harryfat1

At 8:55 an El Tour bus finally shows up – 25 minutes after the fact. Better late than never, I supposed. But there’s nobody else on the small bus other than us. Huh? I thought these guys were a big company that had many other customers? Anyway, who cares, just get on the bus. As we were leaving the cruise terminal, the driver said he was only the driver to take us to the “real bus” as this was not our actual tour bus OK…

20231227_083805.mp4 Besides being anxious about not hooking up with the tour operator, the loud music and the chaos of the cruise terminal didn't make me feel the "Aruba - One Happy Island Vibe". You can check out the scene from this short clip. I will talk more later on about this other ship, Freewinds, docked beside us as it’s permanently docked here. Every Aruba YouTibe cruise terminal video shows the ship tied up here.

Then he asked what tour we were on and as it turns out, he is not the guide for our tour. He said our tour guide is coming. Huh? It’s 8:35 for an 8:30 tour and the guide is not there? That doesn’t sound good as they are typically there waiting for you, not the other way around. He told us to stick around and wait while he texts and calls. I'm not getting warm fuzzies about this whole operation as every minute is ticking away. Later on, another family showed up to talk to this El Tours guide and they were also not with his tour they were told to wait as they were with a different tour than ours but with the same company. By 8:45, the El Tour guide at the terminal left to take his group to their sightseeing. He told us to wait for someone at their office to pick us up. So in the meantime, there’s nothing to do other than take pictures of the cruise terminal area .

We signed up for an independent tour that I found on the Viator website and booked it through them. I know Viator is only the middle person, but I thought I could trust them more than some company I never heard of. Well, that didn’t turn out exactly as planned… I signed up & paid Viator for the tour one month before sailing. Their instruction was to meet the tour operator right after we got out of the cruise terminal. I put in the name of the ship in the signup description. Being 9.2 on the anal scale, I even emailed the tour operator after I got the Viator confirmation to make sure the tour operator has us on their list and they know we are coming on the Odyssey of the Seas. I received an email confirmation from them saying I am on the list and I’m good to go. Or maybe not… The name of the company is El Tours. They are supposed to be a big tour operator on the island with various types of tours and airport transfers so it’s not a one minibus-only tour operator as I wanted a bigger bus with a reliable AC system than a small taxi van. So I got out and I saw the dude with an El Tours blue cap (see me talking to him in the picture below), I was really happy that he was there to meet us – until I gave him our name and then he said we were not on his list. WTH?

The outside scene is best described as “Organized Chaos”. People are everywhere and you need to find whatever tour you signed up for and the very loud music in the background (do they really need that loud music to "welcome you" to Aruba?)

OK, so we just got off the ship in Aruba and weaved through the various shops inside the terminal to get out.

Oh, very nice. Much appreciated. People on YouTube often refer to certain districts and it's not always clear to me where's what. I know from the various research I have been doing on the basics of where Brooklyn and Queens are relative to Manhattan but within Manhattan, I only know the big-name areas like Wall Street and Central Park and Time Square. Still need to get familiar with the other small districts.

Yeah, we started getting rain on Saturday afternoon and it's been on and off since then. Hopefully, this series of rain storms isn't as bad as last time.

Back to the cabin to get ready to get off the ship for our island tour of Aruba. Unlike Curacao, Aruba has a cruise terminal that is there as soon as you walk off the gangway. The white building is the cruise terminal. Can’t miss it. Similar to the Cozumel cruise terminal, you have to weave through a whole bunch of shops before you can get out Aruba’s slogan is One Happy Island. Don't worry, be happy? As we will soon find out, it's time to be worried...

From the water turbulence, it looks like the captain has the side thrusters on and he is docking the ship at the Aruba pier at 8 AM.

To the rest of the world, it’s Wednesday but you don’t care. It’s Day 5 as far as you are concerned Windjammer wasn't too busy at 7:30. They have an omelet station and unlike the old days when you had to stand in a long wait to wait for your personalized omelet, you just place your order with the person at the omelet station and they issue you the pager and when your omelet is done, the pager will vibrate and lights will go off and you just go and pick up it. Much better system. In the past, I seldom got omelets for breakfast because I didn’t want to stand in line and wait but with the pager system, you can get other food/drinks and start eating your breakfast and then go back when the omelet is done.

