JamieLogical

I just got a drink from Crooner's and saw this "Dunes" drink people were recommending. 1000% not my thing. It has coconut, pineapple, AND banana. I HATE all three of those flavors with a fiery passion. Melon, lemon, and lime sound good though.

I am fine with that but didn't find any self-service water stations until yesterday. I am guessing there is only one on each side? Would be nice if there were more if you can't count on table service for water.

I am used to the buffet being slammed for breakfast on port days and very empty for lunch in port days on all my previous cruises. Lunch on a sea day is a usually a lost cause.

Tea Time was from 3:00-3:45 in the Amalfi Dininf room today.

The very first cruise i ever took we left out of Miami and around 10:00pm we turned around and went back towards Miami for a medical evac. All of our ports got switched and we have ended up going to Ocho Rios instead of Falmouth in Jamaica. We ran into a man in the elevator and he was the groom in a wedding that was supposed to be in Falmouth. None of us got a refund! Not even that wedding party!

MDR service has been fine. I don't really know what "buffet service" would be other than them offering/bringing drinks, which had definitely not been a thing in our experience so far.

I have only eaten dinner in the MDR one night and took pictures of the menu when I was there but I did not take screenshots of the MDR menus for the other nights, I I am afraid I can't helped you. Maybe try to catch someone who is sailing in the next week or two and ask them in advance?

I think that is the crux of the matter for us. We like to sail 4-5 times a year and it just doesn't make sense in terms of bang for our buck to do that in the YC versus a regular balcony with drinks & wifi included.

