lepidoptera

Thank you for taking the time to write a review! Interesting reading about the changes due to the dry dock.

I love how NCL caters to solos. Even from being able to put in 1 guest when searching for cruises they make it so easy. I was looking at a sailing on another line due to NCL not working with my schedule and there was no way to search for just one guest, when I went to book there was a 300% solo supplement. I really love freestyle cruising-having a fixed dining time every night is not fun for me. I really like NCL thermal suites. Super nice place to relax and be chill.

I spent some time in Reykjavik pre-cruise in 2021. My flight from the US landed early morning so I had an afternoon free to spend in Reykjavik. I spent some time walking around in down town Reykjavik. I went to the handknitters store and bought a sweater with some assembly required (yarn). I had an afternoon trip planned with I think Mr Puffin-I ended up missing it because I had the time wrong-to go see the Puffins. I did end up making a tour after that where I was picked up at one of the tour meeting points and went to Sky Lagoon then was brought back to Reykjavik. I was planning this day with not a ton of notice-I had free airfare from NCL, booked so long ago it was not the BOGO promo- and didn’t get my air until super late. I bet planning more than 2 weeks out, you could probably find a private tour, or do a shared tour with some people on your roll call that fits your schedule. There are a ton of tour operators in Reykjavik.

Yesterday I woke up feeling sick. On one of my excursions earlier in the week I was sat next to some one whose husband was ill. Later in the cruise I saw her again and she wasn’t feeling well. I think I caught a head cold from her. I really did nothing yesterday except pack and sleep. I decided not to go to my reservations at Le Bistro, just not to get others sick. Kinda weird last NCL cruise I had a reservation in Le Bistro the day I was diagnosed with Covid, they called me in isolation to see where I was 😆. I am thinking that Le Bistro might be a jinx. Good thing is I am feeling almost 100% better today. One thing I thought was weird is no info about departures were left in the cabin/by the cabin door. It didn’t really matter for me because I was doing self-assist. Not sure if I wanted priority disembarkation I would have to go to guest services? I feel like they have dropped off the tags in my room before. Today doing self-assist was pretty painless. Once I caught an elevator down to deck 7 I kept walking and didn’t wait in line at all. Immigration was doing the facial recognition, and it was really quick. They called self-assist slightly after 07:00 and I was at MSY through security at 08:10. And that was with a delay getting on elevators and the most clueless person I have ever seen going through security in front of me at the airport. Got held up over the multiple cans of coke she was trying to take through security 🤣 arguing with the TSA 🤣 I am afraid to look at the weather in Rochester 🫣

Today was Cozumel and it was a late port comparatively, we were scheduled to be released at 10. I slept as late as possible then went up stairs for a small breakfast. This is the only port I scheduled a non-NCL activity-Paradise Beach Club. It was a little weird to just be able to get off the ship whenever and not have a meeting point. There was a bit of a hold up at the bag check getting into the port. People were being very rude and complaining about why we needed bags checked. Ummm maybe it’s all the people I see at the buffet every morning taking apples and pears and cereal🙄🙄🙄 It was weird both in Cozumel and in the beach club with only one ship in port today. It was kinda weird at the beach they were playing like electronic dance remix’s the whole time I was there but there weren’t a lot of people and everyone was just chill. The food and drinks were good. Besides 2 daiquiris I stuck to non-alcoholic drinks. I had a delicious smoothie that tasted just like a banana split. I finished my book I had brought. A little after 4 the sky started getting dark like it was going to rain, I decided to head back to the ship. Took a small nap before we sailed away. I had my balcony curtains open, and we sailed away slightly late. Not sure why? Maybe a ferry ran late with the shore excursions. From what I have heard a lot of people were taking long shore excursions to the mainland. I was still pretty full from the food and drinks. Didn’t feel like a full dinner so I went up to the buffet for a crepe. It was a theme night of Asian food. They even had sushi at the back of the buffet.

I was a bit of a slug yesterday. When I got back on the ship I ate lunch in the buffet. It was kind of annoying that the bar was closed in the buffet. I’ve made a habit of getting a ginger ale for lunch, I do miss tho freestyle machines that were on royal cruise last year. Then I spent the whole afternoon in the spa 😊😊😊😊 Went back to my room from the spa to get appropriate clothes for dinner. Has a lovely dinner-I really liked the beef stroganoff, for dessert I asked for lemon and raspberry sorbet and it was very good. I was pretty tired at this point so I went to bed.

