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Post cruise review - Symphony of the Seas (July 5 to 12) - anyone interested?


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Last day - La Spezia!

 

Before we left on the trip, there was a bunch of debate on what to do for this port of call. There is almost too much choice for this port of call - you can go to Florence, you can see Pisa, you can do Cinque Terre... and only so many hours.

 

We end up deciding on a tour of Florence, but it's an "on your own" tour of Florence. This way, we can do as much as little or as much as we want. We take the usual step of meeting down in Studio B for our tour and head off to the bus. As usual, we have a nice tour guide, but it appears most of our tour bus is not paying attention or sleeping. Our family is wide awake and listening closely - but that's just us. We make the usual stop somewhere to go to the washroom before we head to Florence itself - I recall it was a leather store with lots of belts and purses for everyone who wants something, but we end up not spending anything.

 

We hop back on the bus and we are dropped off just outside of the Florence city centre - the tour buses are not allowed inside the city itself and we walk the 10 minutes or so to the square where it is considered the meeting point. For reference, this is Piazza di Santa Croce so anyone can use this as the point of reference to navigate around and use this as your starting point for all things Florence. By the time we arrive, it's almost lunch time so we find a nice spot for lunch. We sink our teeth into another lunch of pasta and pizza. No complaints here!

 

During the bus ride down, the tour guide offers us an option to do a 60-90 minute "express" eco tour of Florence. Given our weary feet and the last day of touring, we opt for this to make sure we minimized walking. We meet our tour guide after lunch in the piazza and he whisks us away on a tour. We see the outside of all the major spots - the Duomo, Ponte Vecchio, Uffizi Gallery - the tour is mainly for picture taking and seeing things from the outside. No opportunity to go into depth in anything here but it was worth doing to get to see everything.

 

Our tour ends and it's time for one more gelato in Italy, and for me - it's one more cappuccino. There's nothing like standing at the bar of a coffee place and just sipping on your coffee. Love it. We meet our tour guide and of course, everyone is here except 2 people! We wait for about 20 minutes before we finally get them and head back to the bus. The bus ride back is even quieter (everyone is tired it seems) and we get back to the ship just before 6pm.

 

We head to the dining room after a quick change and we enjoy a great last meal with our servers. They surprise us with a bottle of bubbly and some extra desserts - so nice of them. We spend the last night walking around the ship, packing and getting ready for the ride home.

 

Overall thoughts and final wrapup in next post... thanks for tuning in :cool:

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Some final thoughts...

 

Honestly, this was one of best family vacations ever. So many memories, it was awesome. The kids are still raving about it and we are constantly being asked "When are we going back?" :cool:

 

Staying off the beaten path in Rome ended up turning out really well. Being in an area close to the university with a number of student-friendly shops and businesses was awesome. Braci e Abbracci was a pleasant find and now a must visit the next time we're in Rome.

 

We have never done a private tour before but it was well worth it given our party size. Having young and old available to really enjoy touring in Rome without having to walk as much and get into some cool A/C when ready. Best value of the trip.

 

Symphony of the Seas was excellent. The ship is amazing and Royal Caribbean has done it right with this ship. There are number of improvements on the Oasis class ships compared to Allure. We enjoyed our Central Park balcony and would do that again if given the price option. For the most part, the staff were awesome - Drazen and Marianna in MDR were amazing, and special mentions to Cassandra from the ship staff and Jerra from the Sports Deck for the impromptu boogie board lessons. Outside of that, there are some walking zombies on the staff - walking around some of the areas, there are some sleepy or un-friendly staff milling around. Again, for the most part, the food was great - MDR dishes had nice variety and Windjammer was improved. My only gripe was that breakfast got really repetitive, really fast. There was not a lot of variety in choices and it seemed like the same items rolled over every day, no matter what venue we went to. However, this is being nitpicky at this point and I really felt like RC made a lot of changes for the good.

 

Overall, we really enjoyed ourselves and can't wait to go back on a cruise or do the Mediterranean again.

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Thanks Dani, we enjoyed the trip perhaps more than the review :D

 

Thanks for your help with questions when I was planning our trip. I was on shortly after you - we did some different stuff, perhaps you may want to compare and contrast with my thoughts (for your next one!)!!

 

https://boards.cruisecritic.co.uk/showthread.php?t=2675164

 

Thanks again

LB

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