themillennialcruiser

Praying for you and your family. May this be a restful time filled with peace that only god can bring. Happy New Year!

Barcelona to Paris weekend recap- After a lovely last breakfast in Luminae we headed up to the retreat lounge to wait for disembarkation. We were one of the last groups for a flight shuttle as our flight was not international and after 12:00. One thing to note when you disembark in Barcelona is they have a baggage claim type belt where you have to pick up your bag vs having all of the bags lined up. You don’t clear customs in the cruise terminal when the entire trip takes place in the EU. The entire process took around 30 minutes. I noticed the port had a locker and luggage delivery option for those taking a Royal or Celebrity cruise out of Barcelona. We arrived at terminal 2 and looked for our check in area for Transavia, the airline we would be flying from Barcelona to Paris. One thing to note about the lower cost carriers is that you cannot check your bag until 2 hours prior to your flight. We had to wait around about an hour but decided to wait in line so it would be quicker. These airlines are also very specific about luggage requirements so if you do decline to fly somewhere in the EU after your cruise I recommend reading the fine print on luggage and buying a small travel luggage scale you can bring with you. We booked the max fare which gave us guaranteed space for a roller bag & personal bag on the flight and 30 kg of checked luggage included. If you have priority pass check out the VIP lounges in terminals 1 & 2 in Barcelona airport. Our flight was a quick hour and a half flight over to Paris ORLY. Once we arrived in Paris we checked into our hotel for the weekend the Intercontinental Le Grand. This hotel is located right next to the opera and was a gorgeous place to call home for the weekend. One thing to mention about IHG is they have special offers for status from time to time. We ran into an offer last year where if you stayed 5 nights with IHG you would get platinum elite status for a year. We stayed with IHG in Israel last year for a week and were able to use our points/status for this trip. This got us a free upgrade, free daily breakfast, 2 free drinks at the bar, and late checkout. Be sure to look out for special offers like this. We had an incredible weekend in Paris visiting - musee d'orsay, a dinner cruise on the seine, the dior gallery, and the Hemingway bar. Paris is an incredible city and a great place to tack on a few days if you are headed out or back from a European cruise. Let me know if you have any questions! We are headed out on our next cruise in exactly 1 month from today - a 7 night Pacific Coast Cruise on Celebrity Eclipse. Looking forward to that while soaking in the memories from this fantastic vacation.

We have all been there! Even though it wasn’t funny in the moment it leaves a good laugh as a memory!

So sorry a family member was hurt on your trip but hope one day you will make it back to enjoy the island. It really is beautiful. I loved how authentic the island felt to the culture and how beautiful the scenery was.

Day 7 - sea day! Writing this as we are at sea in the Mediterranean! We are headed back to Barcelona today and it is by far the warmest day this trip! We woke up around 8 and packed up a little bit. We like packing a little throughout the last day so it doesn’t feel like a total bummer the cruise is over. Once we packed up a checked bag we headed to Eden Cafe for breakfast. This is an often forgotten complementary venue on Edge class ships for breakfast & lunch. This venue reminded me a lot of the breakfast at 270 on the Quantum class ships. While we were packing I managed to break a nail pretty badly which required a trip to the spa. I got a beautiful manicure and they even removed the gel i had on my nails prior. Once i was done with my manicure i met my husband at Tuscan for the captain’s club wine tasting event. This event is complementary to Elite and above members. The wine isn’t the best i have ever had however it is generally speaking wines you can only get by the bottle on the ship which would be similar to wine tastings I have done paid at Vintages on Royal Caribbean. After wine tasting we headed to Luminae for lunch. Once we wrapped up lunch i headed back to the spa for a blow out. I pre booked this in the cruise planner knowing my dyson airwrap would not be usable in Paris, our next destination. My blow out was lovely. I did take notice the connection to the sea that the edge class spas have, it is stunning. I overheard one of the other hair dressers with a pretty aggressive upselling technique of starting at the highest level of upgrade which was over $100! and working his way down. I was grateful I wasn’t with him as I always have a hard time saying no to the upsell techniques! At this point i was feeling so relaxed and was ready for coffee and a book so I went down to the cafe al bacio and enjoyed some time there. My husband was up at the retreat sundeck but met back up with me and then we went to the casino to press our luck once again. We luckily came out on top this cruise! From this point it was time for the Captains club celebration event happening in Eden. This was the first time we saw the captain in person which was a little disappointing after being on Beyond with Captain Kate being so visible and personable however, the event was beautiful. It was a busy event but no mention of # of elite members etc. They do an award for the most # of cruises and the couple who won was at #32! My husband and I looked at each other like we can do that too right?! One thing i did really like about our captain is he took time to recognize crew for their time with Celebrity celebrating crew with 5, 10, 15, and 20 year anniversaries with the company. Since we started cruising celebrity we have had more and more people comment on the correlation between our status and our age. Maybe it’s specific to the itinerary or ships we have picked. We are on the younger side but cruising is our vacation of choice and will be for many many years to come. I am very grateful for the incredible loyalty program that Royal Caribbean Group has to offer. It keeps us wanting to come back time and time again. After the captains club event we grabbed a martini at the martini bar followed by dinner, at you guessed it, Luminae. I reminded my husband this was our first sailing without any specialty dining. I think that might be a clear difference between royal and celebrity for us. With aqua or suite class we are satisfied enough with those dining rooms(blu or luminae) to not need other dining. On RCCL we exclusively book the UDP. The main dining room experience just isn’t for us. One thing to note at least on this sailing is tip envelopes were not delivered to our room at any point. Currently tips are included for the retreat so any additional is not expected. In a way I like this approach as additional tips dont feel forced but you can still recognize great service. I wonder if this will change with tips no longer being included in the retreat all included pricing starting in October. If you are interested in booking the retreat make sure you do it this month before that perk goes away! After dinner there was a lot of entertainment scheduled for our one planned sea day. We caught the end of the Feel the Funk show. By the end of the show the cast had everyone on their feet clapping and dancing, i was impressed! After this we headed to see the magician in the club. We missed the show called the Magical Bones the other night so i was glad to finally catch it, it was a wonderful show. We ended the night with pizza & one last stop at the martini bar. We booked an open booking over this sailing so we will definitely be sailing Celebrity again. We currently have an open booking for Royal and Celebrity so if you have ideas for 2024/2025 let me know! We are headed to Paris tomorrow for the long weekend! I’ll post the highlights of traveling to Paris and our debark experience if anyone is interested!