Yesterday was our port stop in Costa Maya. We had an early excursion booked. This was the excursion that replaced the one we missed in Belize due to having received someone else’s shore excursion ticket. For this one, we were supposed to be at a meet-up point (Zone 4 & 5) onshore at 7:15. It seemed like the ship was a little late docking, because they weren’t even letting passengers off at 7:00. We lined up for when they did start letting us off, not wanting to miss this excursion. It was only a few minutes after 7:00 that we were allowed to start disembarking and we made it to Zones 4 & 5 around 7:20. It was a long walk along the full length of the pier, so it might have been a rush for anyone with mobility issues or just anyone who was still stuck in line waiting to disembark. The was it was organized, there seemed to be many buses for this same tour and there was just one long line for all of them. They counted people as they let them through the line and just filled up each bus in succession. So, I think even if you weren’t there right on time, you would have just gotten in line when you arrived and been put on one of the later buses. Once to the bus, we were handed a liability waiver and a pen. Each couple/group/family had to complete one waiver. We were allowed to carry those onto the bus and complete the onboard. I read through it and it was just the standard stuff about there being a risk of injury or death, not to do the tour if you had existing health conditions, and freeing the tour company of any liability in the event of injury or death. We signed ours and the tour guide and bus driver came down the isle to collect them all, along with the pens. We got underway quickly. Our tour guide was Jesus and our bus driver had a name that I will not even attempt to spell. Jesus gave us some history of the Mayans as well as some history of how the first Mayan ruins were discovered. He also gave us a couple of sales pitches, mostly for some custom made necklaces where they would make your initials in Mayan. The bus ride was about an hour, mostly through wetlands. The village we left from was definitely pretty blink-and-you’ll-miss-it and the one where the ruins were didn’t seem any bigger. Not a lot in between except cows and open spaces. Once we got to the park, there were some structure with thatched roofs that turned out to be a cafeteria/canteen, some shops, a ticket desk, and restrooms. We were told that we had 10 minutes to use the restroom and whatever else, then we would meet back to start walking. I went to the restroom and was very happy to see it was clean and the toilets had seats! I can’t remember a public restroom in Mexico with toilet sets, so that was really nice. Before we started walking, Jesus did warn everyone that it gets very hot and to be mindful of your heat level and hydration level and that if you started to feel woozy or anything, to let him know. The walk wasn’t bad and it was mostly shaded. Jesus stopped us at several points along the way to tell us about the ways the Mayans lived, their social structure, and the sorts of archeological and anthropological discoveries that had been made at the site. The first major stop along the way was a pretty complete pyramid. We took a million pictured of it then moved on. Somewhere along the way, part of our group saw spider monkeys up in the trees, but they were gone before my husband and I were able to see them. I have seen monkeys before, so I wasn’t super disappointed. Our next major stop was an area that had a circular “stage” with a semicircle of what had allegedly been bleachers around it. That is where the human sacrifices were to have been made. Next was the “residential area” where there were foundations of many homes. It was interesting, because it really did look like a “neighborhood” and seemed like the area where there would be people living and working every day, instead of the far less useful pyramid and murder stage. Along the way, we saw a few “hills” that were additional pyramids that had not been excavated yet. Apparently there are projects underway to complete those excavations, so it would be interesting to come back in a decade or so and see what they uncover. The final stop was the “big pyramid,” which involved climbing. At this point I was VERY hot and the steps up to the second level were fully sun-exposed and dauntingly high, so I didn’t go up there. My husband went up there with his 360 camera, so I will have to watch the video from that when we get home. Oh! That reminds me that my husband had to pay $4 for a pass to be allowed to take video in the park. You are allowed to take photos, but to take video, you have to get a ticket from that ticket desk back in the entrance area. While I was waiting for my husband to come back from his climb, I made friends with a tiny mantis that landed on my shoulder. It was a really cool mantis with elaborate markings