Non-DCL trip report: Royal Caribbean through the Panama Canal

[ChuckElias]

My wife and I sailed on Royal Caribbean's Radiance of the Seas from April 8-22. We embarked in Tampa and disembarked in Los Angeles. In between, we visited Cartagena, Colombia; Colon, Panama; and Puerta Quetzel and Puerta Vallarta in Mexico. We traveled with my father-in-law and his wife.

Day 1: Tampa, 70°

We arrived the night before our cruise and stayed at the Tampa Westin Waterside. This was a terrific hotel for us. We arrived at nearly midnight, but had no trouble with our check-in. The staff was very friendly, the price was very reasonable (about $160 for the night), and it was about a 5 minute Uber ride to the cruise port. Super easy. I'd highly recommend this hotel for anybody sailing from Tampa.

Because we arrived in Tampa so late, we slept in a little and then walked to Publix for a couple bottles of wine to take onboard with us. I was very impressed with the River Walk area. Nice spots to eat, very easy to walk around, very pretty water views. Because we were sort of on a "mission" to get some last minute things before boarding, I didn't take any pictures of the area, but here's the view from our hotel window. To the far left, beyond the housing, is where the port is; and my father-in-law watched a cruise ship set sail from his room the previous day. So you can see how close we were to the cruise port.

We had never sailed out of Tampa, so I wasn't sure what to expect, but we had a very easy embarkation. Royal Caribbean did a great job providing staff to escort us through the entire process. Someone took us to the security checkpoint. Then someone else took us to yet another person who checked us in with an iPad. Then that person took us to the ramp to board the ship. The whole process took about 10 minutes for all four of us. Very easy and efficient.

Once onboard, we were allowed to go to our room and drop off our carry on luggage. This was unexpected, but we appreciated it. It's no fun having to lug your carry-on to lunch. We booked a balcony stateroom toward the front of the ship. It was pretty much what you'd expect of a "normal" balcony stateroom. The bathroom was the standard size and the shower was tiny, of course. But there was lots of closet and shelf space for Kath and me. However, the room can hold 5 people (Queen bed, pull out couch, drop-down bunk bed.), and I can't imagine that there would be enough closet space for 5. In any case, here's what our room looked like:

Once we dropped off our carry-ons, we went up to the buffet restaurant for lunch. It was just ok. There wasn't a huge selection of food, and what they had was not impressive. I tried a beef dish that was lukewarm, there was BBQ chicken with sides (rice/potatoes), and a soup/salad station. There's also a hamburger station (which I didn't visit at all on the trip). The best offering was a stir fry station, but the line was long and it took about 20 minutes to get my order in.

I had never sailed on a Radiance Class ship, so after lunch, we just wandered the ship to get our bearings. We had a drink in the Schooner Bar. We had purchased a 3-meal dining plan, so I used this time to make the reservations for our specialty dining. After our drink, we did a tour of the spa/gym. We just wandered through and peeked into open spaces. I purposely avoided going with a spa employee because I suspected that they would just try to hard-sell us as many products and services as possible. The spa and gym were both pretty typical. The spa had scented showers, sauna, heated stone chairs. There was also just a "relaxation lounge", a room with comfy chairs and flavored water for after your sauna or spa treatment.

After our spa walk-through, we settled in the Solarium for an hour or so. The Solarium is a covered pool area, which I really liked and spent a lot of time there on sea days. After a busy morning and afternoon, it was nice to sit for a little while before dinner.

 

[ChuckElias]

Day 1 -- continued.

Pictures of the spa.

The "relaxation room":

Treatment rooms:

Heated stone chairs and nearby artwork.

Sauna:

Hair salon attached to the spa:

 

[ChuckElias]

Day 1 -- continued

In the Solarium

 

[ChuckElias]

Day 1 -- continued

I forgot to mention that during our wanderings around the ship, we took time to stop and look at the solar eclipse. We were in Tampa, so it wasn't close to the full eclipse, but we still saw it. Pretty cool.

Dinner was in Cascades, the complementary restaurant.

