harryfat1

The police boat was out in the middle of the harbor directing traffic. I could hear him over the boat's speaker system telling the small boats to move out of the way when these mammoth cruise ships were coming through. Don't want a 165K Gross Ton ship smacking into you.... There's the yellow water taxi making a run between Fort Lauderdale and Hollywood Beach (going as far as Margaritaville, where we were yesterday) Gotta love the Samsung zoom lens. No need to bring my SLR to the Caribbean anymore like in the old days The police boat with 3 motors. Probably can go pretty fast

Hanging out with my new BFFs on deck 15 trying to position the phone lens in between the openings of the glass partition to get a clear photo

Yeah, same partitions. Wow. I wouldn't be happy on glacier day in Alaska if I had to deal with these.

My older son and my wife went to deck 14 for the sailway party while my younger son and I went upstairs so you folks get a bonus sailway coverage from 2 perspectives. First, we will run through my pictures and then switch to hers afterward, or else it becomes too confusing if I insert the pictures in the exact order they were taken. The pilot ship out there chilling waiting for us to cast off We cast off a little after 5 PM. Per the port schedule I read online, we were supposed to be the last ship to sail away that day but for whatever reason the other Princess ship and the Viking ship were still in port when we sailed away. I want to say the Disney ship was also still in port when we left even though they were supposed to leave 1 hour before us but they could have sailed before us. I didn't make it to the far Aft to check but I know for sure the Princess and Viking were still there next to us when we cast off. Maybe they are waiting for some delayed flights?

Onward with the trip report: +++++++++++++ By then it was close to 5 PM and we wanted to be on the top deck for the sailaway party. Made it to deck 15 and I am probably in the 0.1% minority in voicing this complaint – I am not a fan of these protective glasses. They get in the way of taking pictures To take pictures, you need an unobstructed view. Taking pictures through any glass is not good. Don’t know why they have them in the Odyssey. Maybe they have them on all the Quantum class as I assume they serve to protect the folks from the wind during sailing? I know they didn’t have them on the top decks on the Navigator. Especially if you try to take pictures on an Alaska cruise, these glasses would be a major distraction. For Alaska, you want a wide deck area with no glass in the way to see the scenery. I know the Quantum and Ovation does Alaska run annually, I hope they don't have glass partitions like the Odyssey or all the photographers will be unhappy. As such, I highly recommend people go down to deck 5 for the sail away as there are no glass barriers if photography is important to you. But my older son and wife wanted to be where the action was on the top deck as they wanted to be at the dance party so that’s where we ended up.

I was going to remind you that RCI would charge you $10 per hanger (similar to the $25 beach towels) that you misplaced until you said you weren’t serious…🤪 As for the original Love Boat TV show, Princess hired the actor Gavin MacLeod (Captain Stubing) as their salesperson for a few years after the TV show went off the air as people still associated the Princess Cruises as part of the Love Boat. I remembered flipping through the old Princess travel brochures in the past with his face in the front.

Thanks for the info. I want to talk more about the dining room spacing but I don't think anyone else cares so I will move on. But just a quick question on turning over 3X, that only applies to my time dining, right? Set dining only has 2 seatings (say 5:30 and 8 PM) so those tables are only 2X?

Mark, Thanks for the pointer on the PDF copy of the compass. I’m sure many people will benefit from this. I am a hard-copy kind of guy. I print stuff out at work when my colleagues just read from the computer. I am old school in that I need to highlight/write on a piece of paper before my fuzzy old-man memory can retain the info. So I prefer hard copies to touch/feel it. In the old days, we used to get multiple copies of the compass, we would mark up one copy with highlighter and pens the night before so we could have a game plan for the next day. Then I take a clean copy home and scan those as a front page of my daily trip report. But the younger generation, like my sons in college, they never print anything out. They can just read from the monitor and tablet. I can’t do that…

Thanks for the info. Too bad you guys are experiencing a storm. Other than last year when CA got drenched, we typically don't have long storms. Most of our storms dump about 0.5 to 1 inch of rain at a time. Any more than that we will get flooding as our drainage system isn't equipped to handle the east coast type of rain. We typically more about drought and wild fires than too much rain.

Bonus coverage for the night before I log off. Saw the full moon tonight from the parking lot leaving work tonight. Just had to take a picture of the moon. Crazy zoom from the Samsung cell phone. I will have more moon shots from the cruise later on

Princess ship is next to sail off 20231223_163745.mp4

So besides not having the luggage delivered to the cabin, they also haven't opened the balcony dividers between our 2 cabins as you can still see the partition with my wife on the other side taking a panoramic picture of the area Here's her picture showing a very obstructed balcony view

As we missed the Celebrity ships sail out, the first real one we saw was the HAL ship

You need to ask Mark @h20skibum about the video link to his yet-to-be-established YouTube channel. He is much more of a DIY person than me in having a hack for all travel-related ideas so you will have to ask him on the hangers solution as well.

So if he never showed up at the family dinner that night, you wouldn't have ever known you had this relative all these years? Your mom's generation all knew he existed but not like they talked about him in front of you even when you were at the age of 25. That pretty much fits my description of people knowing he exists but doesn't want to tell the kids about him. If you were a tad closer to a relative like your mom's sibling or cousin, there might be some visits. So going forward you will look at the RCI photo area with a different set of eyes...

