Got Away on the Getaway! Review of our birthday celebration May 3- 10 2014

[saxgirl84]

Thanks for the review and the great pictures! How did you order the tickets for the Illusionarium? I just see banquet seating.

 

the premium seating was available online for us... how long until you sail? the premium seating might be sold out? they offer a discount on the first night, but if you book before you board, they charge you full rate, and then refund it to your account after the show, so keep an eye on your account details (if you have the app downloaded!)

[schatzi10]

Really enjoying your review. I really got excited when I seen your room number. We have that exact room booked for August 2. At first my husband was concerned about hearing noise or vibration from the engine but I talked him into it. Did you have any noise or vibration ? Looking forward to more of you review and pictures. Did you have to ask for the longe chairs or were they already there?:)

[kylenyc]

Seymore the Sock Monkey! Love it :D :D :D. Ben doesn't know if/when he'll ever get to sail Getaway out of Miami so really enjoying your pictures and review. His short 2 days aboard Getaway wasn't enough and looking forward to seeing more Seymore!

 

Quick question... How many people were on your cabin crawl and did it go smoothly?

 

LOL. I don't recall see Sock Monkey on the Appetizer menu.

Edited May 13, 2014 by kylenyc

[gizmo911]

Great Review. We will be on Getaway in March 2015. Two of us will be flying into FLL same day and was wondering if the additional cost to bring rental car to Miami airport reasonable. The other option would be taking a shuttle or taxi.

[LrgPizza]

Great Review. We will be on Getaway in March 2015. Two of us will be flying into FLL same day and was wondering if the additional cost to bring rental car to Miami airport reasonable. The other option would be taking a shuttle or taxi.

You mean you're flying into FLL the same day as your cruise? If so, why would you be renting a car? You would want to shuttle from FLL straight to the port of Miami.

[saxgirl84]

Really enjoying your review. I really got excited when I seen your room number. We have that exact room booked for August 2. At first my husband was concerned about hearing noise or vibration from the engine but I talked him into it. Did you have any noise or vibration ? Looking forward to more of you review and pictures. Did you have to ask for the longe chairs or were they already there?:)

 

The room had a bit of a vibration when coming into ports in the early mornings, as I was already awake it didn't bother me, and my sisters both sleep like the dead so they didn't notice. The only time we heard anything at night was the night of the fireworks/80's party. I think they had to compensate for the fireworks, but again it didn't bother me to have some background music to my reading :-)

Docking in Miami Sat morning I was woken up around 4:30 am from the vibration, but that was the only time I ever felt it.

 

The room is amazing and I'm afraid I spoiled myself for any future NCL cruises :-P

Enjoy your cruise!

 

Sent from my SPH-L720 using Tapatalk

[saxgirl84]

Did you have to ask for the longe chairs or were they already there?:)

 

Sorry missed this question. The balcony had 2 chairs, 2 loungers and a small table when we arrived. We did a bit of moving the furniture around to give us some more room.

 

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[saxgirl84]

Seymore the Sock Monkey! Love it :D :D :D. Ben doesn't know if/when he'll ever get to sail Getaway out of Miami so really enjoying your pictures and review. His short 2 days aboard Getaway wasn't enough and looking forward to seeing more Seymore!

 

Quick question... How many people were on your cabin crawl and did it go smoothly?

 

Glad you like him! Seeing your Ben reviews, I told my sisters we needed to get a "mascot" and when one of her coworkers got Seymore for her birthday, we decided he was perfect. It did take us a couple of tries to come up with the perfect name though :-P

 

Our cabin crawl had about 40 people in it I would estimate. It went really well, except that I think we confused some of the room stewards who seemed to be wondering what this huge group of people were doing walking around the ship. :-P

I think we had rooms on almost every floor, and in every category (well not all the different types of haven suites, but everything else) my favorite was the Studio! I'm seriously considering another trip in one of the studios since I have quite a bit of vacation time left to burn through :-P

[saxgirl84]

Great Review. We will be on Getaway in March 2015. Two of us will be flying into FLL same day and was wondering if the additional cost to bring rental car to Miami airport reasonable. The other option would be taking a shuttle or taxi.

