At the terminal, we immediately run into Jim and Darlene, a couple that we spent the day in St. Lucia with last year. Admittedly, we’re both regular cruisers, but it’s still a pretty random coincidence (and we proceed to see them on board about five times after that). We get our passes and everything straightened out in relatively short order, and we spot a few other kids which is good news for our own, but then everyone gets seated in a giant lobby because they’re not ready to have us on board. We wait there for about an hour, although it feels like three. No reason is given, but I’m going to blame it on stowaways. (Lucie – a lady I work with – just finished a back-to-back cruise, and they were made to wait for about 3 hours between cruises while the crew tracked down a couple of knuckleheads who were hiding somewhere on the ship. The cruise director told her that it was very common occurrence at the end of a cruise. True story: they’d shaken someone out from the theatre curtain once.)
Eventually we get on board, and it’s immediately very surreal. We’ve taken Celebrity cruises for almost 20 years now and you get accustomed to things looking a certain way. Royal Caribbean is very similar… but just different enough to make you feel like you’re having a dream about cruising and not actually doing it. We go up for to Windjammers, which is the buffet, and it’s rammed with the thousand other people that all also just got on board. We do manage to get a table, and eat some food, and then we get to head to the rooms which are available nice and early. From there, we do a quick tour, and it becomes a string of disappointments for the kids. There’s a waterslide on board, but it’s not open at all on the first day. There’s also an awesome climbing wall; also not open the first day. Even the kids’ club, which – at least on Celebrity – is open in the evening, isn’t open other than for a 30 minute sign-up-your-kid window. We do get to swim at the kids pool for about twenty-five minutes – but then that gets closed (at least in this instance, it was in preparation for muster). The lifeguard is Hispanic and very heavily accented, and when he tries to tell me, “It’s time to close the pool” I keep hearing, “The temperature of the pool” and I was like, “Don’t worry! The temperature is fine!” No exaggeration: five attempts later, I finally realize what the poor guy is saying.
Muster was another overly long wait, starting about half an hour after it was scheduled. It might be too early to say for certain, but there seems to be this ship-wide laissez faire attitude. Like, maybe the cruise ends it Rome, but maybe it doesn’t. Let’s just see where the wind takes us, shall we?
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