(Slightly less so) Cheapo dad's trip report on Independence of the Seas

[harryfat1]

Symphony? Hopefully some day for me but only Indy for now [emoji6]

 

Symphony is just a pipe dream cruise. In reality, it’ll be more like the Ovation first as Symphony has a higher price premium as it’ll be the newest ship. Cheapo dad will look at the price premium and opt for something else when it comes to final selection time. We also haven’t tried the Quantum class ship yet so it would be a good experience to sail on something new.

 

Indy is a great ship. Some people have complained about not 100% perfect shape the ship is in. I don’t vacation by looking down on the ground on what carpet stains they have at each area. I look up to take pictures of the surroundings and people so my preferences are different.

 

You will be fine. Have a great cruise.

[harryfat1]

Glad to hear that you enjoyed San Juan. I spent a couple of hours just taking photos in the forts. I probably could have spent an entire day. Every where you turn, you see a great photo opportunity! We were fortunate enough to be there on a Saturday when they offer guided tours of San Cristóbal with guides who speak English. Very interesting tour.

 

We saw the park ranger there talking to people but didn't see any signs of organized tours. The two forts are really nice but whoever doesn't like forts can just skip this trip report for next couple days as it will take me awhile to go through all the pictures. Not getting back to the ship pictures until this weekend.

[harryfat1]

So it was time to walk up to the first fort. It looks impressive even from the outside. Once inside, it takes your breath away.

Cheap $7/pp entrance fee for what you get. Be sure to keep the receipt as the fee is good for both forts or else you would have to pay again when you get over to the other one.

 

 

Obviously I had done fair amount of research online on what the place looks like but YouTube videos don’t do justice on how big these places are. We like historical structures such as the Mayan ruins and forts so we could have spent hours and hours here but our time in port was limited.

 

 

 

 

Steep climb up to the entrance

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Of course cheapo dad would take picture of the prices

 

 

[harryfat1]

 

The official name of this fort per Google map is:

 

Castillo de San Cristóbal

 

They say it's supposed to be the largest Spanish fort built in the New World

 

 

 

Lots of walking and climbing

 

 

[harryfat1]

 

 

 

 

 

[harryfat1]

You can see the ship from the fort so it's not that far away

 

 

Where is the ship? Oh, found it...

 

 

Back to the fort

 

 

 

You can see the trolley down below - it was NOT RUNNING on Christmas Eve. Maybe getting ready for Santa tonight instead...

 

[Canadian1]

Symphony is just a pipe dream cruise. In reality, it’ll be more like the Ovation first as Symphony has a higher price premium as it’ll be the newest ship. Cheapo dad will look at the price premium and opt for something else when it comes to final selection time. We also haven’t tried the Quantum class ship yet so it would be a good experience to sail on something new.

 

Indy is a great ship. Some people have complained about not 100% perfect shape the ship is in. I don’t vacation by looking down on the ground on what carpet stains they have at each area. I look up to take pictures of the surroundings and people so my preferences are different.

 

You will be fine. Have a great cruise.

The freedom class ships are actually my favorites right now. I know they are older ships but I really like the layouts. I also like that I don't have to make reservations for shows and they don't feel crowded even at full capacity. Some day we will try the larger RCCI ships, but I feel like I will need a week to explore the ship alone! So will have to find a long itinerary with lots of sea days [emoji4]

 

Thanks for humoring all the questions and I will continue to live vicariously through you until I get to go next month!

 

Happy memory reliving!

[harryfat1]

The trolley is just chilling in the parking lot

 

 

 

 

[harryfat1]

So we were just walking around the fort, taking many pictures and guess who came out to greet us? Yeah, just hanging out by the middle of the walkway. HELLO!

 

 

Quick, get the camera out and phones out

 

 

 

 

Edited January 19, 2018 by harryfat1

[harryfat1]

Looking down the coast to our next fort

 

 

 

 

 

[Coralc]

Beautiful iguana! Just the color of grass. :D

[harryfat1]

The freedom class ships are actually my favorites right now. I know they are older ships but I really like the layouts. I also like that I don't have to make reservations for shows and they don't feel crowded even at full capacity. Some day we will try the larger RCCI ships, but I feel like I will need a week to explore the ship alone! So will have to find a long itinerary with lots of sea days [emoji4]

 

Thanks for humoring all the questions and I will continue to live vicariously through you until I get to go next month!

 

Happy memory reliving!

 

The Freedom class is probably the best "value" cruise in the RCI line up if you like bigger ships but don't want to pay the premium for the Oasis class. Not surprising that we picked two ships in this class the past two cruises. Best bang for the buck as the ships are not brand new or has the wow factor as the newer ships but still have enough amenities and activities to keep multi generational families happy and is priced at a decent discount.

