroom- this actually felt decently sized compared to some of the bathrooms in the past. I like the mirror shelves.

Shower- one of the better cruise showers. Solid door, shampoo/conditioner and body wash dispensers. The water pressure and temperature was reliable and with separate knobs for temperature and volume of water, it was easy to set the temperature for kid’s showers without getting completely soaked. #parentproblems

Our muster station was in Taste so we knew right where to go. While waiting for everyone to gather for muster, I turned off my cell service and logged into the i concierge app with our room number and could see the daily schedule on my phone- no paid internet required. FYI- we also saw the people in the room before us, listed on our "my account" on i concierge but they disappeared the next day. The muster drill was pretty much like every muster ever (but at least we had chairs to sit in.) Next up, sail away!

Sail Away

After muster drill, DH decided to hit the gym and the kids and I went up to the pool deck to watch sail away! DD had a little bit of bright light sensitivity from some recent eye issues, so we listened to the sail away party from the shady side of deck 16 near the garden cafe entrance. Miami is a beautiful port to sail away from!

So many fancy boats

It’s a big one but I bet it doesn’t have a ropes course

How cool is this little island?

Pretty beaches

Goodbye Miami!

My suitcase had arrived at the room by the time we headed out for our 5:30 dinner reservations at Taste.

NCL NEWBIE CRUISE TIP- You are allowed to book dining 90 days out.

If you can’t find a reservation for a group your size, customer service advised me to book something for larger (i.e. no 4 person options? Choose a 6 person reservation). You don’t have to make main dining room reservations with freestyle dining but I wasn’t sure what to expect so I did anyways. I would definitely make reservations for specialty restaurants, they seemed to fill up fast. You can always change the times later on the ship according to availability.

We found dinner at Taste this evening to be rather loud. The smaller rooms feel intimate- unless you’re crammed in with two very large families who are all yelling from table to table to catch up with each other on the first night of vacation. It was challenging for the 4 of us to hold a conversation, but the food was delicious. I had the asian noodle salad (kind of like italian pasta salad with big fat noodles and shrimp) and the prime rib which was amazing! Here’s my all time favorite dessert of the week- hot lava cake. It was only true hot lava cake with a melty, oozy center 1-2 nights of the week, but it was delicious no matter what state of matter is was in, especially with the ice cream and strawberries. Mmmmm. I wish I had some right now...

The whole dinner service took about an hour and 15 minutes from start to finish so I don’t think that’s too bad, especially for the first night!

The kids had been on the ship for approximately 6 hours and had not been to the pool yet! Time to change and check it out! Here’s the kiddie pool. It was much busier on sea days. It’s a saltwater pool and too deep for my 7 yr old to touch the bottom of. He’s not quite a reliable swimmer yet, so he wore his puddle jumper floatie whenever he went into the pool. There’s a shallow edge where parents can hang out. There was usually a staff member around but they seemed more like a pool rule enforcer (no jumping in, no food/drinks in pool) than a lifeguard.

The kids wanted to check out the first night of kids club, so after dropping them off, DH and I went to check out Spice H20. This area was used for sunbathing during that day and around 7:00pm they opened it up for families and played movies. This was the first night that we started a daily tradition, checking out all the treats in the late evening Garden Cafe dessert section! The hand scooped ice cream was a favorite and sometimes they had chocolate dipped fruit or marshmellows. Double Mmmmmm.

Here’s a few more random NCL NEWBIE CRUISE TIPS- The elevator two beeps means up, one beep means down. If you get disoriented, the fish on the carpet swim to the front of the ship.

Day 2 Freestyle Daily- I love that the schedule part has a tear edge so you can take it along with you!

 

What talked me out of the UBP, is that as I understood it, if you book the UBP special for the room, everyone in the cabin got it as well, or in the kid’s case, they got the soda package at full price since the UBP only covers two passengers. The gratuities for my husband and I would have been around $99 each, and the soda package for the kids was $41 each. Since I don’t encourage my kids to drink soda, this would have been a waste too so we decided to just pay for any drinks we ordered a la carte.

When guests #1 & #2 get the UBP as a promo, nobody else in the stateroom has to buy anything.

When someone BUYS the UBP, all adults in the same stateroom must have the UBP either purchased or promo. Those under 21 must get the Soda Program.

You could have had the UBP without the soda program for the kids.

Loving your review so far. Your photos are great and so are your NCL Newbie Cruise Tips! :)