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Harmony LIVE, September 16th - 23rd, 2017 - Our Cruise Wedding

christa4

By christa4,
in Royal Caribbean International

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A&L_Ont "Live from...." Rare

A&L_Ont

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I'm on the same cruise. 1, 2, 5, & 6 are completely gone and 3 & 4 look they're currently under repair.afab026877036c532ee9908a8416142b.jpgae18614df93ab0c762c0c07fd8cc9258.jpg

 

Sent from my XT1254 using Tapatalk

 

Big G, thanks for the cabana report. There was definitely some wave action to take them out.

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christa4

christa4

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I've been MIA, I know it! We've been so absolutely crazy busy I can't get over it. I need a vacation from this vacation. Not even kidding. Still no computer internet (boo). So here are a few little overviews for you.

 

1. Haiti was crazy busy. We requested an over the water cabana but as you could see by the other photos, some were completely missing and others were damaged. We "scored" a Standard Cabana, S1. Not my favorite but because we had a bunch to do that day, looking back I'm not too upset by it. I guess when Kristen Bell and her family request an over water one, they get priority to what wasn't damaged by Irma.

 

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2. We ran into quite a handful of virtual Cruise Critic friends on this sailing, specifically a group at Chefs Table last night. I'm still suffering from a food hangover this morning from that dinner. The dinner was amazing. Once we are back home I'll be sure to add a photo of our menu.

 

3. We met with the Captain last night prior to the Chefs Table to take a photo! It was pretty special. A little obnoxious if you ask me though. We don't like attention being on us.

 

4. Yesterday we did the longest excursion: Xplor. I'm so tired and ever so slightly sore for all of the walking and swimming involved.

 

5. There has been some drama in our group. I'm not going to go into it in detail but soon enough I will explain why some of our plans changed.

 

6. Our room is --- absolitely.over.the.top.amazing.

 

7. Our Genie, Sebastian, is great as is our room attendant, Brian, along with Brian's assistant.

 

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8. Cabin Crawl was fun. We started in a 2 Bedroom Aquatheater Suite and ended in our room. We visited a Grand Suite, Owners Suite, Junior Suite and Crown Loft Suite.

 

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9. Our photographer friends are working on editing photos from the wedding day.

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10. Hurricane Maria hasn't changed anything for us, such as port locations. We actually experienced extremely smooth water and we were told that it's is because of Maria and the weather she sent our way outside of her path.

 

11. We are talking about sailing again September 2018 since we didn't get to experience as much as we had hoped. Too bad if we were to book, we'd only be staying in an interior storeroom. Anyone hiring? I need a pay raise if I ever want to stay in the Sky Loft Suite again (sad). [Will work for Star Class Suites]. - Not even kidding.

 

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12. Just finished breakfast in bed. Getting ready to head to the pool.

 

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- Christa 💜

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A&L_Ont "Live from...." Rare

A&L_Ont

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Hello Christa, thanks for the indepth post. Other than the bit of drama:confused: it sounds all good. Glad to hear that Sebastian and Brian are taking great care of you. Let Brian know that Andrew and Lisa will see him in just over a week. Your pics looked great.

 

If you past the post cruise blahs I will be doing a live review starting in a weeks time. It might help, or make the blahs worse. Enjoy your last day.:)

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Alter Ego

Alter Ego

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Congratulations on your wedding and I wish you the best of luck! As much as I love to travel, there is no place like home.

 

Other than the cabana, did the shooting otherwise have any effect on your trip? Did you get your photo with Kelsey?

 

 

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

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christa4

christa4

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Today is full of being lazy, dog cuddles and laundry. Back to work tomorrow.

 

Now that I'm back on my computer, I'm going to start including some details of our experience. I think the best way for me to do this is to go through each day and then go back and touch on some of the daily items in more detail. If there are any questions along the way, I'll do my best to get them answered! Thank you all for being so patient and waiting on this review! Sorry for not being as Live as I had hoped.

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christa4

christa4

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Wednesday, September 13th, 2017:

 

I worked until 5:00pm that day then ran to an appointment at 5:15pm and had to stop back at the office after my appointment so I could finish up our wedding programs. I ran a few more errands before finally making it back home. My cousin, who was my Matron of Honor, came over to spend the night since she was on our flight and she lives about 1:30 away and the airport is close to our house. This worked out well because I had her help with a few last minute details such as folding our wedding programs.

 

The negative part to giving my dad a bunch of our supplies and luggage in advance - it made me feel really disorganized. I found myself pacing around unable to gather my thoughts. Because I didn't have everything laying in front of me, I had the feeling of forgetting things.

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christa4

christa4

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Thursday, September 14th, 2017:

 

It was an early morning. Our flight was at 7:55am out of CLE with a 50 minute layover in ATL with a scheduled arrival in FLL at 12:20pm. My bridesmaid, Destiny, lives near by so she was kind and picked us up at the house at 5:50am. We loaded up and took a smooth 20 minute drive to the airport.

