harryfat1

After playing with Shuffleboard, we walked around the top deck for a bit and then headed back down'' There’s a glass walkway at the top deck looking down Kids pool area. Besides missing the miniature golf, we also miss the water slide from the Navigator. As much as we like the Odyssey, we missed some of the "older stuff" that is a mainstay of the older ships like water slides/miniature golf/Studio B. Seaplex has the laser tag walls up

They have a chessboard as well

After breakfast, we made it back to the cabin to see the captain sailing faster at 20.5 knots Sunny day outside One thing I dislike about the Q-class ships is they don’t have miniature golf. That was one activity we always played as a family but RCI ship designers somehow couldn’t fit in a golfing range on the ship somewhere so no miniature golf on this cruise. Instead, we went to play the granddaddy of all cruise ship activities – shuffleboard. Way, before there was rock climbing and Flowriders, the classic cruise activity in the old days, was shuffleboard. On older ships like the Voyager class, the shuffleboard area is located on the Promenade deck. But on the Oasis it’s located on the top deck and it’s WAY shorter/smaller as the ship designers are just paying lip service to this event in shoving it on some nook and cranny area just to say they have it. This is the size of the board on the Odyssey This is the board on the Navigator. Notice the difference?

While he played, I went next door to the Teppanyaki room and took a couple of pictures. I also thought about eating here when I was comparing the costs of specialty dining lunches. We had eaten this style of food before and while it was fun, it wasn’t anything too special we couldn’t get elsewhere. One thing I want to point out is that for the Odyssey, the seating is 4X4X4 on the 3 sides of the chef. On some ships I saw on Youtube it was 2X4X2 with the sides only having 2 people. If you are the 4th person on the side, you are seeing part of the cooking action via the back/underneath the chef’s armpits instead of a direct view. So keep that in mind as I think the newer ships have this configuration to maximize the number of guests inside but decrease the value for some. Personally speaking, if I got the last seat on the side, RCI should give me a 20% refund for having a bad angle as I am there for the show more than the food

Onward with the trip report +++++++++++++ On the way out of the Windjammer, we met the piano man. The dude is very friendly and chatted with us for a while and asked us what song we wanted to hear as he would play us a song I don’t remember what song the boys picked. I know I would have requested the “Piano Man” from Billy Joel. The dude has a tablet where he can quickly look up any song’s sheet music and play them for you Speaking of Piano Man...

Oh, very nice. Enjoy your cruise. Hopefully, you will have a nice view of the NYC skyline sailing out later today.

Cool. They issued the 10K slightly earlier this year. I don't check the regular RCI boards so I didn't know. I just come in daily to this link and upload my pictures and then take off to watch YouTube videos for my next vacation. Since it's already been discussed, there's no need for me to reinvent the wheels here so we will just stick to the script and wrap the the trip report.

Yeah, I didn't think it was an outlandish request to get a different set of tags but he didn't want to give them to me. But since the boys had 2 tags each and we only had 1 luggage each, I just used their tags instead.

Back to the cabin to wake up the fam and looking at the TV, we are sailing at 20.3 knots Lots of people at the windjammer at 9 AM as we could only find a table at the very back of the Windjammer Some people are really trusting in leaving their phones on the table while they reserve the table and get the food without anyone there. I wouldn’t recommend doing that in any big city… As this was my second breakfast, just got salmon and an omelet and some fruits

One thing of note for the Odysseyy door to the outside deck is that there are two sets of doors to get outside so that the people inside the ship don’t get a big blast of heat or wind every time someone walks in or out. The area where I took the picture is the "buffer" zone. The other glass door with the middle area as buffer zone Is it my imagination or does the cloud in the middle look like Donald Duck’s face? The cloud next to that seems to be some sort of arch. Or maybe my coffee isn’t strong enough and I’m still sleepwalking?

Since we had time today being a sea day, no need to wake up the family too early, I walked around deck 5 after finishing part 1 of the breakfast Saw a ship far out on the horizon (see red arrow) and zoomed in. I assume that was the Carnival Horizon docked next to us in Aruba yesterday as they are now heading up north as well

Got my regular chocolate croissant and coffee but you can get other types of croissants with meat and eggs as well

Open, Open, Open…. I was the first person in line waiting for the magical 7 AM opening While in line, I noticed there were words on top of the café. Never paid attention to it until I was bored standing there. So for those who will be sailing on the Odyssey, look up at the cafe. Are the words on all the Q-class ships?