all over it. I am used to only seeing the big green ones back in the US. Once everyone had returned from their climb, we headed back to the main entrance area where the buses had waited for us. We were given a bit more time to explore the shops and/or grab some food. My husband wisely used this time to buy a bunch of Mexican snack… two type of cookie things and two bags of differently flavored chips from what is available in the US. The we climbed back on the blessedly airconditioned buses. Jesus didn’t talk as much on the drive back to port so we all dozed off a bit and the time passed quickly. At the port, we were dropped in a different location than where we had been picked up. When we were picked up, those meeting zones for the excursions where right at the end of the pier and then we just had a quick walk behind some buildings to where the buses were parked. When we were dropped back off, we were dropped at the end of the huge rat maze that is the Costa Maya port. We followed all the signs and arrows that said “back to ship” but those took us on a very winding and twisty route that forced us to walk a very long distance through all of the shops, restaurants, pools, and attractions. We were so hot and so tired and really just wanted to be back at the ship, so this was a very frustrating experience for us. We finally got through the maze and had the long walk down the pier in the bright sunshine. It was a lot, but we were not mentally prepared for what awaited us ahead. The line to actually get back on the ship was long and wide and there were many dozens, if not hundreds of people ahead of us. They were only using one gangway. We surmised that this was because the waves were splashing too high at the forward gangway and it was unsafe to use, but it made for a miserable boarding experience. No tents with water or wet towels were set up. It was just unrelenting heat and direct sunlight for the entire time. It really only took about 15 minutes to get through the line, but it felt like eternity when we were so desperate to get out of the heat and get some lunch. My husband audibly growled at one point. We finally made it back onto the ship and, of course, the midship elevators were insanity, so we climbed the three flights of stairs to Deck 7 and walked back to the aft elevators to go up to the buffet. I couldn’t believe how packed the buffet was for a port day. We had to do more than one full lap to find seats. We did find a self-serve water station, so that was a bonus. I didn’t think they had those and we had long ago given up on receiving any water from the waiters in the buffet. We both immediately grabbed cups of ice water and inhaled them. I held down the fort at the table while my husband went off in search of his food. He returned with a pita and some gyro meet from the gyro station then it was my turn to go foraging. I ended up with a square of lasagna and some steak fries. I have been really disappointed with the Indian selection on this ship. Nearly every dish that sounded good to me had chicken on the bone and I don’t eat meat off of bones. It was for the better anyway, because I had planned to put my Indian food over some tortilla chips, but I saw a woman just grabbing tortilla chips out of the buffet with her bare hands instead of using the tongs. So, I decided I didn’t need tortilla chips after all. We quickly downed our food and another cup of water and headed back to our room to peel off our sweat-soaked clothes, shower, and just veg out for a little while. Once we were both vaguely human again, we dressed and went down for our afternoon coffee. The piazza was packed. There was some sort of minute-to-win-it game involving chop sticks that everyone was VERY into and there were loud cheers and music and announcements about it. I got my cup of coffee with Bailey’s and promptly managed to spill it all over my white shoe. So, I had to run back up to the room (actually more like crawl as the elevator did it’s fun stop-on-every-deck, full-tour-of-the-ship thing since I was in a hurry). I used up basically my entire Tide pen and tried to get the stain out. While those shoes were drying, I just switched to my sandals. Finally, I got back downstairs and got to drink my coffee. Once we had finished our coffee, we headed up to Crown Grill Bar to set up our games, stopping by Bellini’s for a couple of drinks to tide us over until Crown Grill actually opened. We played some Splendor Duel and some Rummy and I had a couple of Floradoras before we headed back to the room to get changed for formal night. After changing we headed down to Take Five to visit with Bon and get some pre-dinner drinks. We asked him if he could make us a couple of French 77s and he did. Then someone else came up and asked for Bon just to make him something special and he made what he called a French 78. Then I said I wanted one of those, but he made me something even a