My shore excursion today was a mangrove kayak. Lots of waiting around. Wait for the tender, board tender wait for it to fill. Wait for the large group going to the distillery to clear before the company loaded us. Then after we kayaked it was supposed to be like a half an hour wait for the van to take us back, but there was an accident. We ended up waiting about an hour, in the rain. I thought the tour guides just did an okay job in this excursion. They really didn’t keep us together so kayaks were all over the place. The mangroves were cool, and the jelly fish were neat. We spent maybe 45 minutes actually on the water. No pictures on the water because I have a firm rule about only things allowed on a kayak are things you would be okay losing. That is why it took me a few days to be willing to take my nephew kayaking on our family vacation😜 The area where they took us was cool and had a lot of nice looking shops and cool looking bars and restaurants, but nothing was open.

Today we are in Grand Cayman. I have a 7:15 meeting time for my tour. Of course the one day I had to get up early, it was a struggle🤣

Last night I had a late dinner at Ocean Blue. I enjoyed the food but the 2 tables next to me were too drunk-shouting etc. If they are going to market that as one of their upscale restaurants with a stricter dress code there should be a behavior code as well. Anyhow, I had the scallops, beets, linguine with asparagus and au gratin potatoes. For dessert I had the Key lime tart. The scallops and the key lime were my favorite.

When I got back to my room my laundry had been returned which was fantastic. I decided to just put something on an check what was for dinner. I was glad I checked since it was Hungarian Goulash night which is my favorite MDR entree. Unfortunately, it wasn’t as good as it normally is. Usually the meat just falls apart, but about half of my meat was pretty chewy. I went from there to the spa. Took a quick shower then spent about half an hour in the spa. Went back to my room and fell 💤 with the light on. I woke up at about 2 because my room was about a million degrees. I think someone nearby had their door open which was affecting my air conditioning. It was really hard to fall back asleep, but I did probably around 5. Which we went forward again in time so I guess that is actually 6. I have been waking up naturally in the morning for sea days, but what with being up in the middle of the night I decided to set an alarm for 8. I did not want to get up at all. I allowed myself two cups of tea at breakfast. The berries in the buffet were just blue berries the first few days, then we had blackberries raspberries and strawberries. Today we were like 95% blueberries. I also had some toast today, cause I need more carbs 😆. I went down one whole side and there was no butter. Since all they gave me last night was 2 bricks of butter and they were out of the vodka for my drink I think we are getting to donner party situations here on the ship 😝 Afterwards sat on the waterfront and alternated writing this up and reading. Went up to the buffet for lunch. Today I had the sweet and sour chicken, which was yummy but not as good as the shrimp. I went back to my room to grab my suit to go to the spa, but my steward was cleaning so I decided to go to the atrium and listen to the cruisenext staff try to get me to sail on the Prima 😂

No pictures of snakes, just in case you were worried. There should be a picture with a sloth and one with a bird I saw. The butterfly was hard to take pictures of, I had better luck with videos but I’m not uploading those. The long brown thing is a bird nest.

