Another Voyager 2/3/08 Review (Long)

[MakinGold]

We sailed on Voyager 2/3/08 as a party of three (40-ish couple w/ 10 yo son). We were in Cabin 9322, a D1 balcony on the “hump.” I’ve been meaning to write up a review, so here it is:

Getting There: We drove from Baton Rouge to Galveston on embarkation day. No problems with travel. We took the Bolivar Ferry across to the island. Parking was pre-reserved with EZ Cruise Parking. One note here: upon getting to the street that we were supposed to take, there was a big sign saying “Road Closed.” After riding around the block once, we realized that was where we were supposed to go. It would have helped if there had been some indication of, “Go on through, if you’re headed to EZ Cruise.”

Anyway, parking was fine. There was quite a line-up for the parking shuttle, and the ship was basically just a couple blocks away, so we just walked it. If you try that, just be careful about which way you go. We ended up having to cross the main street at an awkward spot. If we’d turned up a different block, we’d have had a traffic light. No big deal, though. We made it.

We arrived at the terminal just before 1:00. The security check in area was a bit disorganized, with just a sea of people that eventually organized into some lines. It only took about 15 minutes to get through that, though, and then the cruise check-in was a snap. We relaxed a few minutes in the Platinum/Diamond boarding area, were onboard, had items dropped off in our cabin and in the WindJammer having a bite to eat by about 1:45.

Accommodations: Our room was fine. It was not huge, but there was plenty of room to store everything we brought with us. All the suitcases fit nicely under the beds. It’s really nice having a balcony, but it didn’t strike me as all that special being in a “hump” balcony.

Our stateroom attendant was Serge, and he did a fine job. We didn’t really see him that much during the week, but I think our cabin location might have been part of the reason. One thing about being on the hump, is that you don’t really have to walk through the halls much. Turn the corner from the stairwell, and there’s the room. So, we never really saw Serge unless he happed to be right there at our room, when we came by.

The Ship: This was our second time on a Voyager-class ship, having sailed on the Explorer several years ago. The ship was in really good condition, and there was always some cleaning and/or maintenance going on in some part of the ship (and done well, without being intrusive). I can’t say that we ever felt crowded. There were rarely any lines for anything. The Promenade felt a little crowded during the Captain’s Welcome Aboard reception, but that’s about the only time I felt it. I really like the Royal Promenade concept. We’re not really big on laying out around the pool, but it never seemed that there was a lack of lounge chairs. Unless you had to be right by the pool, it was never an issue.

Dining: We were seated in the Seville Room, which is a side room off of the lowest level of the main dining room. This was one disappointment, as I would rather have been in the main dining room. It was just a different feel, and when the wait staff did their entertainment, we’d have to get up and go out to the main room, if we wanted to see it. We were at a table for six, with another couple, who had a 7-year-old boy. They were nice, and we enjoyed getting to know them.

Overall, I’d say the food was very good. Some items were better than others, but we never left totally disappointed. My wife had the prime rib on the first night, and she didn’t care much for it. I think that was the only meal we had an issue with, though. I tended to go mostly for the seafood dishes, which were very good all week long.

Our dining room servers were not the best. They were a bit out of sync with each other, it seemed, and there were a few mistakes here and there, but no major problems. For instance, they always took the kids’ orders first, then the ladies, then the men. One evening, our waiter took 5 of 6 orders, then left, without getting my order. I knew she would realize it eventually, and she did, after several minutes, come back to get my order. The head waiter for our section was very attentive, though, and we got the impression that she knew our servers were a little off, and was trying to compensate. Service was slow one evening, and we had other places we wanted to be, so we left without dessert. Later, when we got back to our cabin, we found a plate of chocolate strawberries, compliments of the head waiter.

So, overall, service was OK, but not anything that led us to add extra to the tip vouchers (except for a little extra for our head waiter).

There was lobster, as part of the fisherman’s platter, on the second formal night. The first formal night featured “filet of beef” which was slices of beef tenderloin. The garlic tiger shrimp was one of my favorite dining room meals, though.