Edited January 19, 2018 by harryfat1

[harryfat1]

Beautiful iguana! Just the color of grass. :D

 

Haha, I knew you would be interested in the iguana pictures.

 

Yes, this guy is very green. Given how much green grass there is in the area, he can easily camouflage himself in the area.

 

I will have few more iguana pictures on day 5 at St. Maarten

 

[Newby58]

Here’s something for a bean counter reader to calculate – approximately how much money was saved by giving passengers only half cup of juice instead of full cup?

 

So take 4,200+ passengers for the Indy as an example. Assume for simplicity sake, 1,200 or so passengers daily does not eat at WJ for breakfast as they prefer in cabin breakfast/MDR/café promenade. That means 3,000 will file into WJ. Further assume only half of the people drink the juice being offered as the other half drink tea/coffee/water/booze for breakfast. That gets us to 1,500 people.

 

Now assume by serving half cup, the cruise line saves 4 ounces of juice per person. That would mean 6,000 ounces would be saved each and every day.

 

Then if someone can find/estimate the average cost of cheap generic juice the cruise buys by bulk, multiply that cost by 6,000 ounces by twenty something ships and 365 days a year, you should get a ball park figure.

 

Of course, that person is free to adjust any of my assumptions to do the math. I just started down the path but by no means is my assumption correct.

 

Hmmm, I see this dilemma differently. A bean counter of calories/kilojoules. The water has next to no kilojoules hence the full glass, the "orange juice" has mediocre kilojoules, hence the glass 2/3 full with added sugar I am sure. The apple juice is concentrated and has the most kilojoules? therefore 1/3rd of a glass. How many apples to produce that amount of juice?

It's much better to eat your fruit than drink it IMHO. Lol

[JamesEM]

Harry, if you ever get back to PR the US Park Service offers a free tour of the tunnels under the Castillo San Cristobal each Wednesday at 10:30 am, highly recommend. Jim,

[harryfat1]

Harry, if you ever get back to PR the US Park Service offers a free tour of the tunnels under the Castillo San Cristobal each Wednesday at 10:30 am, highly recommend. Jim,

 

Thanks for the info. Will keep that in mind. Too bad they only do it once a week.

[harryfat1]

The whole fort area is huge

 

 

 

 

 

[Mapleleaf14]

I am loving your trip report!

I hope you don’t mind me venting about something from an earlier photo. RC and Celebrity have a very strange idea on what constitutes Canadian bacon. I have lived in Canada all of my life and never seen anything here that resembles what they call Canadian bacon on their ships. In Canada, we have two types of bacon- strip and peameal. The one they call Canadian on ships is a round roll. Peameal looks like ham, but is a rectangular shape and is covered with cornmeal.

 

 

Sent from my iPad using Forums

[seaair100]

Harry, like many ,still following.Yes,the forts are very cool to explore.And found it worth the walk up and thru the tunnel to get to top view.I was there last year, on a overcast day,so your pics are much brighter.I too like the grass green iguana.

[Valiamo]

 

I am uploading at a much faster pace than previous 2 reports due to switching over to Shutterfly. Much easier to cut and paste from there than trim the stupid non sense long string from Flickr to post here.

 

Question (s) on Shutterfly.... Are there any limits to the number of pics you can upload (or more importantly the number of views you can have). Do you find the interface to upload easy or as easy as Fickr? Any known cost for storing your pictures there or do you just upload the pics you want to share? Also.. Are you using the "insert link" icon or insert image icon?

 

Great review, love the back and forth and all the geeky stuff.

 

Also... as I am a statistics geek, I bet that someone did a Six Sigma / lean processing review on how much you should fill the glass of water/juice and 1/2 had the least amount of overall waste per meal. I bet it saves RCI many thousands of dollars every year.

[bobmacliberty]

Thanks for the info. Will keep that in mind. Too bad they only do it once a week.

They actually do this 3 days a week. This is the tour that we did on a Saturday (also available on Sunday). Some are in English and some are in Spanish, so you need to plan accordingly. I wouldn't recommend this tour if you are claustrophobic as one of the tunnels got pretty small and very dark.

 

End of the tunnel where 2 junior soldiers were stationed for 24 hours to look out for attackers. According to the tour guide, this is where they worked, ate, slept, and used the bathroom. They could use a torch for light, but they had a lot of gun powder in the area and most chose not to take the risk. It was very dark. There was a small amount of light through a slot opening, I cranked up the ISO on my camera, and significantly brightened the image using Lightroom...all just to get this blurry image.

 

I looked back at my Adventure tour review in 2016 to refresh myself on this info and noticed that I reported the admission fee as $5 rather than the $7 that you paid. You could have saved $8 by taking this cruise last year!

[harryfat1]

I am loving your trip report!

