M.Travels

I am told there are Reddits for this, and possibly even an app that can help you turn any cruise into this (especially the larger ships, and there is something you hang on your door to indicate your interest). I am ace so this is not my thing at all, but I hope you and your fiancé have a great time.

The Viking bars have a menu of non-alcoholic cocktails, and they will make other drinks “Virgin” for you as well. The price is slightly lower than the loaded cocktails, maybe around 5 a drink or so …

Norbert’s last day was the onboarding day for our cruise (last day for this contract, not with Viking … staff go home for about 2.5 months every ten months or so before starting a new assignment). Norbert went home the morning of the captain’s reception, and we are under Helmut now.

We are on the Sea now and all three of these shows were in the first Viking Daily as upcoming events … all three have been replaced with other musical events. Janice Martin is the special event musicality person Viking brought on board, she does a lively show with songs and a violin, etc. It is very good if she appears as an option for your future cruises.

We are on the Viking Sea this week and did the Wacky Rollers river tubing safari today … we just loved loved it. Our group was about 12 folks from the ship, and the whole excursion was three hours from the dock to the return (including signing a waiver). The drive to the river was about 30 minutes and you were in the river for over an hour. There were about five or six fellas who floated along and kept everyone moving, away from the biggest rocks, out of bushes, etc. The river was gorgeous and we all had a great time. No idea how you book this outside of an official shore excursion but our group had a lot of fun! A few tips: sunscreen is a must! A lot of the trip is in the shade but the sun parts are real. lift your booty when you are going over the rapids so you don’t get bruised the rum punch at the end is very very strong but if you dip your fruit in it then that helps

We are boarding the Pride a couple of days from now and I am realizing our all inclusive did not include laundry, but I would love for us to add this … can I do it when we Board or do I need to call? We don’t have phone service on the island we are on now but I think I can call when I get to San Juan.

We are currently on the Sea and even though the first day line-up said there would be a Beatles night and an ABBA night it does not look like that will happen. We are on night five and at least two more nights will be special entertainers (a magician and a “multi-instrumentalist named Janice something, she is actually fabulous). We would love love a Dancing Under the Stars event but I have never seen one … the lack of opportunities to dance is one of the big reasons we are looking around for other options for our next big vacation. We looooove Viking but Torshavn is usually people just awkwardly looking at one another while the band plays cover tunes and the vocalists compete with each other.

This made me laugh because my only other Viking was Alaska and the Sea right now is a MUCH younger crowd. In Alaska I was one of maybe, maybe 10 -12 (??) people under 50 on board. There were two people in their twenties, someone’s grandkids, and maybe four in their early thirties that were also traveling with older relatives. Then there were about three couples in their working years on vacation …. Everyone else was long past retirement age! Compared to that experience this Sea voyage seems so young! Several younger couples, people under thirty, etc.

Absolutely allowed … not seeing it quite as much on our current warm-weather cruise, but when we did a (very cold) Alaskan cruise this was the standard for over half the women on board at night. Lots of tunics, often with cardigans on top. The ship was warm but we were all in cold-weather mode and as some folks have noted we liked to go outside if there was a whale or something.

Posting to add my experience re: pre-cruise booking and on-ship booking. We are currently on the Sea and dining options never opened up for us, even though we are in PV1. I finally called two weeks before sailing and was told the whole “tables for two” story. They made us two reservations and told us we would be at a table for four one night and a table for six another, but when we showed up we were given tables for two at both places. Dinner was wonderful both times, no complaints at all. Now the hiccups … I naively did not worry about making any additional reservations because it had been so easy on our previous cruise. So on the first day I open my app and make an additional Manfredis reservation that is available, and then drifted over to the Chef’s Table and asked for a second reservation, since there was another menu we were interested in … we were told no. We already had maxed out and we were booked up. I was surprised and felt kind of chastised. Honestly I did not pay attention enough to realize this was “a thing.” They advised checking back later in the week because things might open up or people might cancel. So I did on Day 5, and was able to book CT for Christmas night at 8 which I was told was the only slot available. The restaurant reservations are one of the biggest places we have noticed a difference since our last cruise when it comes to service. Last cruise we had a Penthouse Junior Suite (1) and whenever we asked we got the restaurant we wanted at the time we wanted. Of course that cruise cost almost 2x as much as this cruise, so there is likely a correlation there … they would just look up our room number and make it happen. This cruise they look up our room number and we make do. I definitely don’t want to take up more than our share of space, and this is a lovely experience, and we do love the Restaurant. But we can feel the change for sure.

