dougyfresh

Good to hear about the drink punch cards, I was hoping they'd push these more on the longer sailings. A nice alternative to the unlimited package.

Likely Explorer, leaving Sydney for Seattle on April 22nd.

Correct! I saw your post that you will also be on that sailing in the roll call. Should be an exciting sailing, can't wait to get it started. I don't know that I will be doing a live blog like this but I'll try to remember to get some pictures of menus etc. And do a post cruise report.

Thanks for the updates CruisenovicesUK, sounds like you both had an excellent night even if you had to pay for it a bit the next day

Thank you for such a thorough report! Wife and I are prepping for a transpacific later this week so it's nice to see details on things like Laundry specials and wine prices. Glad to see it looks like you are all enjoying yourselves; I might use this report to sell my wife on the 5 night specialty dining!

We are taking a cruise in a couple weeks and part of our stay is a few days in Suva. I understand Suva is more of an industrial port so I was looking at taking a bus over to Pacific Harbour. If we do this will we be able to usee public beach space there or do I need to look into booking a days use at one of the resorts? We have our own snorkel gear so ideally we were hoping to just walk over from the bus stop to the beach but I couldn't find much info about public beach space on google.

Are most of the Pacific islands stops easy to get local currency from? We are doing Noumea and Fiji in a few weeks and while I plan to get some AUD while in Sydney, I wasn't sure if it'd be easy to bank at the other stops. Was hoping they would all have ATMs available, sounds like Noumea does and I would assume Suva does too

I think most international flights include 2 pieces of checked luggage. Still best to check with the carrier though, as I don't believe royal has any control over that part