tregatti

Perfect, thanks so much!

Due to a recently-diagnosed medical issue I've needed to cut out alcoholic beverages. On past cruises I've enjoyed a glass of wine with dinner & the occasional beer or gin & tonic at happy hour. I've been looking at various HAL drink menus available online, and it looks like they have Heineken 0.0 but no non-alcoholic wine or spirits seem to be listed. Has anyone been able to get NA wine or spirits on board recently (even if they're not listed on the menus)? I know I can bring on a bottle of NA wine and pay the corkage fee, so I'm considering that option if nothing else is available. Many thanks!

I am guessing here, but I suspect those books were remnants from several years ago when separate libraries were eliminated from the ships and the "library" consisted of one shelf of books located in the Explorations area. We were on the Rotterdam this spring in their (fabulous, separate) library and there was no need to check books in/out.

The new Rotterdam has an extensive library that my husband and I really enjoyed on our transatlantic this spring. Enjoy! (Also a retired librarian 🙂 )

Chocolate whiskey cake. It shows up maybe once per cruise and it's the best chocolate cake I've ever had. (Note, there's no discernable whiskey taste). Bread pudding is runner-up.

Oooh, good to know! Thanks for the tip!

The only reason I upgraded my phone last spring was because I found out my phone's OS was too old for the Navigator app to work. Good thing I tried installing the app before we left, or I would have been in bad shape. They were no longer issuing paper shore excursion tickets, everything had to be done thru the app. 🙃

If you go to the cruise deck plans website, there's a key at the bottom of each deck plan that indicates which cabins have sofas - you want to look for a room that has a circle or a square symbol to get a cabin with a sofa. Some interiors have one of the "sofa" symbols, some don't. Hope that helps!

On this April's transatlantic on the Rotterdam they had several painting classes up in the Crow's Nest in the afternoon. I don't recall seeing Tai Chi but it may well have been on the schedule - there were a lot of activities listed.

100% agree. Lincoln Center was always a highlight of our cruises, and we booked a transatlantic this spring with the expectation it would be on the Rotterdam, but it was canceled in March. I really emphasized how much we wanted it back in our post-cruise survey and from talking to others I suspect I wasn't the only one. It's encouraging to hear that there's a classical duet on at least some (one?) of the ships. I really hope they will increase the presence of classical music across the fleet.

Huh. I have a PCC who emails me regularly, and I have never done any bookings over the phone - always online. Nor did I ever request a PCC, she just started emailing me. (She seems perfectly nice BTW, but our bookings are pretty uncomplicated and I've never really had a need to contact her about anything.)