Sun Review - 4/10-4/21 Southern Caribbean

[chelle74]

This is sort of a teaser, because I don't have time to write my whole review now, but I promise to get a few days' worth done tonight.

 

In the meantime, I will say that it was a FANTASTIC cruise, and even though I enjoyed my previous four cruises, this is the one that got me hooked for good. I was worried that the ship would seem to old or too small, and that there wouldn't be enough to do, but it was so much better than I could have imagined. I'm not a cheerleader by any means... our cruise on the Dawn in November 2011 left much to be desired and that's part of the reason we were hesitant to book the Sun, but DH and I are both very glad we did.

 

While you wait so patiently for my actual review, I have a question (cross-posted on the POC board)... The night before we arrived in St. Thomas, we were informed that every passenger would have to show a passport/ID to a US Customs agent in St. Thomas, and that if we wanted to disembark we must clear Customs first. My MIL was in St. Thomas on a cruise the week before us and didn't have the same experience, and claim she has never had that happen before. Is this the usual routine? We had a wonderful day in port, but it was cut short by about 2 hours because we had to wait until our deck was called before we could be cleared. :confused:

[tripgrl]

I'm really looking forward to your review as I will be on the Sun next March. I'm also curious about the answer to your question as I have recently read of others having to clear customs in St Thomas but have never experienced this myself.

[topguy]

This is sort of a teaser, because I don't have time to write my whole review now, but I promise to get a few days' worth done tonight.

 

In the meantime, I will say that it was a FANTASTIC cruise, and even though I enjoyed my previous four cruises, this is the one that got me hooked for good. I was worried that the ship would seem to old or too small, and that there wouldn't be enough to do, but it was so much better than I could have imagined. I'm not a cheerleader by any means... our cruise on the Dawn in November 2011 left much to be desired and that's part of the reason we were hesitant to book the Sun, but DH and I are both very glad we did.

 

While you wait so patiently for my actual review, I have a question (cross-posted on the POC board)... The night before we arrived in St. Thomas, we were informed that every passenger would have to show a passport/ID to a US Customs agent in St. Thomas, and that if we wanted to disembark we must clear Customs first. My MIL was in St. Thomas on a cruise the week before us and didn't have the same experience, and claim she has never had that happen before. Is this the usual routine? We had a wonderful day in port, but it was cut short by about 2 hours because we had to wait until our deck was called before we could be cleared. :confused:

I've been to St Thomas several times and never had to clear customs there.

[NLH Arizona]

Looking forward to your review; the Sun is one ship I would love to sail on.

[European_CruiseGirl]

While you wait so patiently for my actual review, I have a question (cross-posted on the POC board)... The night before we arrived in St. Thomas, we were informed that every passenger would have to show a passport/ID to a US Customs agent in St. Thomas, and that if we wanted to disembark we must clear Customs first. My MIL was in St. Thomas on a cruise the week before us and didn't have the same experience, and claim she has never had that happen before. Is this the usual routine? We had a wonderful day in port, but it was cut short by about 2 hours because we had to wait until our deck was called before we could be cleared. :confused:

 

I do not have a definite answer for this. However I would suspect that perhaps if:

 

1. you arrived from a foreign port to St Thomas and

2. your next port would have been Miami

 

they might have wanted to do customs in St Thomas already to avoid doing it in Miami?

 

Then again if your MIL did not have these exact circumstances it would make some kind of sense.

[canehdn]

to reading your review once posted. Have not been on the Sun and would love to hear all about your experience.

 

Cdn in KS

[DaisyA]

Hi Michelle!

 

We were on your sailing as well! I was never able to get confirmation as to why we had to go through customs in USVI. I heard a few rumors, the first was that it was because we stopped in Columbia--though NCL has been running this itinerary for awhile and I'm guessing if it was happening everytime we would have heard about it.

 

The other thing we heard from the crew is that sometimes at US ports, they will do an entire ship inspection which sometimes includes verifying that the cruise company is properly vetting and checking its passengers documentation. I know the crew was preparing for some massive US inspection at USVI since they announced the customs thing--but apparently the inspection never happened, just the customs weirdness.