 

For some reason, our TSA Pre Check info wasn't printed on our boarding passes so we went through the regular line which was annoying because I had a belt, tie shoes without socks, a laptop and liquids. There could have been worse problems - it went smoothly. The flights were great, no problems. We did make a name for ourselves on the 2nd flight because the 3 of us each ordered 2 drinks during our short flight. The flight attendant served us first because she got rid of half her drinks just by serving our row first. TIP: I think going forward, the key is to order multiple drinks at once!!! Score!

 

My aunt and uncle picked us up from FLL and drove us to the hotel so we didn't have to worry about transportation there.

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christa4

christa4

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Thursday, September 14th, 2017:

 

We were able to check into our hotel as soon as we got there. Unfortunately, my dad didn't arrive for a couple more hours so we didn't have our supplies to start filling our welcome bags. Not a huge deal. We were hungry anyways so while we waited, we walked across the street to Wendy's. There weren't a ton of food options within a visual distance so that was the easiest and quickest choice at that time.

 

When my dad arrived, we loaded up a luggage cart and wheeled everything up to our room. Which by the way, was a 1 bedroom suite, and not the studio room we booked which was good but after hearing that a lot of our guests were upgraded to rooms much larger than ours - one even got a 2 bedroom suite, I was bummed since we had so much stuff and people through our rooms I wish we had received a larger room. After getting booted from our original hotel though, I just reminded myself that I was happy to have rooms for everyone.

Next thing on our list was to fill the welcome bags. This was fun because I forgot about a lot of the stuff we purchased for the bags so it was fun to see all of the goodies again. Unfortunately, I didn't look at all of the welcome bags when they came in 8 months ago so this was the first time I was seeing them. I was really aggravated because about 6 of the bags were really really faded with weird lines though them and the printing looked as if the printer ran out of ink during the printing process. Of course my bag was one of the faded bags and my good friends bag was also faded. This reminds me, I need to email the printer and tell them because it really was a bummer. :(

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christa4

christa4

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Since I don't have access to my pictures on my phone from anything prior to the cruise (I take too many and my phone always fills up so I had to transfer them to my external hard drive), I'm going to go to what I found to be a super great part of the cruise. Our room. I have those on my phone so I'm going to post about our room now.

 

Ahhh... our room... what I'd give to be able to stay in that same room on all future cruises. Our room was amazing. I really wish each one of you could experience it. The details were beautiful and well thought out. We only had a couple areas of improvement on the room.

 

Here are some things that we noticed, whether good or bad:

 

1.) People are curious. Everyone looked into our room. While we were on the balcony everyone was curious to see who was staying in that room! While I was blow drying my hair next to the bed upstairs with the curtain open, people wanted to see who was up there. It was insane, yet it didn't really bother us. We were equally creeping back at everyone.

2.) The lights were delayed. It took us longer than I'd like to admit to figure out how to turn the lights off on the first night. We didn't realize that there was a delay on the light switch buttons so we just kept pressing each of them since it didn't 'work'. We eventually realized that there was a few second delay after you turned the lights off, or pressed the "0" button. What took us about 5 minutes to figure out seemed like it took 45 minutes because we were so sleepy and just wanted to go to bed. At one point, I thought I was just going to give up and sleep with the lights on.

3.) Having 2 bathrooms in a stateroom was something I wish I could always have.

4.) We could have used a wet bar. That's one thing that I think would have been a nice addition.

5.) The upstairs curtain didn't shut all the way so if you didn't want the Flow Rider lights shining in your eyes all night, you needed to prop a pillow up against it and the window. There were plenty of pillows, 3 on each side of the bed, so this wasn't a big deal. Luckily I knew of this in advance because Andrew touched on it in one of his Live posts in the past.

6.) The TV that folds up into the ceiling in the loft didn't fold down properly. Joey had to press the button over and over and over for it to move ever so slightly. This didn't seem right. Maybe user error? Either way, we ended up leaving this down and I bumped my head on it a few times as I was blowdrying my hair up there.

7.) We discovered part way through the cruise that there was a light outside on the balcony. Oops. We had no clue.

8.) The air conditioning unit does not turn off when the balcony door is open. Apparently this is a feature in many of the suites. (Score!)

9.) There were 2 separate thermostats, one upstairs in the loft and the other downstairs. We didn't discover this right away, as we only turned one to chilly and when we came back from dinner and a show on the first night, we realized there was a second one in the loft. The AC works extremely well, even when it's 108 degrees outside.

10.) If there is a crying baby in the room next to you, you will hear it. Kelsey Grammer's child was heard daily.

 

Ok, time for some pictures. We didn't really prep our room for these so don't mind our stuff laying about.

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