One advantage of having a port-side balcony at Port Everglades is that you get to see and hear the other ships sail out. At the starboard side, you will be overlooking the cruise terminal/cargo containers. I especially enjoyed the Princess ship sailing off by playing the Love Boat Theme Song. As a child of the TV media growing up, I watched more episodes of Love Boat than I care to admit. That theme song is forever embedded in my brain so whenever I hear that song via the ship horn, it stirs up old memories that tuck at the heart. The Disney ship sailed later than us or else they would play the Wish Upon a Star theme song when they cast off. Anyway, we actually missed the first ship out of the harbor of the Celebrity Apex sailing away. This is the only picture I had of them already out of the channel at 4:22. In checking the sail time, they must have been in a hurry to make it to their first port as the 2 Celebrity ships had a 3:30 sail away time. That’s the earliest sailing time I have ever seen. I hope nobody flies in on the day of the cruise for Celebrity with such an early sailing time. They would need to be at the terminal no later than 2 PM as the ship must turn in the passenger manifest 90 minutes before sailing.

By then it was 3 something so we headed back to the cabin since they had promised the suitcases would be delivered. Of course, they were not delivered. OK, never mind. Not going to wait for these to be delivered. Just DIY as I know where the luggage is – just down the hallway less than 30 feet away. So we went down the hallway and just grabbed our luggage from the group and brought it in to unpack. In not watching Mark’s YouTube video on the speedy unpacking hacks, we were just going about it the old school way in slowly unpacking the shirt-by-shirt method into the closet.

Bionic Bar – this area deserves its own space. We are not drinkers so you will never find us in any bars, but we like to sit around the bionic bar area and just watch the robots shake their butts (do robots have butts?). You order from the tablet and can see from the mirror wall displays when your drink will be made. More of the entertainment part of the cruising we enjoy.

Onward with the trip report ++++++++++ We walked all the way forward on deck 5 to the photo gallery (visiting the uncle in prison) but since they were not open yet (the ship hadn’t sailed), we just looked at the pricing for a few miscellaneous items. Somehow this is interesting to me as we have a “stowaway” wheelchair from the Symphony of the Seas aboard the Odyssey…

Were you going in at the same time nightly? Given the size of your party, I would think the dining folks will want to assign you guys to a fixed time/location as it’s hard to find a table for 10 nightly on short notice especially when we were sailing at 125% capacity.

Thanks for the compliment. Nice to be talking to you again after all these years. I highly recommend you stop after the second dessert. The third one will definitely keep you up at night along with the second prime rib from day one…

So if you don’t like the seats, do you just tell the wait staff you will wait until the next table that fits your criteria and go back in front of the line and wait? What is your average wait time? I think this strategy will be easier to implement with a table for 2. Once the party size gets to be 10+ like Brian's clan or other big groups, they may have a long wait if they keep on passing on the next table's availability.

Thank you both for sharing your charging options. There are many choices to pick from nowadays. As long as the newbie cruiser knows not to bring a surge protector onboard and has their charging equipment instead of just relying on the ship providing the wall plugs. Oh, one more thought on this topic – the older ships (like Navigator) did not have USB plug sockets inside the cabins when we sailed on her a few months ago. So do some research on your ship to know what is available.

Yeah, I hear you on the lack of space in the MDR. In theory, they should gain some sort of benefit just by consolidating the 4 smaller dining rooms into one. For example, instead of 4 separate entrances and foyers in each dining room, by combining them into one, there should be at least some space savings there as now there’s only a need for one. Not sure what the square footage is for the area in the middle of deck 4 but if we assume say 10,000 square feet and divide that by 2,100 passengers (normal occupancy of Odyssey per Wiki is 4,200 and divided by 2 seatings), we might eke out 4.7 extra square feet of space per passenger if they filled the middle space. Speaking of capacity, I was going to wait until day 2 to talk about this but they said we had 5,269 people on our cruise. Which is 125% of double capacity (4,200 is 100%). Much higher than the historical 110% capacity of historical Holiday sailings. Part of the trend of more people cruising at a much higher price in 2023. Having 125% capacity for our sailing, meant the ship was filled to the rafters with parents stuffing their kids in the third and fourth berths which meant very tight seating areas in the dining room. They probably had to add extra seats in many areas just to accommodate everyone. Perhaps someone who is sailing say this week might experience less cramped dining quarters if this week is just the typical 100% capacity without the holiday crowds. If we do the simple math of 5,269 less 4,200 of double occupancy, that’s 1,000 extra people they need to find seats for (in reality it might only be 800 as some people go to specialty dining/windjammer). Nevertheless, these extra bodies take up space. I tried to Google the MDR capacities of RCI ships but I don’t think they publish that or else I was going to do some analysis on average square footage allocated per passenger on different classes of ships to see which ships have more dining space. My gut feeling is the older the ships are, the more MDR space they have as they don’t have as many specialty dining venues for people to venture to, and therefore the ship designers will have to dedicate more MDR seats for them instead of the new class of ships having many other non-MDR dining. My fuzzy old man memory want to say back in my 2014 Allure of the Seas trip report, I did an analysis of Windjammer space on that ship as it was woefully inadequate in size. I can’t get any data on the Odyssey to do the same for its MDR. But this might be a good thing for most of the readers as they don’t care about me calculating how they can get an extra 3.76 square feet of dining space on different ships. I will get more “likes” if I post pictures of the bar menu as the people just want to know how much the Bahama Mama costs…🤪

Royal Theater. Pretty standard compared to other RCI ships. However I wonder as these RCI ships get bigger, are they building bigger theaters? These look similar to the size of the Voyager class ships at first glance without counting each row and seat. Does anyone have the theater capacity for each RCI-built ship?