 

I look forward to your review--we had a great time too!

[debnjoe1438]

I do not have a definite answer for this. However I would suspect that perhaps if:

 

1. you arrived from a foreign port to St Thomas and

2. your next port would have been Miami

 

they might have wanted to do customs in St Thomas already to avoid doing it in Miami?

 

Then again if your MIL did not have these exact circumstances it would make some kind of sense.

 

This could be correct. I know we had to through customs at Key West coming back from Mexico and before Miami.

[chelle74]

This could be correct. I know we had to through customs at Key West coming back from Mexico and before Miami.

 

MIL's cruise the week before us was in Cococay (Bahamas), then St. Thomas... but they did not have to go through US Customs in St. Thomas.

 

St. Thomas was our last port before returning to Miami, but we were still required to go through Customs in Miami.

[poffles]

YAY ... can't wait to hear another Sun review.

[tripgrl]

Will suite passengers have the opportunity to clear customs first?

[chelle74]

My disclaimer: I was not super-thrilled with our voyage on the Dawn in November 2011. My husband was slightly less thrilled than me, and my MIL complained pretty much the whole time. The kids enjoyed themselves, though, and the ports were fantastic. So we didn't have high expectations for this cruise, especially since we knew the Sun was an older and smaller ship. But we were excited about the ports of call, which is why we booked this particular cruise.

 

We were originally going to fly from STL to FLL on the day of embarkation, but our flight would not have arrived until 12:55pm and had a history of being delayed by 30 minutes or more about half the time... so we opted to fly in the night before. We arrived in FLL at 1am. DH's aunt and uncle picked us up from the airport and took us to their condo for the night (thank goodness for FL transplant family!) and then to breakfast the next day. They weren't up for driving us to Miami, so they dropped us back off at the airport at 11am where we were picked up by SAS Transportation.

 

SAS had one hotel stop after picking us up, then we were off to Port of Miami! From the moment we left the airport, it was about a 35 minute trip. The driver unloaded our luggage, we quickly handed it over to the porter and walked into the terminal.

 

When we arrived there was a very short line for security, which took less than 5 minutes. It only took a few more minutes to get through the check-in line, and by noon we were on board the beautiful Sun!

 

We walked straight to our cabin and met our cabin steward, Patrick, who told us we could leave our carry-on items in the cabin. So after dropping off our stuff, we made a beeline for Four Seasons to enjoy lunch. After lunch we wandered around the ship and tried to familiarize ourselves with the layout. Before long it was time for muster, which was relatively quick and painless. One lady standing in our group, who must have been at least 142 years old, complained because we did NOT have to wear life jackets and went on and on about her "invisible life jacket." Seriously.

 

After muster we went up to the Lido, grabbed a couple of bon voyage drinks and enjoyed the sail away deck party! We quickly noticed that this ship seemed much livelier than the Dawn had been. At this point I pretty much lost all concept of time.

 

We eventually made our way to Seven Seas for dinner. Our hostess asked if we would like company for dinner, so we thought we'd give that a shot. We were seated with two other couples, one of which we ended up having dinner with nearly every evening for the remainder of the cruise. Dinner was lobster tails (2!) for me (spoiler alert: there was lobster TWICE on this sailing!) and that's really all that matters. I did have the bread pudding for dessert, which was much better than I recall it being on the Dawn. All in all, dinner was excellent.

 

After dinner we headed down (up, actually) to catch the show. We were both tired and got bored with it pretty quickly, so we left to do a bit more wandering about the ship and then retired to our cabin. Lights out!

[chelle74]

We brought on 10 bottles of wine, so we expected that we would not receive three of our four pieces of luggage. But we DID receive it all... minus the wine. I am not thrilled with the idea of strangers rummaging through my unmentionables to extract booze, but worse things have happened. So our suitcases had letters in them telling us to report to the naughty room to retrieve our wine, which we did.

 

Some time that day I did unpack all of our luggage. That's the only kind of unpacking that I like.