For dinner, Kath got the escargot appetizer (very good) and I got the shrimp cocktail (fine, very standard) and crab cake (good). The first night's menu was oddly uninspiring and we both ended up getting a steak, which was very good. My father-in-law had fried chicken (see? Uninspiring) and his wife got the lobster. There are a couple items that are available every night for an extra charge, and lobster is one of them. I don't think lobster was ever included on the regular menu.

My steak and crab cake:

For desserts, Kath got a dark chocolate custard, which she liked a lot. The picture will look like it's very dense, but Kath said that it was pretty light. And I got the Key Lime pie, which was very good, although I like the meringue to be firmer. This was more like whipped cream.

We all went to the Welcome Aboard evening show. It started with a song and dance number. The music was performed by a live orchestra of maybe 12 or 14 instruments. They were really good. The dancers were ok. The did one number and then the cruise director came out and talked for a LONG time about our itinerary and the ship's activities. Finally, the "headliner" came out, comedian Greg Murphy. He wasn't consistently hysterical, but he had a few real laughs and I enjoyed his act. He was fun.

After the show, I went to the Quill and Compass bar to watch the NCAA Men's Basketball championship game. I liked this location. You could usually find some kind of sports on the TVs. I got there right before the start of the game and a performer was singing in the bar. He was probably supposed to do an hour-long set. But when the game started, the people in the bar pretty much revolted and told the crew member to turn up the volume of the TVs. So the performer basically surrendered and stopped his set so everybody could watch the game. I felt a little bad for him, because it was bad scheduling and not his fault.

After the game, I went up to the buffet restaurant for soft serve ice cream, but they stopped serving at 10pm!! Oh, the outrage!! At that point, it was about 11:30, so I decided to call it a night.

 

[RememberWhen]

Looking forward to hearing more!

 

[ChuckElias]

Looking forward to hearing more!

We just got a new foster pup today, so my productivity has been cut drastically! More to come soon.

 

[ChuckElias]

Thanks for your patience, as we adapt to our new foster pup. Now that Lulu has settled in, here's the next installment. . .

Day 2 -- At sea. 80°, mostly sunny. Turning cloudy mid-afternoon

I woke up pretty early for a couple of reasons. Our bed was not the most comfortable and I hated the pillows. Additionally, there was a lot of noise in the night. The ship was at full speed, with a lot of motion, and everything was creaking or rattling or squeaking. The motion was so noticeable that the crew had put out motion-sickness bags in the stairwell lobbies. Personally, I didn't think it was that bad at all. I could feel the motion, but I was never uncomfortable.

Kath and I took advantage of the walking/jogging path on Deck 12. We did this every day of the cruise, I think. The track is a little odd because it only covers half of the deck, but lots of people used it. For the first 3 days of the cruise, the ship was doing 20+ knots and we had winds of over 30 knots. So you can imagine what the wind felt like as we walked around on deck. A lot of times when I lifted my foot to take a step, the wind would blow the back leg into my other leg. So it was real work to do laps!

We had a late breakfast at Windjammer Café, which is the buffet restaurant. I'm going to try not to keep repeating myself, but I was not impressed with the buffet offerings. They had the usual stuff, and it was ok. But it just felt pretty average to me. Somehow, I took no pictures in the Windjammer!

Because of the late breakfast, I skipped lunch and went to the casino for a poker tournament. However, when I got there, it had already sold out To make it worse, I was told that there would be one other tournament on this sailing. (Only two poker events on a 14 night itinerary???) So I purchased my entry for the next tournament. When I got back to my room, I realized that the game was scheduled for the day that we were going through the Panama Canal. WHAT?? Who's going to sit in the casino while we go through the Canal??? Terrible planning. To make a long story short, they didn't get enough players for that event, so it was rescheduled, thankfully.

Anyway, here are a few pics of the casino.

While I was at the casino, Kath went to one of the shops and bought shampoo for me and hand lotion for herself. Let me just say that unless you are traveling in a suite -- bring your own toiletries. In the shower, is a single dispenser of a shampoo/body wash combo. It is terrible as a body wash and it's worse as a shampoo. The suites all have separate dispensers for soap, shampoo, and hair conditioner. But what you get in the non-suites is horrible.

