Serenade of the Seas picture heavy fun review–12 day Med cruise incl DIY port trips!

[Kreuzfahrtneuling]

Intermezzo Ravenna – Dubrovnik

 

Today we had another Centrum show.

 

Once again, I really liked the person up in the air:

 

 

They also had some other people dancing on the ground, which I didn’t care for too much though.

 

 

 

Today’s headliner show was:

 

Mhhh, let’s check it out.

 

 

 

:oNope, we didn’t like it. It was just a guy singing songs that really everybody knew and had heard a gazillion times. Sorry to say, but we got bored really quick and left after a short while.

 

 

 

Next up: Dubrovnik!

[kirian]

Eagerly awaiting Dubrovnik, Stef! I spent a long, hot summer working in Bosnia in 2008 and went to Dubrovnik for an escape on a few occassions. It is such a wonderful town (I hope you found it to be that way too... or maybe it was just such an improvement over where I was in Bosnia that it seemed better than it actually was...lol :eek:.... but I don't think so :D) Can't wait to see your photos and read what you did that day in Port!

 

Melissa

[Kreuzfahrtneuling]

Day 10 – Dubrovnik

Cruise compasses coming up:

More to come!

[mrchips14]

Do you know if there were taxi's at the ports of Revenna and Dubrovnik to get to town?

 

Ship shuttles sound expensive if you can get 4 people in a taxi.

 

Love your review.

[Hobie]

I arrived home yesterday after a fantastic Mediterranean cruise on Serenade of the Seas.

 

Of course, Stef's great review was a big help.

 

@Steph:

 

I checked the community bulletin board every day (including the first two days) and never saw any notice for any GLBT get together. This is the first cruise that I can remember that didn't have GLBT gatherings. Turns out that you probably didn't miss anything your first two days.

 

You will be amused to know that the ice machine on the outside deck, aft of Windjammer is still "temporarily" out of order! No big deal. I sure enjoyed eating breakfast out there.

 

Now I have to catch up with all of your notes since I left two weeks ago!

 

Thanks again for the great review.

 

Hobie.

Edited September 5, 2013 by Hobie

[kirian]

Do you know if there were taxi's at the ports of Revenna and Dubrovnik to get to town?

 

Ship shuttles sound expensive if you can get 4 people in a taxi.

 

Love your review.

 

 

I have visited Dubrovnik on a couple of occassions, although never by ship. But I am fairly certain you can get both a taxi or a bus (which is super cheap) right at the dock. Old Town is not far at all from the dock.... maybe 2 km at most. The buses run fairly often from what I recall (they are public buses) and cost just a couple of Euros. I don't see any need whatsoever to use the ship's expensive shuttle in Dubrovnik.

 

Hope that helps, but I will also be happy to see what Stef says since it has been a couple of years since my last visit to Croatia.

 

Melissa

[kirian]

Hi Stef,

 

Quick question... I know you didn't go to the masquarade party the night the ship left Venice, but do you recall seeing anyone dressing up for it (as in, wearing Ventian masks). Some folks on my roll call are wondering about this. My mom and I are planning to take a couple masks along and we are hoping to not be the only ones "getting in costume" for the party... if we can stay awake until it starts!

 

Melissa

[Wriggler]

Hi Stef,

 

Quick question... I know you didn't go to the masquarade party the night the ship left Venice, but do you recall seeing anyone dressing up for it (as in, wearing Ventian masks). Some folks on my roll call are wondering about this. My mom and I are planning to take a couple masks along and we are hoping to not be the only ones "getting in costume" for the party... if we can stay awake until it starts!

 

Melissa

 

Hi

 

I was on the same cruise as Stef and the Solarium (where the masquerade party was held) was apparently really well attended (My youngest son Ryan has just informed me!!) :D

 

Carol

[Wriggler]

Do you know if there were taxi's at the ports of Revenna and Dubrovnik to get to town?

 

Ship shuttles sound expensive if you can get 4 people in a taxi.

 

Love your review.

 

Hi

 

We got a taxi at the dock in Dubrovnik just as we got off the ship and they charged 10Euros for the trip into the old town.

 

We used the ship's shuttle in Ravenna and I *think* that was $15 per person

 

Carol

[Kreuzfahrtneuling]

Sorry everybody,

 

Life got in the way :o. Will try to answer all the questions tonight -- thanks to everybody who jumped in here! Don't know if I'll get to the Dubrovnik posts today...but I promise to get the first one out here no later than tomorrow!

 

Missed you all!