 

And we first met Richard Matic, our cruise director, that evening. He wasn't what I expected. My first (and second) CD was Max, on Costa. He is a very dynamic, very loud and very Italian man. Before that first cruise I wasn't exactly sure what a CD was all about, but for better or worse, Max set the bar. I couldn't tell you who the CD was on the Freedom or the Dawn, so that tells you how much of an impression they made. Richard is not big, tall, loud, dynamic OR Italian. I didn't think I was going to like him as a CD. (another spoiler alert: my opinion was entirely different before the end of the cruise)

 

OK, now I'm done with Day 1. Lights out for real this time!

[debnjoe1438]

Looking forward to more:D

[sonicbuffalo]

Looking forward to more of this review. We're sailing the same itinerary in October. It seems like a great time!

[PE Cruisers]

We were on this cruise last Thanksgiving & also had to do customs for the first time in years in St. Thomas.Were were on the Emerald Princess in March & St. Thomas was our last stop before Princess Cay & no customs.I don't get it.

[sns1009]

Loving the review! We are doing this cruise next March.

[chelle74]

OK, I don't remember every single thing we did this day... but I will give you the highlights.

 

We got up and made it to Seven Seas (MDR) just in time for breakfast. This would become our usual routine, as we really enjoy sitting down for breakfast instead of waiting in line at a buffet. I packed real maple syrup because I refuse to use that artifically flavored high fructose corn syrup crap that they (meaning every cruise line) try to pawn off as maple syrup.

 

After breakfast is kind of a blur. My husband lost his sunglasses so we spent a chunk of the morning looking for them (never found them). Oh, then we had our CC Meet & Greet. We forgot gifts and decided not to do the slot pull, but it was nice to meet the other members and the senior officers. We also signed up to do the galley tour the next day. At some point we wandered up to the Lido and had lunch. Poolside BBQ happened pretty much every day, and it was very good.

 

We had decided to try Le Bistro for dinner, so after some more walking around and checking things out and doing a whole lot of nothing, apparently, because I don't remember anything specific, we went back to the cabin to get dressed up for dinner. Le Bistro was awesome. I had the coq au vin and it was DELICIOUS! The sauce was amazing. Like, grab the French bread and soak it all up amazing. Dessert was good too. Just all in all a wonderful dinner.

 

The show that night was a production show, which we are generally not big fans of. We've both seen enough Off-Broadway productions that the ship shows don't do much for us. But we did make our way into Dazzles after the show for the Welcome Aboard Prize Giveaway. We didn't win anything, but the show was entertaining.

 

After that, we walked through the shops and went back to our cabin for the evening, where our first towel animal awaited us. Oh, and chocolates. Yay!

[NW Pacific]

Way back on our Cruise on the Sun Feb 2006, I was curious and looked it up, the Freestyle Daily posted ALL GUESTS will go through a Mandatory US Customs & Border Protection Inspection in the Stardust theatre, I do remember getting a notice and had to get up early to report. Due to St. Thomas being the port of entry back into the US. Our itinerary: Miami, Great Stirrup Cay (think we missed that and went to Nassau) Tortola, BVI, St. Thomas, Dominican Republic, Miami. So not a new procedure, but must be due to itinerary, what a stroll down memory lane, knew there was a reason I keep all the old stuff.

[MS52]

Oh, then we had our CC Meet & Greet. We forgot gifts and decided not to do the slot pull, but it was nice to meet the other members and the senior officers. We also signed up to do the galley tour the next day.

 

Michelle

 

Was the galley tour offered at the cc meet and greet?

[chelle74]

Michelle

 

Was the galley tour offered at the cc meet and greet?

 

Yes, we signed up at the M&G. The tour was interesting and definitely enhanced our appreciation of the hard work that goes into prepping and cooking all of the fresh, unprocessed ingredients (no boxes!) for our meals each day. The executive chef, Ricardo spoke with us at the end of the tour and was very giving of his time to answer questions.

[Calm Blue Ocean]

Great review! Considering the Sun for March 2014.

 

Can't wait to read more!

[cmdchiefthom]

Thanks for sharing. We've cruised aboard the Sun three times so far, and booked her again for October. Your comments sound just like the ship we remember, and are anxious to board her again for total relaxation. ;)

[chelle74]

I will try to post more tomorrow... Sorry for the delay, but reality keeps getting in the way!