Costa Rica: So I really, really didn’t feel well after the day before. We had a little bit of rocking sailing out of Panama which didn’t help with all the other reasons I felt sick. I knew that Costa Rica was an hour behind Panama. I did not have a time change when I went to bed. I skimmed the daily and didn’t see anything. But maybe we weren’t changing time zones for one day, just to change back from Grand Cayman? I was nervous though about setting my alarm on my phone since it doesn’t change automatically. So I ended up setting up a wake up call for 6:15 for my 8:15 meeting time. I woke up early and finally gave up on and got up to look at my phone (my smartwatch died a couple of days ago and the charging for my phone can’t be reached from my bed, I hates it.) at about 5:30. Decided to start getting ready. Took my shower and got ready, still no wake up call. Looked at my app and we did change time zones and I really started getting ready at 4:30 for a 8:15 meeting call. I was all ready for breakfast and it was only about 5:00. My choices were early riser’s or O’Sheehans. I knew I needed to get some non-greasy protein in me or we would have problems. I decided to eat at O’Sheehans. I really am not a big fan of eggs, but I will eat HOT scrambled eggs. Figured I would have a better chance at that in O’Sheehans. Plus I was not up with dealing with the mosh pit. Started out with tea, then got pancakes for a treat. Service was slow at that time of the morning, but it went pretty smoothly. I ate about half the eggs, which was a lot from me. I tried the potatoes, skipped the bacon and managed 1.5 pancakes. The food was hot which was great. I had been worried about being sick again, but was okay. After showering and food I was starting to feel better. I had brought my Ipad to wish my step-Mom a birthday and to work on the review but there was no internet. I had to go back to my room to drop off my I-Pad, but still made it to the Theatre in plenty of time. From what the shore excursion person was saying, the Canals and Train tour with the same meeting time was very large with around 300 guests. Luckily they called my tour, Veragua Rainforest and Tortugero Canals, first. Unluckily there was a huge amount of people clogging up the foyer of the theatre leaving only a single file line through, with them asking what tour was called. I ended up waiting on the stairs, since they hadn’t started allowing people off yet. There was a lady throughing an absolute tempertantrum on the stairs, which was a lot. So there was one bus for our tour from our ship, and I think the second bus that spent most of the day with us was from the Viking ship that was in port but I’m not 100% sure. We ended up going to the Tortugero Canals first. They were only about 20 minutes away, whereas the Rainforest was about 1 hour. So even though the tour description makes it sound like the rainforest comes first, I doubt it ever does. It was nice getting to the tour early. It looked like it was getting busy. The boat drivers did a fantastic job back up and swinging around so that all sides of the ship could see things like the sloths that were seen. Some of the animals like the toucan would only be seen by one side since turning around scared them off. Our tour bus guide narrated on the boat as well. He had a green laser pointer which was very helpful in finding animals. I had gotten a window seat but when we turned around and went back to the ship I allowed my seat mate a turn with the window. When we returned to the dock there was some really good watermelon and pineapple for everyone. Then it was time to get on the bus to the rainforest. I don’t think we actually went far from the ship, mostly just climbing. I was worried about being in a huge group but they ended up breaking us up at the rainforest. They allowed us to self-sort between the hard walk to a waterfall with 350 step and an easy flat walk. My original plan was the hard walk, but even though I was feeling better I decided to take the flat path just to make sure I didn’t start feeling better. There were about 11 of that decide to go flat. The majority who were doing the waterfall were also broke up into smaller groups. Our group did the snake area, then the frogs and the butterfly exhibit. The butterfly was my favorite, I am sure you can see why. There were small walks on wide mostly flat paths between the exhibits. There were either concrete or wooden not gravel. After we got done with those we had a small lecture from the head of the Veragua group. The thing that I thought was pretty cool was they are actively doing research. Some of the shore excursions can be a little 😒🤨 on the animals. Once we were done there we took a gondola ride down to the flat rainforest walk. Did our flat walk, then went back to the gondola to go back up to the hill. We then had lunch which was okay, the rice and beans were pretty plain. There was time in the small gift shop and to hit the bathrooms then it was back on the bus. My understanding is all the groups hit the exhibits just in a different order. We went to a banana plantation and gift shop. The banana plantation was kind of interesting, but not super great. The part I like most was reading the signs about the banana plague-Panama disease. Coast Rica is currently free of the current version that is attacking the Cavendish banana. These signs were not in English, since I think they are to educate workers on what to look for and report to the authorities. At the gift shop after our plantation walk, I did get some caramalized cocoa pods to bring to work for my staff to try. The banana plantation was close to the ship, but traffic was not great. We still made it back by 5:00 for a 5:30 sail away. Overall I really liked this excursion. One of my majors was biology so I expected to like, I think even people that aren’t humongous nerds liked it a lot. This excursion was rated a 2 by Norweigian on their difficulty scale. Granted I self selected into the easy group, but it was way less strenuous than yesterday’s 1.