Few random pictures of decks 4 and 5 before going to my favorite café 270 to be the first person in line at 6:57 to wait for them to open You only see these types of stairs on cruise ships

The MDR wasn't opened yet at 6:55 AM as I walked up to the walled flowers as I wanted to take a video to show the moving flowers. I found out that the flowers are motion activated as there was some sensor near the front of the entrance and unless you trigger it, the flowers are still. Look carefully at the first couple of seconds of the first video as the flowers were still until I triggered the sensor by walking up to the path 20231229_065117.mp4 20231229_065308.mp4

Nobody was visiting the crazy aunt before 7 AM A couple of people ahead of me at Guest Services early in the morning. So I talked to the guy at the far right and explained to him that I wanted a later luggage tag as we were not in a hurry to get off the ship and besides our tags are different than our kids. The lazy-ass bugger didn’t want to give me new tags. He just said we could get off whenever and after our time slots were called and we could just go to different stations to get our luggage. Which was what we didn’t want as we wanted everyone’s luggage to be in the same section. I didn’t do the passenger survey or else I would have given him a 2 out of 10 for bad service as how hard is it to just give me new tags? So instead of getting new tags, since they issued 2 tags per passenger, I just used the extra tags from the boy’s group and attached them to ours luggage instead

Instead of going to the secret door down to deck 5, I went the regular route as I needed to go to Guest Services to talk to them about switching luggage tags to be at a later time as we have a late flight out of FLL on day 9. Stopped by Wonderland. For those unfamiliar with this restaurant, it’s themed after Alice in Wonderland and it’s a specialty restaurant. They don’t serve lunch or else I would have opted to dine here. The food is odd and different and it would provide enough of a different experience that we crave. The family wanted to dine here as we all watched the Youtube videos and it was different than your same old, same old meals but at $55/pp for dinner, CFKACD passed on it and instead opted for 2 lunches ($18 and $13) and still save money. I also heard that Wonderland on the Odyssey didn’t have Mad Hatter as in other ships and that was supposed to be a big part of the character-related dining experience. So maybe we will wait for an RCI ship that has the Mad Hatter before trying it. Not a very big venue on the Odyssey You see "the finger" as well as the Bionic Bar on the other side of the ship Time to queue up the Jefferson Airplane song:

Day 6 – Sea Day 6:40 in the morning. Actually, it was 7:40 on the old time but with the time zone difference, we gained an hour so in theory, we got back the extra hour of sleep we lost the other day. Nobody was in the hallway at that time of the morning.

Here’s the last picture for the night, at 11:18, it’s 27 degrees Celsius or 81 degrees Fahrenheit as the captain is putting “the pedal to the metal” is leaving Aruba at 20.1 knots. I guess the earlier he leaves town, the slower the ship can travel and save the company a few dollars in fuel as higher speed is likely less economical in terms of fuel usage. We didn’t walk near as much in Aruba as in Curacao as we were on the bus tour and the port area wasn’t interesting enough to keep us engaged for a long period. Oh, yeah, changing the clock back one hour tonight Time to queue up a song about time This concludes day 5 of the trip report. ++++++++++ As always, thanks for reading along. 3 more days left on this cruise report and 2 of which are sea days where we don’t do much so they should be much shorter. The only detour we might take is that RCCL should be issuing their 10-K report sometime next week. Maybe next weekend we might have the dreaded numbers discussion.... ++++++++++++

Seaplex at 11 PM. All the structures used for the laser tag have been deflated Well, nothing else was happening so we decided to call it a night since we had been getting up early the past couple of days for tours. Time to go back to the cabin and rest Got back to the cabin and saw they had issued us luggage tags to get off the ship. Since I didn’t go on their handy dandy app to tell them about flight info, they assigned us a group number earlier than I wanted. Which is no big deal but then they assigned the boys one group number and my wife and I another group number. I rather have all our luggage together, regardless of the number. Arrr, need to pay a visit to the dreaded guest services tomorrow morning.

Very quiet and colorful at the back of the ship. The skypad can be seen far away at night as its pink/reddish color stands out You can barely see Aruba at 10:30 in the background

We were here at the back of the ship trying to take pictures of the stars with mixed results. That is supposed to be a star But at least the moon shot is still decent as you can see the moon easily from above

Meanwhile, we were at the pool deck waiting for the party to start at 10