 

As was stated above, if you're flying in same day, and there are only 2 of you, I think a shuttle or cab may be more worth it. We got our car for about $55 for the night, which was much less than it would have cost us for our multiple stops the night before/day of.

 

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[Jenjer]

Thank You for your review we leave in 17 days and I can not wait.

 

So happy to see the loungers we are on deck 8 and hope we have them too.

 

Keep it coming please.

[Tminish]

I would be interested to know more about the app....I might do this when I go in October!

I am lovingggggg your review! Happy belated birthday to your sister!

Edited May 13, 2014 by Tminish

[Cruisegirl2004]

Can't wait to read more!:D

[AF-1]

saxgirl84,

 

I loved your review; smiled every time I saw Seymour in the pictures. I have a few questions?

1. Did you take any pictures of Seymour on the shore excursions

2. Did you load your pics directly from a website or thru Facebook

3. How did you like your aft cabin, any noise or wind problems

 

Thanks

[saxgirl84]

Thank You for your review we leave in 17 days and I can not wait.

 

So happy to see the loungers we are on deck 8 and hope we have them too.

 

Keep it coming please.

 

 

Done with work for the day, so I'm working on more of the review... if you have one of the extended/large balcony rooms, I'm pretty sure you'll get the loungers. the regular balcony rooms would never have room for the loungers, as we saw on our cabin crawl.

 

Hope you enjoy your trip! those last couple of weeks before ours was killer for me! I hope the time flies by for you :)

[saxgirl84]

I would be interested to know more about the app....I might do this when I go in October!

I am lovingggggg your review! Happy belated birthday to your sister!

 

 

You can download it to your phone now, there is a count down clock that I used for about 3 months prior to our trip... it was fun to see it go from over 100 days down to hours/minutes!

 

If you have more than a couple people traveling with you, I would recommend downloading and paying for the app. It lets you keep in touch with anyone in your group, as long as you link to them all. It also has an account review, so it lets you keep track of your spending (ours defaulted to one person's name since our charges were all on one card) and it also has the "whats going on" link that tells you what activities are scheduled, but as I stated earlier, it wasn't always 100% accurate, so we missed a few trivia sessions because something else was going on in the location the app listed... not a huge deal, but kind of aggravating at times. They really are missing a huge opportunity to explain what the activities are about. Some of them are pretty self explanatory, but others (like the Art 101 Mythbusters) don't really explain what it is, but I'm glad someone we met up with recommended it to us, as I really enjoyed it.

[saxgirl84]

Can't wait to read more!:D

 

 

Sorry! Work called... working on getting Day 3 and beyond set up and I'll upload more in a bit! The pictures take a lot longer than I thought to organize, but I guess that's what happens when you have over 1200 to go through :) What can I say, I LOVE taking pictures on my vacations so I can relive the trip for years to come!

[saxgirl84]

saxgirl84,

 

I loved your review; smiled every time I saw Seymour in the pictures. I have a few questions?

1. Did you take any pictures of Seymour on the shore excursions

2. Did you load your pics directly from a website or thru Facebook

3. How did you like your aft cabin, any noise or wind problems

 

Thanks

 

 

1--- yep, we got a few of him at St. Maarten and Nassau. We left him on the ship in St Thomas, as we went snorkeling, and didn't have a wet suit for him :)

 

2. I'm using my photobucket account to host the pictures. I do have an album on Facebook but I have no idea how to link that here...it has almost 300 pictures in it. Seymore also has his own album there of the trip as well :)

 

3. I absolutely LOVED the aft cabin! there was very little wind (only noticed it being very windy while docked in Nassau, other than that, the deep walls really blocked the wind. There was very little noise, other than Saturday morning around 4:30am when we were pulling into the Miami area. The Ship really started shaking, and woke me up, I couldn't get back to sleep, so I went out on the balcony to read and enjoy the view. I was expecting that though, since last year on the Sky, the same thing happened in our midship balcony cabin... not sure what that's about, but it's no big deal to me....