Sorry I disappeared for a few days. The internet sailing in and out of Costa Rica was quite bad. I also had my two big excursion days back to back in Panama and Costa Rica. Yesterday, I started typing up Panama but ended up falling asleep 😴. I still have to type up Costa Rica, hopefully I will get to it this afternoon. I’ve been working on Panama on and off this morning but am planning on going to the spa soon. Sorry if is too long, but I had a lot to say 😂 Panama day: I woke up way too early. The meeting time was 08:15 in the Manhattan room. I set my alarm for 6 but I woke up around 5 because I was excited. Our Freestyle said that the temperature was forecasted to be 68 degrees F. When I went out on my balcony I really doubted that and ended up googling. It was forecasted to be a high of 88 F. I think some of the people on the shore excursion just took the forecasted temp at face value, and that lead to some really poor choices in clothing. The Manhattan room was packed, and the person from the shore excursion said that there was close to 400 of us on this excursion. I do believe there was 3 different meetings for this meeting time. They called our excursion then had us walk to the forward elevators/stares to get off on 4. As you can imagine with how many people we were spread out quite a bit. The person directing us just told us to go down to 4, there were supposed to be people telling us where to go but there were none. You just had to decide to go through the duty free/terminal then just find the bus in the giant line of buses. I must have done decently finding where I was going because I ended up being on bus number 1 out of a total of 8. It was mostly full, but I ended up asking to sit next to another solo and we ended up spending most of the day together. Our bus had the tour guide Geronimo who ended up being the narrator for the ferry as well. The bus ride was about an hour, the road to the ferry dock had construction and I feel like the bus was going slowly purposely to make sure we didn’t get there too early/too much before the other buses. I believe we got on near Gamboa, we were near where the Chagres river met up with the canal. Our guide told us to sit on the bottom deck when we got to the ferry. Since we were the first bus, most of the seats were empty. The had an inclosed portion with the buffet, some tables and most importantly air conditioning. Everywhere else was outside, some it shaded and some not. It probably took about half an hour to forty five minutes for everyone to load on the ferry. The parking lot was incredibly small and could only fit 2 buses. There might have also been a small hold up while we waited for ships going the other direction to move. We were underway right around 11. The tour provided a lunch which was rice (not vegetarian), vegetables, breaded chicken that had a kind sauce and onions, cheese sandwiches, vanilla wafers and apples. There was also as much water and coke you could drink the whole time we were on the ship. My favorite was the rice. We sailed towards the Pacific, under the Centennial Bridge and into the Pedro Miguel locks. This lock we were waiting for our companions for quite a while. We were in the frount in one lock, with a sailboat in the next lock. Behind both of us were 2 of the big ships. I believe the ship that shared our locks with us was a car carrier from what our guide said. I didn’t realize that we would be waiting so long for the second ships and spent quite a bit of time outside while waiting for the ships to get in, but it was cool to see the mules getting them into position. After that we sailed into the Miraflores locks. We spent less time waiting for our sailing partners in that locks I felt like. It was kind of cool a tour guide told us the walls were 110 years old and encouraged us to touch them for good luck. Once we were free of the locks we didn’t have to wait for the other ships at all. I feel like it took no time at all to sail under the bridge of the America’s. In the distance we could see the Joy, which was pretty cool. It was very neat watching the pilot get off the boat. Towards the end I feel like Geronimo was telling us we would be docked in like 10 minutes for quite a while. It felt like everyone was really ready to get off the boat. Most people were outside the whole time. When we were moving there was a breeze, but we spent quite a bit of time sitting still in the docks. There was nothing shading the canal. The upper deck was covered, but there were still a lot of people sitting in the sun. I started feeling sick from the diesel around the time that we got into the Miraflores locks, I had brought sea sickness meds and sea bands with me on the excursion, which needed up helping. People were jammed into the front deck of the ship and holding the door to the downstairs open, so there was no breeze and no air conditioning. When we docked, there was actually a rather steep gangway to get up to the buses. We got back on the buses around 5:30. A lot of the people struggled. The excursion was given a difficulty level of 1 by Norwegian, but I think it probably should be a 2. It did not help that a lot of people were not dressed for the weather. One lady that the tour guides ended up having to help on the boat was wearing jeans and a long sleeve button up shirt. Some of the people wearing light colored/loose long sleeve/pants looked fairly comfortable but a lot of people were not looking good. We had about a 1.5 hour ride back to the ship, so we ended up getting back around 7 with a sail away time of 7:30. I was super nauseous by that point. I tried eating some dinner but ended up being sick (thankfully in my own room) Overall I really enjoyed this excursion, but I’m a giant nerd. I wanted to give everyone more of a description of what it was like, so people had a more accurate description of what the tour was like than what the website made it sound like.