We dined at Portofino on Day 6. That was the best meal of the week! The first thin was the bread basket. They bring out a basket with about 5 different varieties of bread and several different dips, based on diced tomatoes, roasted garlic, olives and artichoke hearts. They will also make an olive oil & balsamic vinegar dip. Beware of filling up too much on all that tasty bread. I started with the Melanzane, which was eggplant 'roulades.' It was almost like a cheese-stuffed pasta, but it was rolls of thinly-sliced eggplant, instead of pasta. The flavor was very good. Next was the pear and gorgonzola salad, with toasted walnuts: a heavenly salad. For main course, I had the seafood skewer, with shrimp, scallops, lobster and salmon. All were very good. The desserts were worth the trip by themselves. I had the escellent flourless chocolate cake, while my wife had the famous tiramisu. Fabulous!

One nice thing about Portofino was that they held all the SeaPass stuff 'til the end. I get a bit annoyed in the dining room, with having to sign a slip for our wine, then if we decide to have another glass, hand out the card again and sign another slip. Want an after dinner drink? Hand out the card again and sign another slip . . . I liked the fact that we just had to hand them the card once at the end of our meal. There were separate slips for the service charge and the wine, but still, we didn't have to interupt the meal to take care of such things.

Most of our breakfasts and lunches were in the WindJammer, and we were never dissapointed there. My son is a picky eater and didn't like his dinner one night. We took him to WJ that evening for a little more to eat, and I couldn't resist sampling a couple things, myself, even though I wasn't really hungry.

Lunch on the last day was a special Platinum/Diamond lucheon, which included three small appetizer courses, which everyone got, followed by your choice of filet mignon or mahi-mahi, then flourless chocolate cake for dessert. House wine was included, as well.

We had a great cruise, overall. I'll add some more at some point about ports and onboard activities.

[Rancher Dave]

Sounds like you had a really good time. Thanks for the nice review!!!

[MakinGold]

One curious thing that I forgot to mention about the dining:

 

First of all, we had main seating, which was moved up to 5:30. :( I don't like late dining, but 5:30 was a bit too early. Departure was delayed a bit (less than an hour), because of some fog-related issues that morning. So, we sat down to dinner before sail-away. That was a bit of a bummer, missing being up on deck for sail-away, but that's not the curious thing. My wife and I asked for the wine list at the start of dinner, and we were told they could not serve wine, until the ship had left port. We had seen them serving drinks at bars around the ship earlier and even at lunch in the WindJammer, we saw a few people getting beer to go with their lunches. It seemed odd that they could serve other alcoholic drinks while still in port, but not wine in the dining room. :confused: Has anyone else run into that? Is is something unique to Galveston? We set sail shortly after dinner started, though, and we were then brought our wine.

 

The other thing of note about Day 1 was that it was Super Bowl Sunday. They had the Super Bowl playing at just about every venue around the ship, but there was a big SB party in Studio B (where the ice rink is). So, we didn't meet the son or hubby of our tablemate group that first night; they were watching the game. They had a nice spread in there of hot appetizers and also a pretty elaborate ice carving and fruit/vegetable carving display for the occasion at the entrance to Studio B.

[PhoenixCruiser]

Glad you and your family had a great time!!

 

Very strange about the wine in the DR on the first evening... To answer your question no I've never heard that before.

 

###

[Hypo]

Texas and/or Galveston has some strange laws when it comes to liquor and wine sales on Sundays. Maybe some Texan can explain them to us.

 

We thought it was unusual on the Rhapsody last year, when they were selling certain beers, but not others on Sundays.

[wolfganghowell]

Yes, we do have some weird liquor laws. It's some old "blue laws" about sales on Sunday. I don't know exactly what they are but I know that the cruise ship is limited to what they are allowed to sell. We could drink a Miller Lite but not a Stella Artois. They can sell some beers but not all varieties. They can sell certain mixed drinks or foo foo drinks but cannot access the full bar. You will notice that most of the bars have the liquor put away and locked up until they set sail - except for the varieties they are allowed to sell. You probably could have gotten a glass of house wine but the bottle you requested was most likely still under lock and key.