little different from that and called it a French 79 and it was my favorite thing I have drunk on this cruise so far! We took our drinks with us down to Catch by Rudy, where we had a 6:00 reservation. We didn’t have to wait long to be seated and were immediately challenged by the number of excellent sounding options on the menu. I ultimately decided on the crab cake for my starter, both the pasta and the goat cheese souffle for my mains (additional mains are $10 each) and the Chantilly Lace, which someone from Take Five had recommended, for my dessert. Our server quickly brought out some bread with butter and some kind of amazing spread which consisted of goat cheese, pesto, and a Mediterranean salad of olives, tomatoes, and I don’t even know what else. The goat cheese/pesto thing was delicious, but I had to avoid the ground walnuts sprinkled on top. We didn’t have a very long wait for our appetizers. My husband ordered the stew that came in a ridiculous crab-shaped pot. My crab cakes were small and I only ate one of them in anticipation of having way too much food with two mains. They were good, though and I really liked the mustard sauce they were served with. While we waited for our entrees, a young girl at a table nearby was celebrating a birthday and they brought her one of those “celebration cakes” I had seen around at the buffet and International Cafe. I overheard someone asking about them at the International Cafe and learned they cost $35. The servers all sang Happy Birthday to her and she asked to have the rest of the cake packaged up for her to share with the other kids in the Kids Club. My husband decided t o go use the restroom. Then after he came back, I decided to go use the restroom. I watched food coming out of the kitchen being served to all the other tables, though notably I do not think I saw any entrees being brought out…. just appetizers and desserts. At some point a trumpet and trombone playing the Love Boat theme song led a parade of people through the restaurant, presumably to the 360 Dining Experience, which I had heard was somewhere inside of/behind Rudy’s. More time went by and it really started to feel ridiculous. I had flagged some 7:30 shows/events in the app, assuming dinner would take around an hour and a half. Well, it was already past 7:30 and we still didn’t even have our mains. I went back and checked the timestamp on the photos I had taken of our appetizers and it had been a full hour since they had been delivered to us. Our waiter came out and apologized and said “two more minutes.” Ten minutes later, we just decided to leave. I was starting to get very hangry at this point. Remember, I had only eaten one of my little crab cakes at this point and the only other food I’d had all day was that little square of lasagna and a couple of french fries from the Kid’s Buffet 7 hours ago at that point. On our way out, we stopped at the matre’d stand and asked that we please not be charged for the meal. They apologized again and simply said the kitchen was “backed up.” We explained that we didn’t want to waste our entire evening just waiting for dinner and we had several shows and events we had hoped to see. We ran up to the buffet, but nothing there seemed appealing and I was surprised how little was still open, as it wasn’t quite 8:00 yet. I briefly thought of O’Malley’s, but my husband was actually pretty satisfied from that giant pot of stew he’d had, so he wasn’t that hungry and we settled on Gigi’s. This was our third visit to Gigi’s on this cruise and the matre’d there was the same we’d had each time. He made the mistake of asking how our evening had been and I explained the situation at Rudy’s. He was so sweet and so apologetic and very determined to take good care of us. He told the chef making the pizzas to put a rush on our pepperoni pizza and I was soon inhaling some food. We ended up with the tiramisu for dessert again, obviously. It was just so nice how they tried to make up for our bad experience and I felt human again after getting some food in me. I was very very grateful. After dinner, we had time to make it over to the Vista Lounge for one of the comedy shows. This was a new comedian, Gary Delena, who had just come onboard at our Roatan stop. He was very funny and it was a really good time. After that we talked about the fact that clocks were moving forward again and we wanted to be able to fully enjoy our last day onboard, so we decided to call it another early night, since I still had casino-ing to do. I went back to Take Five to pick up another drink (just a Take Five this time) and headed to the casino. I only stayed about 45 minutes and then headed up to bed. Day's Drinks: 1x Coffee with Bailey’s from Good Spirits 1x Vodka & Gingerale from Bellini's 2x Floradora from Crown Grill Bar 1x French 77 from Take Five 1x “French 79” from Take Five 1x Prosecco from Catch by Rudy 1x Take Five from Take Five