So trying to eat and the ship rocking now that we pulled out were the feathers that broke the camel’s back 🤢🤢🤢. I am going to bed. I realized looking at the app that my shore excursion for tomorrow is another long one, 7 hours so hopefully I’m recovered.

Today was a long hot day transversing the Panama Canal. Just got back in board a few minutes ago. My phone is dead and so am I 😝. Need to clean up, get some food in me and cool down. Feeling slightly nauseous from the diesel from the boat and the hilly ride back on the bus. Hopefully I will get some pictures from the canal up today, but if not tomorrow. Even feeling 😩 I had a fantastic time and really loved the canal.

Burn the floor was fantastic. Started the show with Bohemian Rhapsody which was probably my favorite one they did. Afterwards decided not to go to dinner. I have an early excursion tomorrow. I was expecting Panama to be cancelled, but I am hearing things have been resolved and Carnival and Princess have called in Panama this week.

The bad thing about eating dinner late (when I don’t sleep through it lol) is not getting crepes as an after dinner snack. Fixed it tonight and had one before dinner. Was getting hangry waiting for the doors to Burn the Floor to open. Went with cherry and Nutella.

Yes no shrimp and grits! I would have tried those, love 🍤

I did end up spending some time in the spa, very relaxing but I’m not a fan of the music they have playing. Smooth jazz is just not my favorite spa music. Went and checked out the buffet around noon because I was getting hungry. Nothing I wanted to eat today so I decided to check out Ocean Blue’s lunch window. Ended up getting a lobster roll. Very yummy but not at all filling. Wouldn’t get again I don’t think. I decided to go and check out American Diner. Very nice Ocean view. I ordered the Mozzarella sticks and the spinach salad with steak. Mozzarella sticks were good, very thick. Sauce was too sweet for my taste. My waiter’s English was especially poor, and I ended up with the chopped salad at first. I took a picture of it just to show people. Didn’t eat it, I don't like iceberg lettuce. Easily my least favorite green. My waiter almost brought me ceaser salad, I can tell, but then he brought me the menu and had me point 🤣 The wait for the spinach salad was worth it. The salad was fantastic, probably one of the best things I’ve had on ship. It would have been even better if the eggs were soft boiled as described in the menu. The dressing is slightly warm, and I think it would be even better with some egg juice. I might go back to American Diner just for the salad. I was not expecting it to be that good.

So last night turned into a wash. After “tea” I went back to my room and laid down just to take a small 💤. When I woke up it was 4:30 and it took me a few minutes to comprehend it was 4:30 am 🤣 I tried going back to sleep but was understandably slept out. So I did quite things in my room for a few hours-washing my shirt from yesterday to get sunscreen out of it, organized my clothes again, read and knitted. Started getting ready slightly before 8. Then left to get breakfast because I was pretty hungry, realized we went back an hour last night and I got up even earlier than I thought!😂 Since I was super hungry I had extra breakfast today, a bacon sandwich with PB-one of my favourite food since I was little. After breakfast I spent a little time on the Waterfront, but the only chairs that were open were the u chapped ones which aren’t comfortable for knitting and there was some one hacking up a lung without covering their mouth 🤢. Came inside to shakers and managed to finish my current ball of yarn. Thinking of going to the spa, but not sure I want to change into a swim suit.

Thanks @Erekosse and @cruiseny4life I am enjoying the Breakaway very much and am having fun doing a live.

I had a Norweigian excursion Hato Cabes and City center. The caves were nice but really, really hot and busy. We ended up having to wait around for a while to get into the caves. Walking around the city center was fun and I stayed in the center because I wanted to take the pontoon bridge not the ferry across. I applied sunscreen 4 times and I might still be sunburnt. There is a delft store in the Rif fort/mall where I got some Xmas ornament (I have a special small tree with ornaments from my vacations). Got back on the ship and it felt really good to be back in the air conditioning. By the time I got back my choices were O’Sheehans and tea time at the buffet. I chose tea time and didn’t like most of the choices and most of the things I tried.

For lunch the specialities continue to be great. I really liked the garlic and herb stuffed chicken. Did not get dessert, 2 of them had mango and the others weren’t to my taste.