[saxgirl84]

Back from day 2 of work--- Back to the review- Day 3- Sea Day---

 

Started out at a session of Win Lose or Draw hosted by "Zesty Zach" (one of our favorite game "host" of the week. he was so funny and super friendly, like most of the employees on board!)

 

 

then went and played a bit of Deal or No Deal

 

 

We didn't win, but the games are always fun to watch. They randomly draw someone to come up on stage from the people that purchased the game cards, the rest of the audience plays along on their own game cards. My sisters did end up winning a few free photos from the ship, and there were several people that ended up winning $200 (OBC) as well, not so bad!

 

Went to enjoy some sushi

 

 

very good stuff, and surprisingly priced well... Since we were planning on having Moderno for dinner that night, I wanted a light lunch... only ended up eating 1/2 of this, but it was soooo delicious! My sisters don't eat sushi, so I ended up going with one of the guys that seemed to be showing up to all of the events we were doing. It was weird how we saw some of the same people over and over throughout the week, and there were so many others that we never even saw after our M&G! just proves how big of a ship it is, and how much stuff they had going on to keep everyone busy!

 

After lunch, I headed up to the room to enjoy some reading and the view

[saxgirl84]

After an hour or so of enjoying the peace of the balcony, we headed down to find out how they make those adorable towel animals. They had a demo in the Atrium with some of the housekeeping staff. it was quite informative, and I admit, I've been trying to recreate some of the animals since I've gotten home, with little success :P

 

 

Seymore enjoyed his first Bahama Momma of the trip while learning how to fold towels into friends:

 

some of the creations we didn't see in our room :

 

 

 

[saxgirl84]

Headed back up to the room to relax and get ready for dinner in Moderno. Enjoyed a beautiful sunset from the balcony

 

 

 

 

Headed to Moderno. We had decided before boarding that we wanted to go to at least one specialty. My cousin and her finace had sailed on the Epic a few times and highly recommended Moderno. We also have tried a similar restaurant in Detroit and really liked it, so we decided on Moderno. Very worth the price! We had made a reservation for 8:30, since the options the night before were 5:30 (too early for us for dinner!) 8:30 or 9:30... When we arrived, there was a virtually empty restaurant. There were maybe 8 other tables in the entire place. quite surprising. When we got to the podium and gave the hostess our keycard and told her we had a reservation for 8:30, (it was about 8:25 since it was literally a 2 minute walk down one flight of stairs from our room!) She seemed kind of confused, asked us to have a seat, walked away, came back just as our butts were hitting the seat and said "right this way".... She sat us in the back corner, and told us our server would be right with us.... about 10 minutes later, someone in a white coat walked past and said "I'll be right with you..." 5 more minutes went by and he then came rushing back up to the table, asked us for our drink orders, and then disappeared for at least another 10 minutes... finally brought our drinks and some bread, and told us we could enjoy the salad bar first... we went and grabbed some yummy food from the salad bar (Lots of interesting selections to pick from) we all ate the food from the salad bar and then had 3 empty salad plates in front of us, while multiple people with delicious looking meats on skewers walked past us to the 8 or 9 other tables around us... after about 15 minutes, we finally saw our server again, and he cleared our salad plates, so we were expecting him to bring us the dinner plates so we could start partaking in the meats that kept traveling past our table making our mouths water... finally a few minutes later, we were given clean dinner plates! We thought we'd get to start enjoying those meats... unfortunatley, we only saw 1 person in the next 10 minutes with a skewer of meat, and they were running low... it was a good teaser... the service did pick up after that, the sirloin was my absolute favorite and I had to ask specifically for it to be brought back a couple of times. It seemed as though they switched it up and only had 2 people bringing the meat around after a certain time, so that caused a bit of delay... all in all, the food was delicious, and we enjoyed the meal, just wish the service was a bit faster...

here's my favorite offering of the evening!

[saxgirl84]

Day 4 began before the sun was up (well for me anyway!) It was St. Maarten day! I had been anticipating this day since I booked the cruise! I was so excited to see Maho beach and catch some planes landing right over head!

 

since the sunrise was towards the front of the boat, I had to head up to the top decks to get some pictures. It was so worth it! there were very few people up there, but it was so peaceful and I was so glad I didn't sleep through it!