For dinner, we went to the specialty restaurant Samba. This is a Brazilian-style steakhouse. Appetizers are on a buffet, but then waiters bring 7 or 8 cuts of meat to your table on skewers. There were sides of rice/beans, yucca fries, and fried plantains that were served family-style. The food was very good. I enjoyed the restaurant very much. The service was just ok, but they kept the meats coming. There were two minor drawbacks. First, you can only access the restaurant from the outside deck. So you HAVE to walk outside to get to dinner. As I already mentioned, winds on deck reached about 45 knots. So we got all dressed up and then got blown around by the wind before we could sit down. (They told us that in heavy rain, they allow people to come in through a crew-only passageway.) The second drawback is that shipboard announcements about upcoming activities were piped into the restaurant. So we're in this upscale setting that we've paid extra for, and we have to stop our conversation to hear about bingo and karaoke. That took away from any special feeling for the evening.

But even with those two minor inconveniences, I really enjoyed this meal. I would definitely recommend giving it a try if you ever sail on the Radiance.

As a palate-cleanser, they served a grilled pineapple that was pretty amazing. It was not at all what I expected. It was caramelized, which made it really unique in my experience. I loved it.

After dinner, the evening show in the main theater was entitled "Piano Man". We thought this was going to be a Billy Joel tribute, or maybe more generally a tribute to piano-playing pop artists. And in a way, it was. They used Billy Joel and Elton John songs, but they tried to build a dance show around the songs. So there was a kind of story about a young couple, and every song was a big dance number. If you've ever read my trip reports before, you know that this is just not my cup of tea. I didn't like it, but I didn't think it was terrible. Surprisingly (to me, anyway), Kathryn hated it. She did not enjoy the singing performances at all. I thought they were fine, definitely talented, but it's not the kind of show that I wanted to see.

After the show, all four of us wandered through the casino so my father-in-law could play a few slots. (A silly tradition on a dress-up night.) But then I headed back to the room, because I was very tired from my lack of sleep the previous night. The funny thing about going to bed early was that the ship's TV was running the Pixar movie Ratatouille, which was a fun surprise. The bigger surprise was that it was voiced in Spanish! So we watched about 45 minutes of it, doing the dialogue in English while trying to figure out how close the Spanish was to what we were used to.

 

[ChuckElias]

Some additional pictures from Samba:

Decor

The appetizer buffet:

The chocolate dessert that I loved.

A caramel flan dessert. I'm not a flan fan, but this was pretty good.

 

[Wendy Pleakley]

I'm doing RCL Wonder of the Seas later this year, so this report should be a great primer for my first RCL cruise.

My impression of the upcharge restaurants is that they aren't really cheaper than the equivalent on land, so unless one doesn't live near a Brazilian steak house or Teppanyaki restaurant or what not, they're not really worthwhile from a financial standpoint. You're paying for a meal when one is already paid for.

Do you find you get sufficient value and/or benefit from eating at the upcharge places?

 

[ChuckElias]

You're paying for a meal when one is already paid for.

Ok, you know what's kind of funny? That's my exact attitude when it comes to shore excursions that include lunch. There's a 3 hour excursion for $100 and there's a 4.5 hour excursion that includes lunch for $150. Why am I going to pay extra to get lunch, when I can just come back to the ship and get the lunch that I've already paid for ?!?!? (My wife rolls her eyes so hard that she gets a concussion when I say stuff like that out loud.)

Do you find you get sufficient value and/or benefit from eating at the upcharge places?

In this case, it's not so much that I'm concerned about the value, We were onboard for 14 days, so I basically just wanted to be able to break it up a little bit and have some variety in our dining, instead of going to the same restaurant for two weeks straight. We could've just done one or two, but by getting the 3-dinner plan, we did save some money.

To address your question directly, though, I would say that I felt two of the three restaurants were a decent value. I'm not going to tell you which one was not, though. You have to keep reading to find out! I really enjoyed Samba and the meat was very good and prepared well. (Unlike our meal on the Norwegian Breakaway, when all the meat seemed to prepared medium-well to well-done.) I would probably go again and would recommend it to somebody who was considering it. At $30 per person, it was about the same price as a similar-style restaurant near where we live. And on any cruise ship, if you're not wildly overpaying for something, it feels like a decent value.