I hope you don’t mind me venting about something from an earlier photo. RC and Celebrity have a very strange idea on what constitutes Canadian bacon. I have lived in Canada all of my life and never seen anything here that resembles what they call Canadian bacon on their ships. In Canada, we have two types of bacon- strip and peameal. The one they call Canadian on ships is a round roll. Peameal looks like ham, but is a rectangular shape and is covered with cornmeal.

 

 

Sent from my iPad using Forums

 

Hi,

 

Thanks for the compliment,

 

Haha, yes, the name Canadian bacon is a US terminology. The folks in Canada do not use this term.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back_bacon

 

Wonder if there are foods that people use overseas that describe US food but no one back in the US has ever heard of it?

 

For example, if some country would call something like US cabbage but in the US, we don’t have that variety of cabbage as the soil and weather is not conducive to grow that type of cabbage. It would be interesting to know what food is named after a country but nobody in that country really uses that term themselves.

[harryfat1]

Harry, like many ,still following.Yes,the forts are very cool to explore.And found it worth the walk up and thru the tunnel to get to top view.I was there last year, on a overcast day,so your pics are much brighter.I too like the grass green iguana.

 

Hi,

 

Thanks for continuing to follow along.

 

We were very lucky on the whole trip. Other than the couple rain clouds & showers at the beaches, we had really nice clear blue skies.

 

The winds really picked up during the tour of the various islands so that kept the weather cooler instead of stifling hot.

 

Have couple more iguana pics for day 5.

[harryfat1]

Question (s) on Shutterfly.... Are there any limits to the number of pics you can upload (or more importantly the number of views you can have). Do you find the interface to upload easy or as easy as Fickr? Any known cost for storing your pictures there or do you just upload the pics you want to share? Also.. Are you using the "insert link" icon or insert image icon?

 

Great review, love the back and forth and all the geeky stuff.

 

Also... as I am a statistics geek, I bet that someone did a Six Sigma / lean processing review on how much you should fill the glass of water/juice and 1/2 had the least amount of overall waste per meal. I bet it saves RCI many thousands of dollars every year.

 

 

Hey, questions about Shutterfly. First time as far as I remember it.

 

To answer your question, no, as far as I know, Shutterfly has no limit on bandwidth of people viewing the pictures. They are not like the sucky Photobucket that I also have an account with but they are so limiting that my account is pretty much inactive.

 

I feel bad for so many peoples' trip reports or general posting in other non-cruise forums that depended on Photobucket before they became idiots and started charging people for them. Maybe they have since changed their policy but I remember there were many really pissed off people out there months ago when this happened.

 

For those who have no idea what I am talking about, all the pictures you are seeing here in all my trip reports are "hosted" by a third party photo site (like Shutterfly or Flickr to name a couple). CC is too cheap to just have people attach pictures in the posts as they would have to pay for the data storage of the pictures. So in order for all of you to see my cruise pictures, I have to first upload them onto the other site and then either embed them in my posts via a long web site link or copy & paste.

 

But many people were unlucky enough to have picked the service provider, Photobucket, their link died awhile back if they had the basic free account.

 

Anyway, back to answering question before further digressing. So no limits on number of photos as far as I know with Shutterfly. I have tens of thousands of pictures in my account and there is no indicator on the limit. Even Flickr has a counter that says my limit with them is 1 TB.

 

Flickr has never told me the limit on bandwidth. If they had one similar to Photobucket, my previous 2 trip reports would probably be dead by now as each one has many click views and each time someone pulls it up, that adds to the bandwidth limit count and I am pretty sure I would have blown through that limit easily given how long my trip reports are (not as if I upload 3 pictures and call it a day).

 

As for adding the picture with Shutterfly, that’s the best part. Now that I switched over, adding picture is literally the simple copy and paste function with right mouse click. No need for the stupid long nonsensical long web string from Flickr that you have to trim. Not a big deal if you only upload 2 pictures that you need to trim. But when you upload on average of 1,000+ photos like I do in my volume upload for my trip reports, that is mind numbing boring even for bean counters.

 

Anyway, I am sure nobody cares about this info unless you want to write your own trip report and have to deal with the mechanics of writing one…

[lbjen]

Hi,

 

Thanks for the compliment,

 

Haha, yes, the name Canadian bacon is a US terminology. The folks in Canada do not use this term.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back_bacon

 

Wonder if there are foods that people use overseas that describe US food but no one back in the US has ever heard of it?

 

For example, if some country would call something like US cabbage but in the US, we don’t have that variety of cabbage as the soil and weather is not conducive to grow that type of cabbage. It would be interesting to know what food is named after a country but nobody in that country really uses that term themselves.

 

I’m originally from the UK, only place I ever saw an ‘English muffin’ was at McDonalds! They’re becoming more common now, and I do think they may be an originally English thing, I had just never heard of them!