 

Thanks for the review - glad overall things seem to be going well on Voyager.

[SadieQ]

Makes our recently overturned laws about selling beer but not wine seem downright logical.

 

Thanks for the review. We'll be on Voyager in March, in a cabin on the other side of the hump from yours. And we're also from Baton Rouge.

 

That eggplant thing from Portofino sounds great. We'll have to try that.

[brn2crz]

We were in the Seville as well..The little 4 topper,right and I mean right next to the serving area door...I would not go so far as to complain about them...Definitley not the best..(of course,we were late 2 times,and absent twice,and our tablemates once,so probably hard for them to get in sync with us :eek: )

[MakinGold]

I wrote up a nice description of our port activities, then got the dreaded server error message, when I went to post it. So it's gone. Oh well, I write it up again later (offline) and cut and past here.

 

Brief synopsis:

 

Didn't do much in Montego Bay

Nice day at Seven-Mile Beach in Grand Cayman

Awesome Dolphin Swim Adventure in Cozumel

 

*adds above to clipboard, before hitting the submit button*

[MakinGold]

Montego Bay: We mostly stayed on the ship. My wife had been on a trip to Montego Bay years ago, and was not impressed with the repeated offers to sell hair-braiding, trinkets, marijuana, etc., so she is not a big fan. I was interested in doing the Chukka Canopy Tour, but that's not her thing, and my son is below the age limit, so I decided not to do that by myself. Maybe next time, when the son is a bit older.

 

Due to a packing error, we were short on toothpaste, and the ship store didn't have any:eek: , so we needed to at least get to a shop where we could buy some toothpaste. We were going to just shop at the terminal, but realized after walking off the ship that there were no shops there. We figured out later that there were some nice shops at the other nearby pier, where a Carnival ship was docked, but we were already in a taxi headed downtown at that point. The taxi driver was nice and gave us some little commentary about the area, as we road into town. The duty free shopping area downtown is not really that much to see. It was not really as pushy as what I feared from some reviews, though. We looked around a bit, then found a shop, where we could get our toothpaste, plus a souvenir or two, then headed back to the ship. Upon arrival back at the pier area, we did look around some of those shops. They were actually nicer, and in many cases better priced, than the shops in town.

 

Grand Cayman: We just planned a beach day for this island. We took a taxi to the Courtyard Marriott area of Seven-Mile Beach. It was a beautiful beach, not too crowded and free public access. We paid $10ea for two beach chairs and found a good spot under a shade tree (but not far from the sun). My son and I rented snorkel gear, which was also $10ea. We spent most of the morning there and had a really nice time. The snorkeling was decent for right off the beach. They had a few coral formations and quite a few little fishies. It was not spectacular snorkeling, but nice.

 

Tendering was no problem, by the way, even with six ships in port that day. We went back to the pier around noon time and browsed there a little, then hopped a tender back to the ship.

 

Cozumel: Our main excursion of the week was here. We had a "Dolphin Swim Adventure" planned for 1:00. I booked this directly with Dolphin Discovery, rather than through RC. DS stayed on the ship in the morning, while we went downtown to look around some of the shops. We weren't really looking for anything in particular, just browsing. We came back in time for a quick lunch, before heading to Chankanaab for our dolphin adventure.

