(Slightly less so) Cheapo dad's trip report on Independence of the Seas

On Oasis, the pre-poured drinks were all under filled, but they never even looked as tidy as this, they were just trying to keep the trays filled as best they could as it was so busy.

You can gain 3 pounds just by looking at this

Ha, I did have some Canadian bacon/ham thing on my plate. But at least it's not the typical bacon

Fruit plate

On Oasis, the pre-poured drinks were all under filled, but they never even looked as tidy as this, they were just trying to keep the trays filled as best they could as it was so busy.

Maybe because it was 7:30 or 8:30 in the morning makes a difference as people are still trying to sleep in on a late port day after a beach day yesterday. WJ wasn't very busy.

Anyway, I'm off to bed. Enough pics for the night.

I am uploading at a much faster pace than previous 2 reports due to switching over to Shutterfly. Much easier to cut and paste from there than trim the stupid non sense long string from Flickr to post here.

Liked your side trip to visit the trees and rocks, also the bean counters seam to be every where.

Hi Harry

I love the rock pictures too....

but can I swerve for a photography question? How/what settings to get that bokeh effect?

thanks!

...

 

For those that read my Allure trip report, you know we like them BIG. After 2 sailings on the Freedom class, the family is clamoring for going back to the big ship again. So since we had time to kill, we stopped by the Next cruise and got the next available appointment to get some price quotes for the Harmony/Symphony cruise for December 2018.

 

Of course, the Christmas sailing is crazy expensive and if bad dad has his way, he would take the kids out of school the week before Christmas and save boat/ship load of money but it’s hard to take kids out during the critical high school periods. This isn’t kindergarten.

 

If we sail Christmas week, the 4 of us would be around $7,400, not counting airfare from California, which means we are looking at a $10,000 budget cruise. If we pulled them out of school 1 week early to sail before Christmas, it’s only $4,100 for cruise portion only. So that meant we would have to pay $3K+ more to sail during Christmas in 2018. Cheapo dad “not down with that” - to steal a phrase from Sir Mix A Lot – just to sail over Christmas.

 

So for now we have no cruise planned for the winter. Maybe go back to Disneyworld in Orlando to pay homage to the Mecca that the Mouse has built. We haven’t been there since 2011 so it’s long overdue. Deep down I am a bigger Disney fan than a cruise fan as it’s more ‘fun/work” to plan for a Disney trip than a cruise.

 

It brings out the aggressive anal side of me in planning out where I want to eat dinner 180 days out during the entire 7 night stay. Now that is ANAL…

 

But that’s way down the road. Enough digression.

So loving your report. Amazing as always! As for big ship...would you try Symphony some day? Or even Anthem class?

I hear you on the Christmas week vs before. Cruises know they can charge more. We'll be going Canadian March break (or maybe its just Ontario break?) so at least at March it's not one set week for everyone i.e. its spread out (airlines get you though).

I remember you commenting before about Disney parks. We love them too and cruising and Disney parks are certianly the best family holidays. We've been rotating between them and even visited Disneyland for the first time last summer (your home park). How amazing that you had an annual pass. And so nice if you can get back to the World too. They are similar but yet differences (with proximity of parks being the biggest difference). Love both.

 

Of course, the Christmas sailing is crazy expensive and if bad dad has his way, he would take the kids out of school the week before Christmas and save boat/ship load of money but it’s hard to take kids out during the critical high school periods. This isn’t kindergarten.

 

If we sail Christmas week, the 4 of us would be around $7,400, not counting airfare from California, which means we are looking at a $10,000 budget cruise. If we pulled them out of school 1 week early to sail before Christmas, it’s only $4,100 for cruise portion only. So that meant we would have to pay $3K+ more to sail during Christmas in 2018. Cheapo dad “not down with that” - to steal a phrase from Sir Mix A Lot – just to sail over Christmas.

Ugh, I hear you. I just can't do it either for those holiday sailings. We pulled the kids out when they were in elementary school (wow, those mid-January cruises are CHEAP) but now that they're in high school you can't miss a thing. It seems like they take a bathroom break during an AP class and suddenly they're behind two units and down one letter grade. Sigh.

These guys are called Revoiced. They are the typical A Capella group. Pretty empty at 6:42 ahead of the 7 PM pre dinner showtime. The show was surprisingly good. I would almost say they were the best guest performers on the cruise. It was either them or the comedian on the last day.

Keep it comin' Harry. Really enjoying the review. I agree with your assessment on the entertainment (although I would add the Hypnotist in the top three), but I was pleasantly surprised by how good, and funny, these guys were. We were at the 8:30 show - early dinner - and it was quite crowded. 15 minutes before the show the only available seats for 6 of us were in the upper level on the side. It seemed like that was the case for most of the late entertainment shows when they had an early and a late one.

Liked your side trip to visit the trees and rocks, also the bean counters seam to be every where.

Here’s something for a bean counter reader to calculate – approximately how much money was saved by giving passengers only half cup of juice instead of full cup?