 

[Lilofan]

I'm doing RCL Wonder of the Seas later this year, so this report should be a great primer for my first RCL cruise.

My impression of the upcharge restaurants is that they aren't really cheaper than the equivalent on land, so unless one doesn't live near a Brazilian steak house or Teppanyaki restaurant or what not, they're not really worthwhile from a financial standpoint. You're paying for a meal when one is already paid for.

Do you find you get sufficient value and/or benefit from eating at the upcharge places?

On the Wonder , we boarded , left luggage in the room and went straight to the near empty buffet lunch location. Most of the passengers when boarding were at the pool and outside decks, touring the ship. I'm paying for that meal so why not eat it.

 

[Wendy Pleakley]

Ok, you know what's kind of funny? That's my exact attitude when it comes to shore excursions that include lunch. There's a 3 hour excursion for $100 and there's a 4.5 hour excursion that includes lunch for $150. Why am I going to pay extra to get lunch, when I can just come back to the ship and get the lunch that I've already paid for ?!?!? (My wife rolls her eyes so hard that she gets a concussion when I say stuff like that out loud.)


In this case, it's not so much that I'm concerned about the value, We were onboard for 14 days, so I basically just wanted to be able to break it up a little bit and have some variety in our dining, instead of going to the same restaurant for two weeks straight. We could've just done one or two, but by getting the 3-dinner plan, we did save some money.

To address your question directly, though, I would say that I felt two of the three restaurants were a decent value. I'm not going to tell you which one was not, though. You have to keep reading to find out! I really enjoyed Samba and the meat was very good and prepared well. (Unlike our meal on the Norwegian Breakaway, when all the meat seemed to prepared medium-well to well-done.) I would probably go again and would recommend it to somebody who was considering it. At $30 per person, it was about the same price as a similar-style restaurant near where we live. And on any cruise ship, if you're not wildly overpaying for something, it feels like a decent value.

I was like that in Alaska last year. We didn't eat anything off the ship, even if it meant coming back for lunch before heading out again.

In fairness, that was a last minute "budget" trip and was intended to be frugal.

I'm planning to allow for extra spending on my upcoming cruise.

It's also worth remembering that cruise fares are generally pretty cheap for what is included. It's not that big a deal to spend on an extra nice meal, in theory.

 

[ChuckElias]

Day 3 -- At sea, mostly sunny, mid-80s, windy
Clocks fall back 1 hour

We slept in and didn't bother to order room service. I just ran up to Windjammer to get coffee and a few small things. While I worked out and did laps on Deck 12, Kath got a massage in the spa. It was not the greatest experience. It was a therapeutic massage, so it wasn't just for relaxation. But the massage therapist was very aggressive in her approach. Kath said that it was actually painful at several points. I think she did feel better afterwards, but I'm not sure she enjoyed it as much as some other spa treatments. Additionally, at the end of the session, the therapist was VERY pushy about purchasing spa products, like oils and lotions, to take home. Apparently, this is just a part of an overall strategy in the spa. Every time I walked past the spa entrance (which was a lot because of our stateroom location), someone would ask me if I wanted to come in and book something or if I wanted a free demo chair massage. Eventually, I just stopped acknowledging or answering them, which I don't like because it's rude. But there's a point where I just felt that I'd said "no" enough and I didn't want to have to do it anymore.
For lunch, we went to Cascades (our complimentary restaurant for dinner). At dinner, we just sat with our own party, but for lunch, they put you wherever there's an open spot, so we sat with a few other parties. I'm not much of an extrovert, but it was fine. In fact, I might as well just add this here: we found that almost everybody we met or spoke to on this cruise was very nice and pleasant. We've been on sailings that were full of complainers, and this trip was not like that at all. We enjoyed everybody that we ran into.

So for our actual lunch, I had the lentil soup, which was good, and the shrimp risotto, which was very good. I also had the steak quesadilla, but that was just ok.

Shrimp risotto:

Quesadilla:

After lunch, we decided to head to the pool for the first time. The Solarium was pretty packed, so we went to the outside pool. The reggae band was playing and they were pretty good. We had to "check out" our pool towels. You have to present your room key card before they'll give you a towel. Then you have to return it to the same desk so that they know you didn't steal it, I guess.