 

Chankanaab is a beautiful park. We were there about 10 years ago, but it's really been developed a lot more since then. We were a little bit early for our adventure, so we just walked around the park for a bit. We gathered at 1:00 with our group, but they were apparently running behind, so we waited about half an hour, before finally getting our orientation talk, then heading to the dolphin area. It's a pretty nice facility. The dolphins are not in "tanks." It's just a fenced in area of the shoreline. There is a big central area, with several smaller "pens" around the perimeter, where the less interactive dolphin encounter groups do their thing. There were about 10 people total in our group. After being introduced to our dolphin, Ixchel, we took turns doing four different activities: the kiss, the hug, the belly ride and the boogie push. You've probably all seen pictures of people doing the dolphin kiss. For the hug, you go out a bit into the water and hold your arms out in front of you, a little under the surface. The dolphin will swim up into your arms for that "hug." For the belly ride, I went out toward the middle of the big pool area, faced back toward the platform and extended my right arm. Ixchel swam up beside me, turned upside down and let me get hold of each pectoral fin. Then . . . off she goes, pulling me along back to the platform. Finally, for the boogie push, it was holding onto a "boogie board" while the dolphin came up behind and pushed you along (fast :)) by the bottom of your foot. After all that, we had a few more minutes to do some other activities with the whole group in the water with our snorkel gear and Ixchel swimming around us and doing a couple jumps for us. It was great! :D

 

Of course, after that, they lead you up to view the video of your experience, then down to the gift shop for the opportunity to buy a video and numerous pictures. It can add up pretty quickly! In the end, we bought the video for $38 and hoped our own pictures from our cheap waterproof camera came out OK. (They were not as good as the pics taken by the photographer, but were still pretty good.) We also bought a $13 t-shirt. If you pay with a credit card, be aware that they will charge you in pesos. Hopefully, 555 pesos is pretty close to $51 . . . The video was worth it, though. They do a good job of putting it together in such a short time (but, of course, they get a lot of practice doing so). I've heard a lot of good things about the "Royal Swim", which is a bit more involved than the "Swim Adventure" that we did. I wasn't sure how skiddish my wife and son might be, so I went for the intermediate encounter. As you can see, though, it was pretty involved. As far as cost, btw, it came to $308 for the three of us, plus $10 each way for the taxi, for a total of $328. I mostly booked independantly to be able to come and go on my own time, but it the same thing would have been $149 pp through the ship, so we saved a good bit of money, too.

[MakinGold]

Adventure Ocean: My 10 yo old son had a good time with AO, but was not quite as engrossed with it as when he was younger. I think his favorite part this time was that they had an area with PlayStation games that they could play on during "free time." There were surprisingly few kids onboard this week. It is school time for most kids, but many Louisiana schools are out for Mardi Gras week, so I expected quite a few Louisiana kids. The numbers were actually low enough that they eliminated the 6-8 year old group and put the younger ones with the 3-5s and the older ones with the 9-11s. All-in-all, it was a good experience for him. The difference is, last time we cruised, he wouldn't miss an AO session if we begged him to. This time, he skipped a couple of the sessions in order to do other activities with us. Overall, his favorite thing was probably playing on the "Adventure Beach" water slide.

 

For those in the 9-11 age range, they do all parents the option of having kids sign themselves in and out, but we chose not to do so. One day that we picked him up, we were given an 'incident report.' Our son had been hit by one of the other kids. I was fairly impressed by the level of detail they give you in such a report. It seems that they really investigate these type of things and were able to go back and review the incident on the security camera. Turns out they determined that the other child, and not our son, was being agressive. So, there was no discipline involved for our child. The report said that the other child was disciplined, but they did not give names or details (which is fair enough). DS was hurt a little and still had a red mark behind his ear, where he'd been hit, but he was able to shake it off and not be too upset. Seemed to have been handled in a professional manner, as best we could tell.

 

Entertainment: We went to shows the first half of the week, and they were good, but after that, we tended to skip them. We've cruised a few times, and it gets a bit of a "been there, done that" feel to it. We saw two productions by the RCI singers and dancers, one a Broadway revue and the other a movie revue. The singers and dancers were quite talented and did a good job with it, so the shows were enjoyable. We also so a magic show, that was a bit cheesy, but still very good.

 

I have to say that the ice show was my favorite entertainment of the week. It was really a top-notch performance. Don't miss it, if you're on any of the ships with a Studio B ice rink.