 

Stef

[kirian]

Hi

 

I was on the same cruise as Stef and the Solarium (where the masquerade party was held) was apparently really well attended (My youngest son Ryan has just informed me!!) :D

 

Carol

 

Thanks, Carol! I think several of us from my roll call are planning to bring venetian masks along on the trip (or buy them in Venice) so we can really get into the spirit of the party:D. Thanks again for confirming!

 

Melissa

[Kreuzfahrtneuling]

Eagerly awaiting Dubrovnik, Stef! Can't wait to see your photos and read what you did that day in Port!

 

Melissa

 

 

Hi Melissa,

 

Sorry to keep you waiting so long for Dubrovnik. I'll start writing the next lines this evening. We had tons of appointments yesterday and today, so there was just no way to go online. Here's just a little prefeeling...we absolutely hated some and loved other parts about our port day. I found the people to be extra extra nice and the old town reminded me a lot of Mdina on Malta --which I loved! Some organisational problems almost threatened to ruin our day. And there's just a certain critical amount of touristmasses that can drive you crazy while squeezing through narrow streets. But the sea soothed all of our traumatic experiences later on. We definitely want to return to Croatia.

 

Stef

[Kreuzfahrtneuling]

Do you know if there were taxi's at the ports of Revenna and Dubrovnik to get to town?

 

Ship shuttles sound expensive if you can get 4 people in a taxi.

 

Love your review.

 

Hi mrchips14,

 

Welcome to the review! Thank you!

 

I didn't see any taxis in Ravenna (except the ones rushing past me in the evening:D). But I really must admit that I didn't pay attention to it... As far as I know I could have walked by 10 taxis, not noticing, because I was busy staring at our ship:o.

 

We did however notice a huge sign in the port of Dubrovnik, advertising Taxis that will bring you to old town for €10,00 -- not Kunas. One way of course.

 

Stef

[Kreuzfahrtneuling]

 

I checked the community bulletin board every day (including the first two days) and never saw any notice for any GLBT get together. This is the first cruise that I can remember that didn't have GLBT gatherings. Turns out that you probably didn't miss anything your first two days.

 

Hobie.

 

Hi Hobie,

 

Whoohoo, you're back! And I can't believe you checked the board every day just for me:eek:!!!!! :DTHANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU:D!!!!! That was so nice of you! Now I can breathe easy, knowing it wasn't my stupidity afterall that kept me from a meeting.

 

Stef

[Kreuzfahrtneuling]

Hi Stef,

 

Quick question... I know you didn't go to the masquarade party the night the ship left Venice, but do you recall seeing anyone dressing up for it (as in, wearing Ventian masks). Some folks on my roll call are wondering about this. My mom and I are planning to take a couple masks along and we are hoping to not be the only ones "getting in costume" for the party... if we can stay awake until it starts!

 

Melissa

 

Hi Melissa,

 

I didn't see a single person with a mask, but I really think that's due to the fact we didn't attend. I do however remember the cruise director saying what a great party it was over the breakfast tv- show, and how much he enjoyed all the different masks.

 

Stef

[danny8826]

Hi Kreuzfahrtneuling,

I have read and still reading the rest of your fantastic review of the Serenade of the Seas which we will be on this November.

For the port of Cannes, what would you recommend that we should see? We have a choice between Nice/French Riviera OR Monaco/Monte Carlo.

We are planning to do an excursions through RCI. It would be easier since there are 5 of us.

 

Thank you.

Danny

[MrFunInTheSun]

Great review and pictures! Thanks for bringing us along with you!

 

 

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk. Please excuse any typographical errors.

[Kreuzfahrtneuling]

Day 10 – Dubrovnik (part one of three)

 

Today we had the pleasure of arriving in Dubrovnik a littler later in the morning. Even before you reach the actual port, the scenery is very beautiful.

 

 

I didn’t know they have so many islands in front of the main land. Floating in was amazing. We chose the heli pad this time to take it all in. There were only 4 more people there! I have no clue why. This was a fantastic spot!

 

 

If you’re going to Dubrovnik by cruise ship, you’ll either dock in Gruz harbour, which is a HUGE harbour – but no fear, not a container port. You can walk off to the local busses or taxis or take a ship shuttle bus…everything is possible. Smaller ships often anchor close to old town and tender in.

 

See the port in the back? Notice the white block building behind the docked cruise ship? This is sooo important if you’ve prebought the Dubrovnik card…but more on that later.

 

 

Closer and closer. The ship ahead is the MSC Fantasia by the way. They were there much earlier than us, left earlier as well though too.