Will let Jim give the official reply, but we were there yesterday and there was not a peep of an issue. We did not even have to wear our masks on the submarine excursion if we did not want to wear them, after Viking told us that would be required. The sub employees said the mask mandate had just been lifted.

You might try asking over on the port boards

Just posting for future cruisers: the Viking Sea is docked at Pier 4 today.

Thank you for doing this! It was really enjoyable to read and helpful for planning.

You might look at the “Mega Rock Star” packages on Virgin. I have not sailed them myself but we looked seriously there for a while and they have some offerings in the price range and the level you are looking for … Especially if you are willing to avoid “prime time” sailings like New Year’s etc. when it seems to me the rates more than double. Another option to look at is “The Retreat” on Celebrity ships. There are also supposedly ways to link three suites together on some Windstar ships (using door/wall configurations) to make a mega suite with its own balconies, etc. I have never looked at that but I saw something about it over on the Windstar boards a couple of weeks ago. Good luck and have fun!!

Any updates on this?

Found this thread and just wanted to say it was super helpful … not sure if it is still the same but we walked the couple blocks down to Pier 1 tonight and it seems very doable. We are really looking forward to boarding tomorrow!

Hope you are having a delightful last day on your cruise! We are staying across from the harbor and excited to see the ship come in!

Thank you, they emailed me today and said we are not in Old San Juan we are at the Pan Am.

Does anyone know which port Windstar uses?

We looked at holiday cruises for six months and finally booked a Christmas cruise during Thanksgiving and then a New Year’s cruise yesterday (there were extenuating circumstances on why we had to wait). Having watched cruise after cruise sell out, I can confirm your choices will narrow drastically … but at the same time there will be rooms available.

I enjoyed something of a "progressive breakfast" on several mornings of my last Viking cruise, and hope to do it again this time: Some mornings I would naturally wake up VERY early, before most of the ship, and read while watching the sun come up until Mamsen's opened. Then I would go down and enjoy a quiet up of tea, and two slices of their marble rye bread with butter and sprinkle of salt and pepper. Delicious! Then I would take my hot beverage of choice back to my room, get ready for the day, and collect my travel companion. She prefers a more formal breakfast, so depending on when we were scheduled for our morning activities we would eat at the World Cafe or the DR. Both were lovely. No matter what I ordered or where, I always asked for a small serving of the congee to to go with it. This is an amazing savory breakfast porridge they have out every morning. It always perked me up and gave me extra energy for my daily adventures. If you have not tried it yet, I highly recommend it because it tastes great on the ship and I have yet to perfect the recipe at home.

Oh yes please do! 🙂

Don't worry too much! There will be folks who spend their cruise commenting on what everyone else is wearing, but we don't pay them too much attention ... it seems to be a form of entertainment for some people on vacation. A few years ago we were in Yellowstone and this one couple ended up eating near us a few times, and the woman kept a running commentary on everyone in her field of vision: what they were wearing, how much salt they used, how fast the staff cleaned the tables, every little detail. She actually made OUR vacation better because we were so grateful we were not traveling with her we did not get annoyed with anyone in our group the entire trip! I hope you and DH have a fab time.

We booked a Penthouse Junior Suite for our Alaskan cruise earlier this year and it included laundry. We used it a LOT and it was great. The first couple of packets we sent out came back immediately and with no issues, so it lured us into complacency. We did have a couple of issues later in the cruise, presumably because so many other people were sending things down there at that point. A few tips: - Always keep your "receipts," and it is nice to keep them in the same place and let the room steward know where they are too. If there is an issue they can sometimes solve it without involving you by checking the original copy of the receipt. - If you are wondering about how to describe an item them you should use more than one word ... the laundry folks are probably not native speakers of your language, and more than once they were confused about the words we used to describe things. That was on us. By the end of the cruise we simply asked our room steward what she would call something and then used that word. The most confusing item was a "buff" - one of those long, circular neck things that we found INVALUABLE for Alaska as they can easily convert from a neck warmer to ear cover to hair tie to many other uses. We described this as a "scarf" and the laundry described it as a "bra" and chaos followed! - If you want to wear something to dinner on a specific night, send it out for pressing at LEAST one day before, preferably two. Overall it is a great perk and we loved it, but we learned a lot for our next cruise!