 

We also partook of a couple of the little entertainment things throughout the week, like one of the karaoke contests, a fruit/vegetable carving demonstration, dancing with live music from the show band and a couple other things like that. A highlight of the entire cruise was Captain Gerry. I understand he's leaving RCI to be able to spend more time with his family, which is a shame for RCI. He was very visible and personable throughout the week, and I went to see his musical performance in Studio B. I was fairly late at night, right after Quest, so I was by myself. The wife and kid were already getting settled for bed time. For a Norwegian ship's captain, he was a pretty good country/western musician and singer. Of course, the largely Texan crowd really appreciated the rendition of "God Bless Texas!"

 

By the way, I did see the last 15-20 minutes of Quest, before the captain's show started. That's another thing that is very entertaining for a lot of people, but was sort of a "been there, seen that" kind of thing for me.

 

 

 

There are probably a few other details from the week that I could share, if anyone is reading all this. I'll post more, when I think of it.

[tkportersat]

Thanks for your detailed review!!

 

Adventure Ocean: My 10 yo old son had a good time with AO, but was not quite as engrossed with it as when he was younger. I think his favorite part this time was that they had an area with PlayStation games that they could play on during "free time." There were surprisingly few kids onboard this week. It is school time for most kids, but many Louisiana schools are out for Mardi Gras week, so I expected quite a few Louisiana kids. The numbers were actually low enough that they eliminated the 6-8 year old group and put the younger ones with the 3-5s and the older ones with the 9-11s. All-in-all, it was a good experience for him. The difference is, last time we cruised, he wouldn't miss an AO session if we begged him to. This time, he skipped a couple of the sessions in order to do other activities with us. Overall, his favorite thing was probably playing on the "Adventure Beach" water slide.

 

For those in the 9-11 age range, they do all parents the option of having kids sign themselves in and out, but we chose not to do so. One day that we picked him up, we were given an 'incident report.' Our son had been hit by one of the other kids. I was fairly impressed by the level of detail they give you in such a report. It seems that they really investigate these type of things and were able to go back and review the incident on the security camera. Turns out they determined that the other child, and not our son, was being agressive. So, there was no discipline involved for our child. The report said that the other child was disciplined, but they did not give names or details (which is fair enough). DS was hurt a little and still had a red mark behind his ear, where he'd been hit, but he was able to shake it off and not be too upset. Seemed to have been handled in a professional manner, as best we could tell.

 

Entertainment: We went to shows the first half of the week, and they were good, but after that, we tended to skip them. We've cruised a few times, and it gets a bit of a "been there, done that" feel to it. We saw two productions by the RCI singers and dancers, one a Broadway revue and the other a movie revue. The singers and dancers were quite talented and did a good job with it, so the shows were enjoyable. We also so a magic show, that was a bit cheesy, but still very good.

 

I have to say that the ice show was my favorite entertainment of the week. It was really a top-notch performance. Don't miss it, if you're on any of the ships with a Studio B ice rink.

 

We also partook of a couple of the little entertainment things throughout the week, like one of the karaoke contests, a fruit/vegetable carving demonstration, dancing with live music from the show band and a couple other things like that. A highlight of the entire cruise was Captain Gerry. I understand he's leaving RCI to be able to spend more time with his family, which is a shame for RCI. He was very visible and personable throughout the week, and I went to see his musical performance in Studio B. I was fairly late at night, right after Quest, so I was by myself. The wife and kid were already getting settled for bed time. For a Norwegian ship's captain, he was a pretty good country/western musician and singer. Of course, the largely Texan crowd really appreciated the rendition of "God Bless Texas!"

 

By the way, I did see the last 15-20 minutes of Quest, before the captain's show started. That's another thing that is very entertaining for a lot of people, but was sort of a "been there, seen that" kind of thing for me.

 

 

 

There are probably a few other details from the week that I could share, if anyone is reading all this. I'll post more, when I think of it.

[dixie54]

What were your favorite things you ordered in the dining room, room service, cafe Promenade, WJ? Thanks for the review!