 

Entering the port, we loved to watch the little boats that passed by. We had been in Monaco, remember – and walked by the harbour in Cannes, France…but neither one could cope with the beauty of the little ships we saw here. Sure, money wise the yachts on France and Monaco are unchallenged. But these simple, yet lovingly restored traditional sailing boats with lots of wood and fesh paint seemed to have the one thing the other ones lacked – a soul!

 

Once we reached the pier, we still weren’t ready to leave our grand spot on the heli pad. We enjoyed to watch the ship being tied to these giant poles. They have a quite interesting technique with a tiny rope with a ball attached to it…Fun to see at least once, since we’d been to so many docked ports before and never watched it before.

 

 

Lol – and while we were standing there, enjoying the “rope show”, guess who we saw pacing past the ship in order to be first off the port?

 

Yup, THAT family again! (and it is really tough not to show this picture, because Tarik got an excellent one, showing them pace along like crazy – but I’m being good. No mean pictures. Sigh!)

 

Now to understand our upcoming odyssey, I have to tell you a bit about our preparations for Dubrovnik. We basically wanted to do two main things while in Dubrovnik…walk the walls of old town in the morning, return to the ship for lunch and then go snorkelling at a bay close to old town in the afternoon. For all these trips we wanted to use the public busses. We knew we’d need Kunas for the busses and the walls…and maybe we’d find other sights in Dubrovnik we would want to visit as well…you never know. How many Kunas would we need for all of that? And if we’d get too much, what would we do with the rest? Nahh, there was an alternative I found online: the Dubrovnik card. It’s valid for 24 hours and you can ride any bus during that time, walk the walls for free and visit a ton of different museums, also for free. And you could buy it in Euros online even cheaper than in port. So I thought cool – no Kunas needed whatsoever and all options as to what to do that day. Let’s do it. We got 3 Dubrovnik cards – well not the cards. You print out a voucher. On the voucher it says to pick up your actual cards (and a free tourist booklet) conveniently located by the port of Gruz once your ship arrives there. They had an address printed on the voucher as to where exactly this pick up place should be. We were in good spirits and left the ship with our voucher to get our tickets.

 

Well, the harbour area really is vast. And the address printed on the voucher was somewhere completely else than where we were at. There were ads for the Dubrovnik card almost on every pole we passed…but not one sign telling you where to go to pick it up. But we had the voucher with the address. So we should be fine, right?

 

No!

 

We walked and walked … all the way to the end of the harbour … still we hadn’t reached the printed address yet. At least we finally arrived on the right street name. After asking two really nice and helpful Croatians (one actually pulled out his cell phone and googled our address for us), we finally found a filthy house, well more like a garage backyard looking sort of building with OUR address.

 

 

This? Really? We tried to find someone…actually found two people chatting in the inner yard and tried to talk to them. No English, no French, no German…Sigh, we don’t know one word in their language and they didn’t speak one word of ours…We showed them the voucher and just put our finger on the address printed there and the Dubrovnik card logo. They just shrugged… no idea where we had to go, but it sure wasn’t here. Now what? We paid for the damn thing – I was in a bad mood now --- I wanted to get those tickets…I refused to exchange Kunas afterall to use the busses. All the ads grinned at me and worsened my mood further. Tanja was heroic. She kept asking EVERYBODY she saw and even walked into all kind of stores along the way. Finally a person told her that we’d get the tickets at the tourist info point half way up the harbour. Sigh, so we started heading back the way we came from. In front of the info center was a long line…do we really have to stand in that? Next to this place was a small kiosk…again Dubrovnik card commercials all over the place. We went in there and asked the person behind the desk…Finally a few English words…felt like heaven. He told us to walk further up the port and look for the big white building on the other side of the street. In there we should find the counter for the Dubrovnik cards. Remember the big white building in the port picture? That’s it. It was so close to our ship, we walked right past it .. just because they printed a wrong address on the voucher. What a nuisance. Our quest for the tickets lasted almost 2 hours!

 

 

Finally with our cards in hand, we entered the next bus to old town. We were pretty pooped and not in the very best mood anymore.

 

 

More to come!

[kirian]

Hi Melissa,

 

I didn't see a single person with a mask, but I really think that's due to the fact we didn't attend. I do however remember the cruise director saying what a great party it was over the breakfast tv- show, and how much he enjoyed all the different masks.

 

Stef

 

Thanks so much, Stef, for the info. You are always so sweet to take the time to respond to all of the questions we are all tossing your way :)

 

(PS - hope you get to have a nice relaxing weekend... sounds like you deserve it after last weekend and the past couple of days at work)

[Kreuzfahrtneuling]

Hi Kreuzfahrtneuling,

I have read and still reading the rest of your fantastic review of the Serenade of the Seas which we will be on this November.