In any case, we spent most of the afternoon by the pool. Interestingly, both pools were filled with salt water. We were still moving at full speed, so the water was sloshing around the pools quite a bit. People were definitely having fun in our "wave pool".

After a very relaxing afternoon, we showered up and went to dinner at Cascades. The menu wasn't very appealing to me. However, there are a few items that are on the menu every night and so I decided to go with one of those. I had the Spaghetti Bolognese. This was actually really good. My father-in-law had a couple different times during the sailing and it was consistently very good. Kathryn had the shrimp scampi, which was good, but not great. Dessert was a black forest tart (chocolate cake with cherry filling), which was pretty good. The cake was ok and there was enough filling to make the whole thing moist. The other selection was a coconut layer cake. This was a white cake with white frosting that had some coconut in the frosting. It was pretty terrible.

Scampi

Bolognese

Black Forest tart:

Terrible coconut cake

After dinner, we went to the evening show, which was Scott Record. He did musical parodies/impressions and sketches. Let me say this as nicely as possible. This show was terrible. Abysmal. Loathsome. He should never be on stage again. I did not laugh once. There was a lot of nervous laughter in the audience, and only one guy that I heard who laughed genuinely. His parodies were stupid. His sketches were primarily fart jokes. We left early and not a minute too soon.

After that debacle, we went to the Schooner Bar to hear pianist/singer Olena Glotova. Her set that night was listed as a tribute to Billy Joel and Elton John. Well, that's exactly what we had hoped that we were going to see the previous night in the main theater. So we were really looking forward to Olena. As it turned out, it wasn't exactly what we would've liked. She is very talented, and she did some really good songs from Joel and John. But her versions drastically changed the pacing of the vocals and phrasing, so nobody could sing along. And her slavic accent muddled the lyrics. It was her version of the songs and it was well-done, but it's not what I would call a tribute-type performance. Despite not being what we expected, we enjoyed it and stayed for her whole set.

Once it was done, we got one last ice cream and headed back to the room for the night.

 

[ChuckElias]

Day 4 -- Cartagena, Columbia Sunny 92°

We were still traveling at full speed, and the seas were rough overnight, and I didn't get a ton of sleep. So since I was awake, I got up around 6 to do my walking early. However, all the doors leading to the deck outside were roped off. The whole upper deck was closed due to the high winds. So I hit the gym instead and used a treadmill. After that, I got a small breakfast at Windjammer. Once we were both up and ready for the day, we headed to the main theater to meet our shore excursion group.

They gave us an arrival time of 10:00 am. We decided to get there a few minutes early. Why? Because our last non-DCL cruise that included shore excursions was on the Norwegian Breakaway. On that cruise, we arrived at the meet-up point 10 minutes early only to discover that our group had already left the ship. So to avoid that, we got to the theater 15 minutes early this time. And that turned out to be a mistake; because there were crew members stationed at the entrance who were turning people away until their actually arrival time. So we got shunted into a separate line for the 10:00 people. At 10:00 sharp, they started letting our line into the theater. We walked to the front, got our group stickers and sat with the rest of our group in the theater.

And we sat. And sat. And -- wait for it. . . sat. They finally released our group at 11:20. This was not a good start to our adventure in Cartagena. But, we were on our way on our "Getsemani and Old Town Discovery" excursion. A bus took us into town and then we walked, for about a half hour at a time, to several locations. Getsemani is the poorer area which used to be the center of the slave trade in the city.

Because it was so hot, we stopped at a historic hotel for some refreshments.

Then we were driven to a more middle-class part of town where they pointed out the cultural significance of the door knockers, among other things. The door knocker would tell you what type of work the person did, and how important he was in his industry. The bigger the knocker, the more important the resident. The door could also tell you how many slaves the person owned, depending on the number of decorative rivets in it.

This door belonged to a military officer, based on the lion door knocker. You can also see that he owned at least 10 slaves.