 

 

 

pulling into St. Maarten

 

 

We docked near the Disney Fantasy and the MSC Davina

 

view of our room from the pier:

[saxgirl84]

 

 

 

We didn't book any excursions for this island, simply because we wanted to make it to both Maho beach, and Pinel Island, which are at opposite sides of the island, and no excursions stopped at both... We were initially planning to just get a cab to one, and then another cab to the other, but after figuring out that it would cost approximately $100 round trip for all 3 of us, we walked over to the rental car booth to see how much that would cost... we worked it out that we got a rental car, with a GPS from the Hertz stand for $80... the only drawback was it took almost an hour and a half to actually GET the car, since it seemed they only had 2 employees working that day, one at the rental booth, and one down the road at the car pick up/drop off location, so they would fill up the bus/van with a group of people, and the driver had to check out each car to the renters... after our delay, we decided to head to Maho beach first, since I had read that the majority of the big planes come in before 1pm, and it was already 10:30... Plugged the beach into the GPS and off we went... traffic wasn't horrible, it took us about 30 minutes to get to the beach... we walk up and see the surfboard at the Sunset Bar with the landing times... KLM (the BIG one) was scheduled to land at 11:15...yay, we hadn't missed it yet!...

 

 

 

the water was beautiful! beach was crowded, but was still fun to see

 

[saxgirl84]

Here come the planes!

 

 

 

 

 

so we ended up seeing 5 planes land and one plane take off... i really had to use the bathroom (stupid small bladder!) so I started walking towards the bathrooms... at this point, it was almost noon, and KLM still hadn't landed... As I'm asking one of the workers at Sunset bar where the restroom was, I hear everyone cheering and turn around in time to see the Enormous KLM jumbo jet fly past and land! just my luck... it was still quite the site to see, too bad I didn't catch it on film :(

[saxgirl84]

Since we knew most of the people were there for the KLM landing, and would probably be leaving, we wanted to beat traffic so we could make it to the northern part of the island and see Pinel Island to do some snorkeling, so we jumped in the car and headed off... It took about 45 minutes to find our way (thank goodness the GPS came with the car, even though I still got lost a couple of times :)) I must say, traffic on the island really isn't too bad, there are A LOT of "round abouts" which could cause issues if you're not used to driving in them (luckily they are pretty popular near my home, so I'm comfortable with them, both of my sisters were not quite as familiar, which is why I got to be the driver!)

 

made it to the dock for the "ferry" to Pinel Island... $10/per person round trip, about a 10 minute ride over to the island... just a note- if you're going to try and find this on your own (no cab/tour bus) there is only one VERY SMALL sign on the road in that says Islet Pinel (it's the French side of the Island)... that's it... We drove right past it, and didn't realize we were at the dock... once we finally figured it out, we made it just in time to jump on the "ferry" (really just a medium sized boat with an outboard engine that holds maybe 20 people)...

 

 

 

 

We got dropped off near the Yellow Beach Bar.

 

Decided we were hungry so we went and grabbed a table in a little hut...

 

 

Lathered up the sunscreen

 

and headed to the beach (we decided it was too late in the day to snorkel since we had to catch the 4:30 "ferry" back to the main Island and it was already 3... maybe next trip....

 

[saxgirl84]

We headed back towards the ship since we had to drop off the car, we wanted to make sure we made it for all aboard at 6:30!

 

this ship is HUGE. and I really enjoyed the artwork. In my opinion, NCL ships are so much more fun to see than any other line!

 

 

We ended up getting back in plenty of time and got to watch some people who were making it back just in time...

 

 

We headed down to the Atrium for some 80's music or movie (I can't remember which) trivia!

(note the 3 guys that are in the top of this pic were at every session of trivia with us, so we were quite competitive with them... towards the end of the week, we decided we should have just teamed up with them and we probably would have won more "junk" that way! :P)

 

Dinner at O'Sheehan's and then time to go back to the room and relax before the fireworks

 

they sometimes had the lights turned on at night on the back of the boat, so I took advantage and grabbed a shot: