Sailing the Es-cap-ay (Escape)- Western Caribbean Review June 24, 2017

One more Escape photo from the Cozemel port

Once we got back to the ship, DD wanted to take me on the ropes course. I have never been on a ropes course before and I’m not a big fan of heights but the whole thing looked safe and fun so I was totally willing to give it a try. So we waiting in line, the got us both harnesses and we were on our way in less than 5 minutes! As a newbie, I wanted to see what the harness felt like before I jumped off the zipline so I tried sitting down before we even got to any obstacles and seeing how far the ropes let me go. Ok, that wasn’t too bad. Then,we get to the first obstacle and DH and I agree that they put a single narrow crossbeam at the very beginning of the course to weed out the people that are going to chicken out early. Don’t worry folks, you can do it! As Marlin say, “So, we’re cheating death now. That’s what we’re doing, and we’re having fun at the same time.”

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We were able to do both zip lines this time and it was soooo much fun! You get such great views from so high up on the decks. Here’s Kasiah’s view of the second zip line that takes you over the edge of the ship!

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DH told us when we got down from the course that a teenage girl got stuck halfway across that second zipline. I guess she didn’t give it the running start and it really didn’t have much decline to get you across. He said that one of the attendants went up and gave her a rope to pull her to the other side, but she looked very nervous while she was waiting- poor thing! So give those ziplines a running start, just to be safe!

Dinner tonight was our third specialty dining credit so we went to Cagney’s Steakhouse. This was another amazing restaurant! The service wasn’t as good for us as Moderno but the steak was delicious. Nathan got a ribeye and I got a filet. There are extra steak “topping” options so I got the lemon garlic butter which was also yummy. With the dining package, you get an appetizer, soup or salad, any entree, 2 sides and a desert. I thought the truffle fries were a great side dish. Very well seasoned. Desert was an amazing 7 layer chocolate cake. Here’s a photo of my steak and cake!

After dinner, we went to sit on the Waterfront and watch the sunset.

Pretty Sunset

We have been looking forward to the glow party since we booked this cruise! Finally a family-friendly party! The kids love glow sticks so we bought a few of those at the dollar store and we purchased a few cheap light-up glasses and colored gloves at the local skating rink. The family party was held in Spice H2O and it seemed pretty well attend. The Splash Academy staff hosted and they played music and games with prizes, some of which involved parents. They had several hula hoop games and a pie smashing contest!

The kids in their glow party gear.

Later that night, Spice H20 transitioned to the adult glow party, but we didn’t make it out that late.

Great review. We are thinking about booking a last minute August cruise on the Escape. All your posts and pictures will help us decide what to do.

Great review. We are thinking about booking a last minute August cruise on the Escape. All your posts and pictures will help us decide what to do.

Awesome! I'm so glad to help!

I just started this review today and to see that I caught up and that it is almost over. I will be on the escape in dec. I will have nieces and nephews on board so its good to see how happy your kids are. I cant wait for our trip and the rest of the review.

I just started this review today and to see that I caught up and that it is almost over. I will be on the escape in dec. I will have nieces and nephews on board so its good to see how happy your kids are. I cant wait for our trip and the rest of the review.

Thanks for joining me! This was a great family ship. I'm excited for you!

Day 7 Freestyle Daily

The last day on a cruise always makes me sad (even writing about it is making me wish I was back on day 1), but the wonderful part about the Escape is that there’s so much to do on the ship, that we still had an exciting day.

Day 7- Sea Day

I had heard from the forums that the Kid’s club show was not to be missed, so when we noticed the show rehearsal from 10am-12pm, we knew that’s what the kids would be up to this morning. Here’s the kid’s club agendas for the week for Ages 6-9 yrs and 10-12 yrs.

While the kids were at rehearsal, Nathan and I went back to the room to do the sad task of packing up our bags. I realized at this point, that I hadn’t taken photos of our storage spaces, so here’s the under the tv storage where DD put her clothes (3 shelves to the left) and I kept the electronics and excursion stuff (two shelves to the right).

We also hung a shoe organizer over the bathroom door as an easy place to find all our smaller items like daily medications, sunscreen, sunglasses, hair brushes, and sometimes even shoes.

Here’s our closet cubbies. There’s a lot more shoved in at the end of the week, but I took the bottom shelf and pulled out the packing cube that I needed each day, Patrick took the second cube (most of his outfits were in bags) and Nathan took the top cube and hung up most of his clothes in the tall closet part.

Here’s one of the Carnival ships heading back to Florida alongside us. They all look so beautiful in the big blue ocean!

After packing up, I did some casual walking around to grab a few photos of areas that I hadn’t been to before. Here’s Bayamo. I liked the pretend trees and lighting fixtures.

Le Bistro

The beautiful chandelier

Lighted staircase

Manhattan Dining Room entrance

Arcade

Another view of the kid’s splash area. My kids spent a lot of time playing here.

The kids pool sure gets busy on sea days!

Adults pool and stage- also very busy.

Golf course

Spice H2O during the day

The Grotto

This is one of the coolest ideas! It was a neat hangout for small groups or couples and if you’re sunbathing, you have a place to cool off.

We hit the buffet for lunch today. Nathan was really impressed with some of the healthy options that were offered on the buffet. Being on the Atkins diet, they have a few items that seemed tailormade to fit his low carb eating habits.

Kasiah wanted one last run at the ropes course and this time the line was very busy! I had read that the last sea day was the worst time to try the ropes course and they were right! There were lots of first timers in line and quite a few return adventurers. Even with the long line, Kasiah and DH made it to the front in about 30 minutes. The zip line was closed for a little while- I’m guessing they may have been short staffed while people went to lunch, but the zip lines reopened before they got started (about 1:30pm). I grabbed a few more photos of DD on the course.

Before dropping the kids off for the big show, we stopped by the Waterfront to try the gelato! I picked tiramisu flavored and it was sweet and fluffy!

The kid’s show was a riot and each child got to pick a “circus trick” to do and come out with their group to perform it. DS wasn’t really interested in the whole show idea this morning, but he did great on stage and was so proud of himself afterwards. He did the handkerchief juggling.

DD did the devil sticks.

The kids had a great time in the show!

After the show, we hit the slides one last time. Here’s the Aqua Loop.

Here’s a video of the Aqua Racer. It was really hot in the tubes so the camera fogged up partway through.

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This slide is sooooo much fun!

Here’s a little timelapse from our balcony.

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One thing we miss about Freestyle Dining is the opportunity to sit with other guests to meet new people throughout your cruise. To get that same opportunity, we invited Kasiah’s new Australian friend Kayla and her family to join us for dinner at Manhattan. We had a great time sharing cruise experiences and just making new friends! Here’s a photo of the girls-

The Caribbean graced us with one more gorgeous sunset before the trip was over.

The kids wanted to go to the pajama party in Splash Academy that night to say goodbye to their friends so DH and I finally got our chance to check out Dueling Pianos. These musicians are so talented and quick witted. Some of the music wasn’t really our style, but we had a great time sipping drinks and enjoying the fun anyways. I imagine the show gets a little roudier as the night goes on because the musician’s mentioned a few times that they were keeping it clean for the families in the room.

After one more late night buffet run, we headed to be for our last night on the lovely Es-cap-ay.

I will be on that cruise too!

Back again Roskie!:*

Thank you so much for taking the time to do the review. You have a beautiful family and your photos are stunning.

We will be on the Escape on 8/5 so we're super excited.

Love your photos and trip report.

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Super awesome review!! Thank you!

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Hi, just read through your review thus far and I am absolutely loving it. I am a total type A personality and packing list crazy as you. We are just under 60 days away from our first cruise with our toddler (not our first cruise as a couple). I have had my packing list started since we booked over a year ago. I would love to compare packing lists? Would you mind sharing? You can email it to me privately if you would like.

Hi, just read through your review thus far and I am absolutely loving it. I am a total type A personality and packing list crazy as you. We are just under 60 days away from our first cruise with our toddler (not our first cruise as a couple). I have had my packing list started since we booked over a year ago. I would love to compare packing lists? Would you mind sharing? You can email it to me privately if you would like.

A packing list a year out! I'm so impressed. I'd be happy to share my lists- could you send me your email address? Thanks!

Day 8- Disembarkation

We’ve always carried our own luggage off the ship on disembarkation day and the Escape’s easy walk off was the most efficient we’ve ever experienced! We work up at 6:30am and grabbed a quick buffet breakfast. The sunrise over Miami was stunning!

The Port of Miami all-clear was called at 8:00am and we immediately took the aft elevators down to deck 7 (no elevator congestion), scanned our cards, and walked right off the boat! Easy as that! There was no wait in customs and no declaration of purchases was needed unless you spent more than a certain amount so he just checked our passports and we were on our way. We walked right across the street to the garage and using the ticket that DH had gotten when parking last week and a credit card, we paid the parking fee at the kiosk on the first level. The total for the week was $140. We were on the road in about 15 minutes!

We headed from there to St Augustine’s Florida, which is a great post-cruise tourist stop (and about halfway between Miami and our house in SC), but before I get into some of the cool things to see in St Augustine, I wanted to finish the review about the Escape and our overall impressions. Since all our other cruises have been on RC, most of my comparisons come from there. And feel free to take my opinions with a grain of salt. Everyone on a cruise has a different experience and viewpoints. These are just ours and I hope some of it helps you have the best experience possible on the Escape!

Overall Impressions

The Ship Itself

• Ambiance- In my opinion, the public spaces on the Escape don’t have as much “wow” as some of the large RC ships (i.e. the Oasis’ Garden area or Boardwalk), but you can tell they paid attention to the utilitarian aspects of the space because in general the flow of traffic throughout the ship works, the spaces are pretty but not over the top and you never feel like you’re stuck in a crowd. The waterfront was one of my favorite public spaces and it was simple but functional. The negative part of the ambiance is that many of the places we went was loud. Other people may have a different experience but to me, the restaurants seemed noisy, the music on the pool decks during parties was almost unbearably loud and the Atrium activities would boom around the room. The positive of that is that this ship did seem to have a more vibrant party atmosphere. There was always people around at night having a great time and coming back from port days to the music and dancing on the dock was a fun experience too. For looks, I think RC wins, but for fun, I think NCL has an advantage.
  
• Stability- The Escape was a pretty smooth ride. DH and I noticed that it had a little shimmy at slow speeds on all floors, but otherwise smoother sailing than our experience on the Freedom. There was only one day where we were doing the zig zag walk down the hallway because we were swaying, but we also had great weather.
  
• Booking Promotions- This is where NCL was way better than anything we’ve gotten with RC. The dining package itself was a great value and if we had been drinkers, so would the UBP. The excursion credit saved us $100 and the tickets were already cheaper than a comparable RC cruise. I’m pretty happy with the overall value of this cruise.
  
• Demographic- It could be that it’s mid-summer, but the demographic on the ship seems over all younger compared to our other cruises. I feel like there were more retirees on our RC ships. This cruise seemed very young (working age families and singles). Was it younger partially because of the UBP and party atmosphere? Maybe so!
  

• Pools- I’ve never been on a cruise ship with enough pools, but I think they could have put an adult's pool in spice H20 and that would have spread out the crowds a little. The kids pool too deep in my option. I really, really loved the water slides. I guess the equivalent to the slides on our RC ships would be the Flowrider but the wait on the flowrider gets so long and so many more people can enjoy the waterslides. The ropes course was a highlight of this ship too!
  

The Room

We had a standard balcony on deck 9.

• I felt like our room was an average size and I was happy with the size of the balcony.
  
• Average amount of storage. You had under desk/tv, closet, under bed.
  
• Good exhaust in bathroom (it felt less stuffy than our RC bathrooms). Good shower with pressure and it was easy to set the temperature.
  
• Our room had no trouble keeping a consistent temperature in room and cooled down quickly at night when we adjusted the thermostat.
  
• NCL NEWBIE TIP- The key card had to be in the slot by the door for items that are plugged in to charge and the attendant was instructed to take card out if you left it in while you were gone. This makes sense to me from an energy conservation and safety perspective, but it did make charging phones/camera batteries a little trickier. I did like that it was easy for our room attendant to tell when we were in the room or gone by the lights on the door.
  

Room attendant

• Our room attendant was helpful and friendly, but he didn’t have the visibility of our RC attendants. On RC we’d always see our attendant in the hallways, coming in and out of neighboring rooms so that’s what we were used to, but our NCL attendant was on occasion difficult to find. We could always call guest services and have something taken care of in a timely manner, but the difference in availability makes me wonder if the room attendants on NCL may be a little understaffed or working a bigger area than the RC ones. Or maybe it wasn't his personality to hang out in the hallways. On a personal level, he did a great job at keeping everything in the room looking great and the times we chatted with him, he really seemed to care about our well being. I know he works long hours and does an excellent job, so we named him as our service hero for the cruise.
  

Food and Drink

I put this in a few different categories since there was so many food options but overall we were thrilled with the food on the Escape. The overall presentation may not have been as fancy as RC in some instances but the flavors were overall excellent. We experienced well seasoned, well cooked, even more adventurous food, especially in specialty restaurants.

• Specialty Dining- The food in these restaurants were outstanding, not just for cruise food but for any high end restaurant that you could visit on land. Teppanyaki was an experience in itself (plus a delicious meal)! The servings were generous and the three free dining package was an amazing good value, even if you had to pay for it. RC specialty was great too but I think NCL comes out on top for the consistency of their specialty dining restaurants and the variety of options.
  
• Main Dining Room- I think the MDR food quality was comparable between both lines. Sometimes it’s the little things I think about, for example I like that RC lets you pick your own bread instead of bringing a variety basket (because we would all want the french bread) but NCL wins for desserts because that hot lava cake is the best! I ate it pretty much every night. I do miss having the option for traditional dining but even on RCL that’s changing and they sometimes seat you without “table buddies” anyways. My family always liked getting to know new people through traditional dining and having our servers get to know us. The service at RC Main dining seemed better than NCL and I think part of their advantage is the dining teams. There was a lead waiter and they had a helper to go around and refill water, check to make sure everything came out ok, etc. NCL didn’t seem to have those teams and we even notice some conflict and tension between staff in several restaurants as they were supposed to be working together.
  
• Buffet- I felt that RC had a little more variety throughout the week on their buffet, but everything we had at the Garden Cafe was decent and fast. I wasn’t a fan of the buffet layout with the long line, I’d prefer the food islands on Oasis/Jewel, but the buffet seemed to have a good enough flow to never feel too crowded. Buffet favorites were those delicious little hash browns disks, eggs benedict, and chocolate crescent. Nothing really wowed me at lunch. The hand scooped ice cream is a big plus for NCL to use as we love some dessert and although I didn’t get to try them, the crepes was a fun buffet option too!
  
• Room Service- Oh, I did miss RC’s free room service. Having cookies and milk brought to the room on demand was one of our evening highlights, but there’s always the buffet. NCL if you’re listening, you need to have chocolate chip cookies on hand at all times. Oatmeal raisin just is not the same. :)
  
• Drink package- This felt like a better value on RC because DH prefers Coke over Pepsi, getting sodas was a chore because (in his opinion) the bars were slow and there were no self serve drink machines. Personal choice, but we would not purchase this again.
  
• A small detail but I miss being able to bring on our own bottle of wine and drink it in our room without the corking fee. Maybe I misread the rules, but I don’t think NCL allows that.
  

Activities

• This is where NCL really shines. There were a variety of activities throughout the day where felt like RC put some of the highlights like newlywed game very late at night so we’d never even consider going. We didn’t come in contact with the cruise director himself but his team was doing a great job of keeping people having a good time throughout the cruise! Line dancing class in the Atrium was a lot of fun.
  
• Even though we don’t stay up late much because our body clocks wake us up around 6am, you could tell that the Escape had an active party nightlife (where on the RC ships, we joked that they rolled up their sidewalks at 10pm). They offered lots of party options and having a glow party for the family was a big highlight.
  

Family Friendliness

• Lots of family friendly activity options like escape room, karaoke, t-shirt making, glow party, farewell party, and so much more. Kids seem welcome at all events, except at the broadway-style shows. I was disappointed that Brat Pack not appropriate for kids because DD is the only one who cares to see shows with me and those things are more fun as a family, but there were plenty of other things to do.
  
• The features of the ship itself really appealed to our family with the ropes course, slides, arcade, splash pad, etc. I think kids of all ages would enjoy what the Escape had to offer.
  
• The Kids club is awesome on both RC and NCL. The employees seem happy and they keep the kids engaged. I don’t know how they get them to want to keep coming back day after day, but they’re definitely doing something right. And the late night club fee seemed very reasonable (cheaper than our sitters at home).
  

Excursions

• Here’s where NCL struggles in my opinion- I felt like the majority of excursions were overpriced compared to RC. When I compared RC to independent, most of them seemed fairly comparable and you may pay a little extra for the convenience of having a ship excursion. With NCL some of the options seemed priced higher than they should have been and lacking in variety.
  
• I also prefer RC’s pre-cruise excursion booking process, because they let you download a guide so you can save it and compare options beforehand. I found NCL’s online system a little cumbersome.
  
• Where NCL is way better than RC is the experience coming back to port. NCL really rolls out the welcome mat when you come back from a port day. They have wet hand towels for your face, you can do a towel exchange to get rid of wet beach towels before you even get on the boat, they have water cups and shady places to sit. We even had music, dancing and jello shots when we returned from Cozumel. The other cruise lines could learn a lot from NCL here.
  

Misc

• This doesn’t really fit in a category, but I realized about Thursday that I had seen no mention of laundry service. I must have just spaced out on that because I could have sworn on the forums they offered some laundry service but we survived by washing some items in the sink with a sample laundry detergent that I brought and hanging them on the balcony. Not a big thing, but I wasn’t sure how I missed out on that.
  
• I forget which ship, but RC had these placards in the elevator that showed what day of the week it was, and I was kind of glad to be rid of them on the Escape because I lived an existence of blissful ignorance of the fact that days of the week even existed until that last sea day. Oh if only I could live in vacation land a little longer, I might even forget what month it is!
  

Here’s every family member’s favorite things about our Escape vacation-

• DS (7 years old)- Kids club and water slides
  
• Myself- Water slides and the sloths
  
• DD (10 years old)- Sloths and ropes course
  
• DH- Ropes course, inflatables on Playa Mia and food
  

So, there you have it! That’s my item by item summary of the Escape and our experiences of NCL versus RC. Overall, I give my experience on the Escape a 9 out of 10. Yes, it had it’s pros and cons in comparison but we had an amazing vacation on an amazing boat and I would recommend it to anyone!

Well, if I haven’t put you to sleep yet, stay tuned for our post-cruise day and a half of fun in St. Augustine!

A packing list a year out! I'm so impressed. I'd be happy to share my lists- could you send me your email address? Thanks!

jlcarovillano at yahoo dot com! Thanks!

Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! This was an incredible review that truly helped me with my planning. Really appreciate the time and level of detail you put into this!

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Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! This was an incredible review that truly helped me with my planning. Really appreciate the time and level of detail you put into this!

Awesome! I'm so glad it was useful for your planning!

Totally awesome review!

You have a beautiful family!

Thanks so much for posting!

Looking forward to Escape this September!

Totally awesome review!

 

You have a beautiful family!

 

Thanks so much for posting!

 

Looking forward to Escape this September!

Thank you for reading! I hope you have an amazing time! September is so close!

Great review Katie! Thank you for posting this. You had tons of great information, especially for those of us with kids.