Our last stop was a big town square with a public park and shops, as well as the Gold Museum. This is a museum dedicated to the aboriginal people of the area. They used to bury a person's valuables with him/her when they died. In the first half of the 20th century, as anyone could predict, people began to raid the graves to take all the gold and other valuables. Starting in the 1960s, the government started to re-claim as much of the stolen gold as they could. Much of the recovered artifacts made its way into this museum. It was actually pretty interesting. (And it was air conditioned, which a lot of us appreciated.)

The public park

I really thought that I had pictures of the museum, but I guess I don't. Sorry!

We got back to the ship at 3:40, and headed straight to the pool to cool off. We dipped in the Solarium pool, but only stayed for a half hour or so, because of our early seating time for dinner. We were back in Cascades with our regular serving staff. I haven't mentioned them yet, but they were very good throughout the entire sailing. Alban and Banjit were terrific for us. Alban was very attentive, and Banjit brought me 2 Coke Zeros to start every meal without asking.

The service overall was very good. I was definitely impressed with our dining staff and our stateroom attendant. It was a small step below the outstanding service we received on the Celebrity Summit last year, but we were very satisfied throughout the entire 2 weeks.

 

[ChuckElias]

Day 4, Evening

For dinner, the menu had an Italian theme. There was a very average Minestrone soup, an excellent arancini (fried rice balls with cheese in them), and an excellent beef carpaccio. Entrees included lasagna with Béchamel sauce, which was very good, and my chicken parmesan which was not very good. For dessert, Kath got the tiramisu (it was good but didn't need all the whipped cream), I got the miniature lemon merengue pie (excellent), and we shared the chocolate hazelnut cake, which was amazing! With the lone exception of my chicken parm, it was a very good meal.

Beef carpaccio

Anacini

Lasagna

Chicken parm

Tiramisu

Mini lemon merengue pie

And the awesome chocolate hazelnut cake

After two terrible evening shows in a row, we skipped the main show. It was called "Xplosion". It was singing, dancing, drumming, Argentinian bolo, Tango, "and more". It actually sounded interesting, but I just wasn't up for taking the risk again. So instead, we went to the Colony Club and saw the ship's "house band", which was called the High C's Horns. They were made up of a couple trumpets, two saxophones, a trombone, guitar, bass guitar, and drums. They were outstanding. They did a set for about 45 minutes, and it was really, really good. This was probably my favorite show of the whole two weeks.

After the High C's, I popped into the Quill and Compass to see if the guitarist/singer was there, but he must have been done for the night. So I grabbed one last soft-serve and took it back to eat on our balcony.

 

[ChuckElias]

Day 5 -- Colon, Panama High 80s, sunny

Another HOT day. We didn't have any excursions planned, so we slept in a little bit. Took our normal walk on Deck 12 and our regular small breakfast at the buffet. Around 11:30, we left the ship to check out the local shopping at the pier. The staff had warned everyone not to leave the port area unless we were part of an organized excursion due to possible crime in the area. So our plan was simply to visit the local shops, maybe find a cute place to have some lunch and then return to the ship mid-afternoon.

There were 4 or 5 tables right outside the exit of the port terminal. Local people were selling small souvenirs. Beyond that was a US-style mall which was still under construction. But to get to the mall, we had to walk through dozens of taxi drivers and tour guides who just swarmed anybody who walked by. And they were relentless. They just kept asking over and over again if they could take you somewhere. After about 10 of these encounters, I just put my head down, ignored everyone, and pushed my way through the crowd. I honestly felt like I was under siege.

Once we got through that harassment, the mall had a department store, a jewelry store, a sporting goods store. But because of the construction, almost nothing was actually open. So we did one lap around the building, and decided that there was nothing to see. So we turned right around and gratefully re-boarded the ship by 12:30. The whole afternoon essentially became a sea day for us, spent by the pool.