For the port of Cannes, what would you recommend that we should see? We have a choice between Nice/French Riviera OR Monaco/Monte Carlo.

We are planning to do an excursions through RCI. It would be easier since there are 5 of us.

 

Thank you.

Danny

 

Hi Danny,

 

Welcome to the review! Thank you!

 

Well, we never been to Nice ... if you don't count spending ages at it's train station...but we did enjoy Monaco...No idea what would be best. I guess it depends on what everybody would like to see that day. Can you show the tour itineraries to all members of your group and decide then by which sights rank first for them?

 

Stef

[Kreuzfahrtneuling]

Great review and pictures! Thanks for bringing us along with you!

 

 

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk. Please excuse any typographical errors.

 

Hi MrFunInTheSun,

 

Thank You! Glad you're enjoying it!

 

Stef

[danny8826]

Hi Danny,

 

Welcome to the review! Thank you!

 

Well, we never been to Nice ... if you don't count spending ages at it's train station...but we did enjoy Monaco...No idea what would be best. I guess it depends on what everybody would like to see that day. Can you show the tour itineraries to all members of your group and decide then by which sights rank first for them?

 

Stef

 

 

Thank you Kreuzfahrtneuling.

I think we leaning toward Nice.

[christi1805]

 

the Dubrovnik card. It’s valid for 24 hours and you can ride any bus during that time, walk the walls for free and visit a ton of different museums, also for free. And you could buy it in Euros online even cheaper than in port.

 

 

Stef, I checked the website, but could only find the price for the card in Kuna.

 

Where did you get it in Euro ?

Edited September 8, 2013 by christi1805

[Kreuzfahrtneuling]

Dubrovnik (part two of three)

 

Old town

 

The bus spits you out right by the entrance to Old Town...You really can’t miss it, since everybody gets off here. Once out of the bus you have to fight your way through a tightly packed mass of people, who are pushing closer to get ON the bus you just left. The masses of people would continue to be our nr. 1 problem. Before entering Old Town, we needed to take a rest on this wall.

 

 

Well, let’s follow the herd…we walked through Old Town… I would like to say we leasurly strolled… but it was more of a zigzagging around a traffic jam of people.

 

 

Can you imagine how beautiful this place must be, if all these people were gone? We did manage to find some side streets, where you were able to breathe freely again. Not deserted – no, but much better than the main road.

 

(I just blocked the bottom part of the picture with all the people in it, so you get a better feeling of what it could have been like)

 

Tarik found this…

 

…and was at peace with this day ever since.

 

Well, we still wanted to walk the walls, remember?

 

Aehm, do we really want to join that one way human traffic jam up there?

 

We decided to look for another spot to enter…

 

 

And we DID walk the walls. In a much less frequented area. Just for a couple of minutes though. Then we saw, that the direction we were headed --- inland from the old port, would lead us up a gazillion steps (now I know why this was less frequented). No way after having walked around all day to pick up those Dubrovnik cards…We turned around and made a whole lot of people aggravated, since we walked the wrong way on a one way single person width path…Sorry everybody! We needed to get out of here.

 

Dubrovnik Old Town is breathtakingly gorgeous – but on this particular day, with these unbelievable masses of people – it was too much for us. We longed to be back on the ship for a small lunch break. So we took the bus back and enjoyed the park café. This first part of the day was not really relaxing… We felt like we didn’t get to enjoy old Dubrovnik’s charms at all. We could have explored a wide variety of sights, but the sheer overwhelming amount of people EVERYWHERE made us want to escape back to the ship. I think Dubrovnik has lots to offer and we do want to come back (in the OFF season) to start exploring it. Today we hardly scratched the surface.

 

More to come!

[Kreuzfahrtneuling]

Stef, I checked the website, but could only find the price for the card in Kuna.

 

Where did you get it in Euro ?

 

Hi christi1805,

 

Oh, you got the right webside! There is only one. We just bought it over the credit card...so for us it felt like we paid in Euros. I think they actually did say the amount in Kunas. We just didn't have to actually exchange physical money to get it:). Sorry, I guess I should have clarified that right away -- thanks for reminding me:D.

 

The cost for the one day card was 117 Kunas -- which is €15,42. I think that if you're there anytime outside of July and August this is absolutely the way to go. I'm sad we couldn't use more of what the card offered. If we ever visit Dubrovnik again -- which I hope, we'll definitely buy that card again.

 

Stef