Went back to the cabin after my coffee and woke up the rest of the family to go to Windjammer A pilot boat here already to guide us in Aruba straight ahead

Day 5 – Aruba Since we had a tour scheduled for Aruba this morning, I woke up earlier to go down to 270 to get my coffee. Wake view at 6:56 after going through the secret entrance. More overcast today than at Curaaco yesterday. A couple of dudes are already at the back of 270 early in the morning I got there at 6:58 and the café 270 wasn’t opened yet. Had to stand and wait a couple of minutes for them to open up at 7. They are nothing if not punctual. Don't expect them to open up early

At midnight, we are only sailing at 6 knots out of Curaaco on the way to Aruba as the 2 islands are only 70 miles apart so we don’t need to break any speed record to get there tomorrow morning. Anyway, since tonight was the 80’s night and that reminds me of the popular 80’s TV show – Miami Vice and the famous Phil Collins song to close out the night: This concludes day 4 of the trip report as we are now officially halfway done with this cruise. +++++++++++ As always, I appreciate everyone for following along. It’s been over a month since I started and we are more than 60% done as Curacao has the most number of pictures compared to other days. The next day, Aruba, has the second most.

My $20 cheapo pseudo smartwatch from Temu tells me we walked 14,000+ steps today in going back and forth to Curacao twice. This would be the most we walked on this sailing as we joined the tour at Aruba so we didn't walk as much. Labadee wasn’t that much walking either. We pedaled the bike pretty far back at Hollywood Beach but I don’t think my watch accounted for that.

After the show at 11, my older son and my wife wanted to check out the 80’s dance party at the Music Hall. The venue was WAY too small for the number of people that wanted to be there. My younger son and I left after a while but my wife and my older one stayed for most of the dance. These are some of their pictures. Since I didn’t stay, I can’t comment on the event other than it was way overcrowded. You can definitely feel the 125% of capacity in this event as it was wall-to-wall people.

The show tonight was the magician Michael Holly. It was a very good act. I rate it the best of all the guest performers they had for our sailing.

So everyone is familiar with the “chair hogs” at the pool deck area whereby [people leave their towels early in the morning to hog the chair for the whole day. Well, the same chair hog people did it for the main theater seats. I had never seen it done at the theaters. I saw it at Studio B where they had 1 person trying to save 8 seats for the ice show as her party soundering in 3 minutes before the show started but at least they had a live person there. These folks take chair hogging to a new level. They came in and dropped off their drinks and left a blanket there and took off. Wow. Not that I am the fighting or confrontational type but I wish there would be a group of big dudes who come up and say, the heck with the savings the seats crap, and move the blank out to one chair and plop down and see what the chair hogs would do when they come back 3 minutes before the show to see they lost their space. Would it be a Carnival ship-level brawl? You know who I’ll be rooting for…

Dinner was done at 9:30 and since the show for the night doesn’t start until 10 PM, we visited the uncle in prison (aka photo area) to see if they uploaded the pictures we took last night and this morning getting off the ship

Our overall impression of the food was pretty good but we prefer the MDR atmosphere more. The solarium Bstro was a tad too quiet for our liking and the limited food menu that never changes will prevent us from eating it more than once per sailing We may or may not try it again on future sailings that have Solarium Bistro going forward. Dining is subjective as different people prefer different things.

Good baklava – at least for some Chinese dude who only eats it once every few years. It’s not like I’m an expert on how good/authentic it is back in Greece. It’s like some non-Chinese person reviewing dim sum in only eating it once every few years and thinks it’s good and authentic.

After we were seated, the waiter explained the setup and after we informed him of a member of the party having a nut allergy, he went to check with the chef and said there were some nuts with the lamb. Later on, the head waiter for the section came over along with the head chef for the section and said they would cook a lamb order just for us with no nuts. So I applaud RCI for being attentive to people with allergies and will accommodate by changing their recipe to the extent possible. The Calamari was pretty tasty as well as the lamb.

An interesting twist for the night is there was a wedding reception at the Bistro that night with maybe 20+ people all dressed up in white for the occasion as they took over a major part of the dining area. The straggler diners like us were seated on the side wing sections. Here's me checking in at the podium at 8:13. You can see the wedding party behind the head waiter

OK. We made it to the Solarium Bistro. My first time at this place. As the name implies, it’s located next to the solarium area. For some people who live in the Solarium area, they know exactly where it is. For us, this is the first time we even made it to this part of the ship and it’s the evening of day 4 and we are only here for the food… Here is the menu as found online. https://eatsleepcruise.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Odyssey-Solarium-Bistro-Dinner.pdf It’s the same menu nightly. It never changes so depends on how you feel about having the same food over and over again nightly in how often you want to come here for dinner. They have a breakfast and lunch buffet here with a smaller selection than Windjammer (smaller area) but we never made it up here other than tonight’s dinner. The theme is more Mediterranean cuisine The setup is new to us as it’s a hybrid between a typical buffet and MDR. They have the items listed out similar to the Windjammer but they don’t have too many of the items out. So for example, if you want lamb and it’s not there on display, they will cook it for you so it’ll be freshly cooked

Excellent photos. You have a rare perspective of NYC skyline and statue of Liberty that very few people will ever experience. Thanks for sharing.