Since I don't have much else to talk about for this day, let me throw out some random thoughts and impressions about the Radiance before I move on to the evening's dinner

• The ambient music in the public areas of the ship is awful. It's a lot of modern pop/techno/dance music that I didn't recognize at all, or terrible remade versions of songs that were more recognizable. The exception to this was the outdoor pool. This is where we walked every day, and the mix here was more of a mid-1990s to mid-2000s mix, with a lot of stuff that I know and like.
• The hot tubs were in really rough shape, with big chunks of paint peeled from the bottom. Not a great look for a ship that just came out of a refurbishment.
• I think I mentioned that the pools are salt water. That's not a problem at all, but it might be surprise if you were expecting fresh water pool (as I was).
• The walking track on Deck 12 gets pretty busy in the morning. A couple of days, I chose to use the treadmills in the gym and it was a great alternative. The only drawback is that they don't have a video screen. The treadmills on some ships have a screen so you can either watch the ship's TV or view a neighborhood has you walk "though" it. So no TV, but you still get to look out and see the ocean in front of you at the front of the ship.
• I also mentioned bringing your own toiletries for your shower. Another issue with your bathroom is simply that the shower in your stateroom is tiny. (Again, unless you're in a suite.) This is a common complaint in the cruise industry. What I did on this trip was to shower in the spa. The spa provides showers for people using the gym or the sauna. They'll also provide you with towels. You can get a locker, as well. Unlike some cruise lines, however, they didn't have shower shoes available.
• The hallway outside our stateroom had a really strong musty odor and the carpet was wet. After the first few days, we mentioned it to our stateroom attendant. They put some fans in the hallway to dry the carpet, but it didn't do much. Toward the end of our first week, we noticed maintenance crew were working inside a panel of the hallway. Apparently, a pipe in the wall was leaking and getting the carpet wet. I think they eventually did get the leak fixed, but the musty smell never completely disappeared.
• While I didn't love all of it, the artwork on this ship is much better and more interesting than what we saw on the Celebrity Summit last year.

Ok, onto dinner. Kathryn had the strip steak again, and loved it. I had the braised pork short rib, and also loved that. For desserts, I had the chocolate cake, which was above average; and Kath had the cheesecake, which she felt was too dry.

I didn't take a picture of the steak because you've already seen that. But here's my short rib. Really good!

This was Kathryn's dad's dessert. A brownie with a deep chocolate gelato on top. Yum!

Cheesecake

Chocolate cake

The evening show was just a movie that no one wanted to see. So we walked around outside on the deck and enjoyed the warm night. No trivia, no lounge music. Because I'm just that old! It was just a very nice relaxing evening.

 

[ChuckElias]

Day 6 -- Panama Canal Low 80s, mostly sunny

We spent the whole day on deck to watch the crossing. The total passage took about 10 hours. This is longer than it usually takes. For those who don't know, the water for the canal comes from a man-made fresh-water lake. The water level of the lake is very low, due to insufficient rains for a few years. So they are trying to conserve the water that they use in the canal by sharing the water between locks. Instead of draining each lock into the ocean to lower the ship to the next lock, the water is emptied into another lock to raise that ship. In any case, it was 10 hours from beginning to end, and we waited quite a while to get into the first lock. There were a lot of ships lined up to get in.

Passenger ships typically get priority during the daytime, since the passengers want to see the process. The toll for passenger ships is also higher for this reason. The toll for our ship to go all the way through Panama was $370,000.

There was a wife/husband team of historians that gave a lecture in the main theater earlier in the week to tell us about how the canal was built, how long it took, difficulties it faced, etc. They knew a lot, but they were terrible presenters, having a hard time just reading their own script. They also spoke to us over the ship's intercom as we progressed through the canal. Unfortunately, they just read the same script to us from the initial lecture. Almost verbatim.

That's all we did today, so there's not much more to write, so here's a bunch of pictures of our passage. Then I'll talk about dinner.

Here's the Centennial Bridge, as we approach the canal from the east

Here's the "French Cut". This is where the French company made their attempt to build a canal.

Here we are waiting to get into the first lock. Ahead of us is Holland America's Nieuw Amsterdam.

And the gates open to let us in!

A couple of pictures from inside the lock. These were taken from Deck 5. You can see how close we are to the sides of the canal.

Here's one of the "mules" (named in honor of the actual mules that had been used to pull boats down the Erie Canal) that kept the ship from hitting the walls too hard. (We did bump once and made a big scrape in the paint!)

And here you can see we're almost all way into the lock and waiting for the lock to be filled to raise us to the height of the next lock.