So take 4,200+ passengers for the Indy as an example. Assume for simplicity sake, 1,200 or so passengers daily does not eat at WJ for breakfast as they prefer in cabin breakfast/MDR/café promenade. That means 3,000 will file into WJ. Further assume only half of the people drink the juice being offered as the other half drink tea/coffee/water/booze for breakfast. That gets us to 1,500 people.

Now assume by serving half cup, the cruise line saves 4 ounces of juice per person. That would mean 6,000 ounces would be saved each and every day.

Then if someone can find/estimate the average cost of cheap generic juice the cruise buys by bulk, multiply that cost by 6,000 ounces by twenty something ships and 365 days a year, you should get a ball park figure.

Of course, that person is free to adjust any of my assumptions to do the math. I just started down the path but by no means is my assumption correct.

Hi Harry

 

I love the rock pictures too....

 

but can I swerve for a photography question? How/what settings to get that bokeh effect?

 

thanks!

Not knowing your equipment (cell phone versus types of camera), it’s hard to say exactly. But the idea of bokeh is just depth of perception. You are just telling the camera lens to focus either the fore ground or the background and make everything else blurry.

If you are able to adjust the aperture of your camera, get it to the lowest number f stop your lens allows and point at the subject you want while standing few feet away.

I am by no means a photographer. I watched hours and hours of YouTube video on how to take pictures before the Allure cruise as I was amazed by the pictures I saw online and wanted to be like them. So that’s how I picked up some of these concepts but I don’t like photography THAT MUCH to play with my camera on days I am not on vacation. For 6 months, I will go through every day without even touching my camera even though it’s sitting on my desk less than 3 feet away. I am not like those photo guys on the photo forums at CC that walks around the neighborhood with their camera. Only take pictures on vacation as cheapo dad wants to maximize vacation value years down the road.

Here is a YouTube video that shows you how to do bokeh. Just practice with anything from home, like a mug. Don’t need anything fancy.

Ugh, I hear you. I just can't do it either for those holiday sailings. We pulled the kids out when they were in elementary school (wow, those mid-January cruises are CHEAP) but now that they're in high school you can't miss a thing. It seems like they take a bathroom break during an AP class and suddenly they're behind two units and down one letter grade. Sigh.

Yeah, us parents with kids in high school is pretty much stuck. We have decided we won't be taking any more December cruises next couple of years unless we see a really good rate. Most likely we will do Disney World in December and maybe a driving trip next December while we do an Alaska cruise in the summer.

Just so to avoid the huge premium on the Christmas cruises. Not worth it.

So loving your report. Amazing as always! As for big ship...would you try Symphony some day? Or even Anthem class?

 

I hear you on the Christmas week vs before. Cruises know they can charge more. We'll be going Canadian March break (or maybe its just Ontario break?) so at least at March it's not one set week for everyone i.e. its spread out (airlines get you though).

 

I remember you commenting before about Disney parks. We love them too and cruising and Disney parks are certianly the best family holidays. We've been rotating between them and even visited Disneyland for the first time last summer (your home park). How amazing that you had an annual pass. And so nice if you can get back to the World too. They are similar but yet differences (with proximity of parks being the biggest difference). Love both.

If you like maximum number of rides in a short time frame, Disneyland & CA Adventure is the place to be. If you want a bigger more immersive resort feel with boat rides and monorails, go to WDW.

We will likely head out there this December. Disney may have a premium for the holidays but nothing crazy like the cruise line prices.

Counting the Indy cruise, this is the third Caribbean cruise in a row. Maybe time for a switch on next cruise. We will see. Last year I was looking to go on Adventure of the Seas or Celebrity cruise and neither panned out. Sometimes it's hard to plan the family vacation too far out.

Keep it comin' Harry. Really enjoying the review. I agree with your assessment on the entertainment (although I would add the Hypnotist in the top three), but I was pleasantly surprised by how good, and funny, these guys were. We were at the 8:30 show - early dinner - and it was quite crowded. 15 minutes before the show the only available seats for 6 of us were in the upper level on the side. It seemed like that was the case for most of the late entertainment shows when they had an early and a late one.

Interesting observation.

I wonder if the later show will be more popular because you have the windjammer people coming over. Meaning that WJ does not open for dinner until 6 PM. Unless they eat really fast, most of the WJ folks won't make it to the 7 PM show early as they will still be eating.

So the 8:45 show will have both the people from the 5:30 dinner as well as whomever from the WJ. Whereas the 7 PM show, especially if you arrive early at 6:45, most likely only the late seating crowd will be there and hence more open seats.

So after the Next Cruise visit, we just went back to the cabin to chill and wait for my wife to come back.

The wife had promised to have lunch with the brother in-law at MDR as they are the MDR type but we are the more WJ type so we typically don’t see each other during the day time but since we are all going off together to see San Juan, it makes sense to eat lunch at the same time and then get off the ship together.

Although I somewhat regret this decision as the captain came on the PA system and announced we are sailing into San Juan and suggested people take a look while we were stuck inside MDR. So I have no pics of us entering the port in San Juan. Dang.