Haven't heard from him. He is on the Seashore, not the Mera.

Yesterday was our port stop in Roatan, Honduras. When we first opened the curtains, it looked really hazy outside, but when we actually opened the door, we realized it was smokey. Strong smell of wood smoke in the air and I pulled out my phone to see that Google showed the current weather condition as “smoke.” I tried to see if there was any news of local wildfire, but everything I found was from April, 2023. I did check some wildfire map sites and it seems like there are just wildfires everywhere. With the oppressive heat AND smoke, I didn't spend much time hanging out on the balcony and instead had my rooms service breakfast and typed up my blog on the couch in the room. We had a super lazy morning and just planned to get food in the buffet. I used the time that my husband was in the shower to try our doing some work stuff on the wifi. I was able to VPN and remote desktop into my work PC and I was able to hop on a zoom call with a couple of my coworkers. All of that worked fine, so I am optimistic about being able to work from the ship on August. My husband still hasn't been able to get all of his stuff tested yet though. We headed to the buffet around 9:00 and it was as predictably insane. I tried to get a made to order omelette from the omelette station. It was pretty slow and I clear what you were supposed to do once you got your ticket. I just loitered, but they kept saying to give your ticket to “the waiter” and they would bring it to you. I don't know who this “waiter” is supposed to have been. It's the buffet. I haven't even had any luck acquiring water from any of the crew roaming around the buffet, much less an omelette! Also, I never saw any waiters retrieving omelettes for people as I waited. Mostly people just left and then came back a while later to check if their omelette was ready. Once I had my omelette, I grabbed some sausage gravy and a hash brown and then went searching for my husband in the area he texted me he would be. At one point th restaurant manager came around checking on people and he saw we had no water and asked “no water?” and we said we would love some water and he went running off to one of the wait stations, but we still never got any water. After breakfast we set up camp at Good Spirits and had some drinks and played a game. At 11:00 we headed up to Bellini's, which was scheduled to open then and got one last round of pre-lunch drinks. I had promised my husband we would do Salty Dog grill for lunch so we dropped out stuff at our room and headed up there. I had the Reuben Dog and loaded fries with chili and cheese. My husband got a BLT burger minus the L & T and some plain fries. My hot dog was pretty good. The bun was a little sad, but the meat, saur kraut, and thousand island dressing were all good. My chili cheese fries were not good. The cheese sauce was the same flavorless sauce I had tried to put on my tortilla chips earlier in the cruise and the chili was just bad. I decided to go up to the kids’ station and get some plain fries (we had moved inside the buffet for the air conditioning) and saw they had chick nuggets. How could I resist those? So I took two of them and some fries and then filled up a little sauce cup with HP sauce and grabbed two more little sauce cups to take over to the salad station with me. I was hoping to find ranch dressing, but ended up with blue cheese and creamy Italian. There was honey mustard there as well for whoever was talking about honey mustard for the chicken strips earlier in the thread. The creamy Italian ended up being the real winner. It was zesty and delicious on both my fries and chicken nuggets. The nuggets were definitely better than the chicken strips earlier in the cruise. After lunch was nap time and after nap time was coffee time. My husband elected to skip nap time, so I checked the app to spy on where he was. He was at Crown Grill Bar. I grabbed all our games, went down to International Cafe/Good Spirits for my coffee and Bailey's and then headed up to Crown Grill. I ran into my husband in the hallway. He was heading towards Bellini's to try to get a drink since the one he ordered through the app never came. We headed back to Crown Grill Bar to set up a game. It was still pretty early but we eventually decided to move down to O’Malley's where we planned to have dinner. The bar there didn't open until 4:00, so we picked up some drinks from Bellini's and took them down with us. We got a nice booth and set up shop to play more games. Once the bar opened, we were able to get more drinks and soon as things are were getting crowded in there. At one point, after we finished a game, I got up to use the restroom and saw Wally and Wes at the bar. I asked what their plans were for dinner and they were planning to do first dinner there at O’Malley's, second dinner in the MDR, and third dinner at Ocean Terrace Sushi! I told them they were welcome to join us in our booth so they didn't have to eat at the crowded bar. We had a nice chat before Celtic Wave began playing and then it got too loud for conversation. For whatever reason, Celtic Wave’s set was super short, though, so we were still eating by the time they were done. After dinner, there really wasn't a ton going on. We still had all our games with us, so we dropped those back by the room. Since nothing was really starting until 7:30, I decided to get my casino-ing in and meet my husband at Princess Live for 80’s Movie Trivia at 7:30. I have definitely been down every day in the casino so far this trip. Yesterday I was down slightly less than previous days. I headed over towards Princess Live a little before 7:30 and joined the long line at the bar to try to get drinks. My husband showed up and went to try to find us seats while I got us drinks, but there were no seats to be found. We decided to give up on waiting around and headed over to Take Five where we were the only ones there. The music wasn't set to start until 8:15 in there. Bon hooked us up with some drinks. He had been saving some super secret Zacapa 23 for my husband and I tried the Take Five, which was very good. We stuck around for some more drinks, but then Bon was scheduled to go on break and my jazz tolerance is extremely low, so we fled shortly after the music started. We had decided to get our respective “late night snacks” despite the early hour, because clocks were moving forward an hour and our shore excursion in Costa Maya required us to be off the ship and somewhere in the port by 7:15am. I headed up for a slice of pizza and came back to the room to find my husband had acquired several cookies and other desserts that he had promptly abandoned. We watched the rest of Aliens and triple checked we had set our watches and alarms to the right times. Day's Drinks: 2x Champagne & Chambord from Good Spirits 1x Mimosa from Good Spirits 1x Sorento Sunset from Bellini's 1x Coffee & Bailey's from Good Spirits 1x Vodka & Gingerale from O’Malley's 1x Clover Breeze from O’Malley's 1x Golden Gorse from O’Malley's 1x Take Five from Take Five 1x Rosemary Grapefruit Fizz from Take Five

I probably won't be posting my blog about yesterday until this afternoon. We have an early excursion in Costa Maya that we are determined not to miss this time!

Guess I should be glad I never had the original so I can't be disappointed with the current version. I do like the current version version much.