 

[Lilofan]

Day 6 -- Panama Canal Low 80s, mostly sunny

We spent the whole day on deck to watch the crossing. The total passage took about 10 hours. This is longer than it usually takes. For those who don't know, the water for the canal comes from a man-made fresh-water lake. The water level of the lake is very low, due to insufficient rains for a few years. So they are trying to conserve the water that they use in the canal by sharing the water between locks. Instead of draining each lock into the ocean to lower the ship to the next lock, the water is emptied into another lock to raise that ship. In any case, it was 10 hours from beginning to end, and we waited quite a while to get into the first lock. There were a lot of ships lined up to get in.

Passenger ships typically get priority during the daytime, since the passengers want to see the process. The toll for passenger ships is also higher for this reason. The toll for our ship to go all the way through Panama was $370,000.

There was a wife/husband team of historians that gave a lecture in the main theater earlier in the week to tell us about how the canal was built, how long it took, difficulties it faced, etc. They knew a lot, but they were terrible presenters, having a hard time just reading their own script. They also spoke to us over the ship's intercom as we progressed through the canal. Unfortunately, they just read the same script to us from the initial lecture. Almost verbatim.

That's all we did today, so there's not much more to write, so here's a bunch of pictures of our passage. Then I'll talk about dinner.

Here's the Centennial Bridge, as we approach the canal from the east


View attachment 786933


View attachment 786934


Here's the "French Cut". This is where the French company made their attempt to build a canal.

View attachment 786935

Here we are waiting to get into the first lock. Ahead of us is Holland America's Nieuw Amsterdam.

View attachment 786936

And the gates open to let us in!

View attachment 786937

A couple of pictures from inside the lock. These were taken from Deck 5. You can see how close we are to the sides of the canal.

View attachment 786938

View attachment 786939

Here's one of the "mules" (named in honor of the actual mules that had been used to pull boats down the Erie Canal) that kept the ship from hitting the walls too hard. (We did bump once and made a big scrape in the paint!)

View attachment 786940

And here you can see we're almost all way into the lock and waiting for the lock to be filled to raise us to the height of the next lock.


View attachment 786941

I was there ! Miraflores Locks and the Panama Canal are incredible man made wonders.

 

[Phonedave]

I was like that in Alaska last year. We didn't eat anything off the ship, even if it meant coming back for lunch before heading out again.

In fairness, that was a last minute "budget" trip and was intended to be frugal.

I'm planning to allow for extra spending on my upcoming cruise.

It's also worth remembering that cruise fares are generally pretty cheap for what is included. It's not that big a deal to spend on an extra nice meal, in theory.

We are like that when we cruise to Bermuda.

Bermuda cruises tend to dock for 3 days, so there is time to do a lot of out and about sightseeing.

I think we have been on 4 Bermuda cruises now. We at lunch in Hamilton ONCE. Never doing that again. A hamburger, a chicken sandwich, and two alcoholic beverages were north of $100 before tip (Bermuda is expensive). Now we eat a big breakfast, and are sure to make it back to the ship in time for dinner (and then we may head out again after dinner).

 

[ChuckElias]

I have a lot more pictures of the canal and Lake Gatun. But I'll post them at the end of the report. For now, here's:

Day 6 -- Dinner

For appetizers, we got the Bao pork tacos. These had an usual flavor, but they were good. I also got the coconut shrimp, which I liked very much, and Kathryn got the tiger shrimp. But these were very small shrimp, and as a whole, it was only ok. For our entrees, Kathryn had the Pasta Tagliatelle. It was a pretty simple meal, but she enjoyed it. I had the curry chicken rota, which was very good. Our desserts were a very moist brownie with a delicious ganache on top, and a blueberry cobbler that was served at roughly the temperature of the sun's surface. I liked the cobbler, but the brownie was the better option.

Tiny Tiger Shrimp

Tagliatelle:

My chicken curry:

This was another dessert option. Some kind of doughnut. I don't remember what they were called, but I was curious, so we tried them. Don't waste your time. These were not good.

Molten lava cobbler:

After dinner, we headed right back out on deck to see our passage through the descending locks near Panama City that would empty us out into the Pacific Ocean. We stayed out on deck until after 11:30pm. It was a gorgeous night and it was fun to see the city all lit up. Long day, but really interesting and unique experience.