At any rate, here is the lunch menu. One good thing about the lunch menu is that it’s smaller and easier to hold and I can take a picture of it without looking like a dummy in not lining up.

MDR salad area where they make the exact salad you like

My son's steak sandwich. He didn't like it much.

I got the salmon

My older one got this

So after lunch, it was time to head back to the cabin and get ready for another port. But we walked out on deck 4 to take few pictures of the harbor area.

This is my first visit to San Juan and I was really looking forward to it. On day one of the cruise, the assistant waiter, Simona, asked which of the five ports I was most looking forward to visit and I said San Juan. Few years ago I read someone’s review on San Juan as “the armpits of the Caribbean”. After visiting there, I could not disagree more. Don’t know which part he saw, but for us, it was a great visit.

Much has been written about the hurricane damages to San Juan and for a while we weren’t really sure if the ship would even make it to San Juan. As all that have cruised to the Eastern Caribbean route the past few months and will do so the next few will tell you, there have been a lot of uncertainties on what ships will visit what ports on what day with all the cruise lines posting daily updates on their web site on when they will go back to the hurricane damaged ports.

You can see the fort to the left in the distance. That's where we will be going

There is another ship in the distance. Per cruise tt, that was the Jewel of the Seas as it was a Sunday and she was starting her 7 day southern Caribbean route. Regardless, we have bigger butt than her butt so we are good. She would sail off before us while we were still eating dinner.

So we headed back to the cabins to get our stuff and went to WJ to fill up our water bottles. I find it much cleaner to go to WJ, grab tons of cups of ice water and pour them into our water bottles. After seeing bunch of idiots trying to fill their water bottles at café promenade last year straight up and with Noro virus alert on our cruise, wasn’t taking any chances.

Gather the troops and all 8 of us made it down. Of course, stopping for the obligatory pics along the way.

Be sure to get your buns back to the ship by 8:30 PM. This time stamp showed 1:15 PM local time

In a perfect world without any hurricane effects, there would be a free trolley that takes people around old San Juan. In a real world post hurricane damages, there was no trolley running on Christmas Eve when we were in town.

That was the first question I asked the dock security guy when we walked along the pier. He said the trolleys were not running that day. That didn’t surprise me as I had read all along post hurricane, the trolleys were not running so I was ready for the hike up the hill but didn’t hurt to ask.

Lazy man is an efficient man.

Although in retrospect, I was glad the trolley wasn’t working as it allowed us to walk around town instead of being lazy trying to see it from the moving trolley. There was a sense of accomplishment to walk the route and we were able to get some pictures along the way.

As soon as you get to the end of the pier, there are taxi vendors vying for your business on the island tour. I wasn’t interested on seeing the island as I wanted to see the two forts that have been in all the SJ pictures. The rest of the island can wait next time.

Check out the taxi guys in blue

I had the walking route more or less mapped out in my head prior to leaving home. I also download the step by step walking map of OSJ in case we got lost but I never needed that. Just used Google map from my phone as my phone is now turned back on given we are back in US cell phone coverage area.

I like the cobble stone roads of SJ

Give you folks 3 guesses on who took this picture...

What's the name of the city we're in? Oh, yeah,

That's where we are going as our first stop. Wasn't too hard of a walk to get up here. Especially for folks like us that have walked hilly cities such as San Francisco/Boston/Seattle.

San Juan looks great! Those taxi guys look annoying though.

Thanks for following up on the cold. It's 98% gone, just that lingering cough every once in awhile.

 

I believe Mark is leaving for Symphony so you will have someone else on your cruise.

Symphony? Hopefully some day for me but only Indy for now [emoji6]

Glad to hear the cold is almost gone, now to kick the rest of it out. I get it cause the last couple of times I catch a cold on the way back home.

Jewel of the seas this September had the same thing with the glasses half "full". I don't mind it though.

I love the last pic of the PR with the dark lightning. Also loved the tree pics.

San Juan is awesome. I hope you got a chance to try the mofongo.... oh my, so yummy.

Glad to hear that you enjoyed San Juan. I spent a couple of hours just taking photos in the forts. I probably could have spent an entire day. Every where you turn, you see a great photo opportunity! We were fortunate enough to be there on a Saturday when they offer guided tours of San Cristóbal with guides who speak English. Very interesting tour.

San Juan looks great! Those taxi guys look annoying though.

They are mild compared to some of the really aggressive ones I have seen. Cabo taxi drivers stand right by the tender docks and swarm you as soon as you walk up – “Amigo, your family want a taxi?”. You have to walk the gauntlet of drivers just to get off the pier.

The worst pushy taxi driver I had was the cruise to Acapulco about 10 years ago. Right off the pier, in walking with the family to look at the local shops, there was one taxi driver who literally walked side by side with me for 100 plus feet trying to get me to hire him. I kept telling him I already booked a tour (I really did but that tour doesn’t start for another couple hours).

But the guy wouldn’t take no for an answer. He gave me his cell phone and say “call the tour operator and say you want to cancel and go with me instead”. HUH?

After that, all these taxi drivers are pretty tame in comparison…