I would agree with you on the smaller ship 100% for the Med! It is nice to be on a ship and not have the FOMO feeling like you do on an oasis class ship at times. Also, if you can I would recommend a land trip to Maine to soak in all that the state has to offer! Southern Maine is our favorite particularly the Cliff House in Cape Neddick, Maine. They have rooms that overlook the cliffs and WOW! Its truly majestic and so so beautiful!

Day 6 Recap - Ajaccio, Corsica When i woke up this morning we were pulling into the beautiful port of Ajaccio, Crorsica. After breakfast at Luminae we headed off the ship in search of a great beach club. I love any port of call where you can walk off the ship and walk right into the heart of the city. We were originally going to visit the KOS beach club about a 20 min taxi ride away but finding a taxi proved to be very difficult. We opened up uber and it seemed to be an option however after 15 minutes no car was found. Based on how hard it was to get a taxi at the port we decided to go to a beach club we could walk to - Paillote Trottle Beach. Once you walk through the city center it is approximately a 15-20 minute walk along the beach. There was a closer beach to the port around 10 minutes but we wanted to visit a beach with chair/umbrella rentals and a bar available. Once we arrived we paid for our chair rentals 15€ each and enjoyed a few glasses of rosè for 5€ each. The beach was stunning, crystal clear water and the mountains surrounding. The sand was a little rocky, if i were to come back i would probably bring water shoes. We decided to head back to the ship for lunch around 1:30pm as my husband was wanting a burger and the beach club only had pizza on the menu. I enjoyed lunch at the ocean view cafe and husband got a burger from the mast grill. Once we wrapped up lunch we were shocked to see how many people were on the people didn’t get off the ship. I personally thought this was a beautiful port of call but if I had to guess most probably over do it in Rome & Florence and by the time we got to Corsica they needed a rest day. After passing through the pool we decided to head over to the spa to inquire about the thermal suite. One thing to note if you do a move up bid from Aqua Class to the retreat in a Sky Suite you don’t carry over your thermal suite benefits. In addition, with Elite status you do get a free port day thermal suite pass but unfortunately not on edge class ships. The price for 1 day of the thermal suite was $100 which was more than I was expecting however i was told it would be $79 the next day (our sea day). I was a little surprised that it was more on a port day than a sea day but decided to decline for now and went to the solarium instead. After enjoying the pool and hot tub we got ready for our second Chic night. Tonight was Lobster night! We enjoyed a beautiful dinner in Luminae followed by the comedy show. Phil Walker is a British comedian, this was not the adult comedy show it was an all ages one however it was pretty good. We went to the 7:30 show which was pretty empty. He did do a full on singing performance of the King George scene from Hamilton which is my favorite musical so i loved that! Plus the king is the best part if you ask me! After the show we headed to the casino, we have been pretty lucky this sailing as we are running up at the casino for once! Before bed we headed up to the Ocean View to grab our first night pizza of the trip. I love that celebrity has both pizza and a pasta station at night available. Tomorrow is a sea day as we head back to Barcelona.

Recapping Day 5 - from Rome, Italy(civitavecchia). Today on the agenda was - Destination Highlight: Civita di Bagnoregio and Pairing Lunch at Local Winery which luckily started at 9:30 AM vs all of the other Rome excursions which left the ship around 7am. We have done the best of Rome tours in the past but wanted to check out a different part of Italy on this trip. We got some breakfast at Luminae before heading out to our excursion. We visited the disappearing city of Civitia di Bagnoregio. This was one of the first times i have ever been on an excursion combined with another ship. Celebrity Reflection was docked next to us and we had passengers from this ship joined with our Celebrity Edge group for the excursion. The city was breathtaking, it felt like a city lost in the clouds. To get to the city you have to walk up this large pedestrian bridge. No cars are allowed in the city. Our shore excursions tickets said this trek was strenuous and i would agree. The incline up and down felt more like a short hike - from the original look out point it took about 30-40 minutes for our entire group to get back and forth. Once we made it to the top it had started to rain pretty hard so we went into the local church to visit there. Our group had a lot of rain soaked umbrellas so the workers in the church asked that we place our umbrellas near the door and while organizing the umbrellas our guide ended up hitting her head on the stone of the church. She was in pain so there was some choice words said in Italian which then lead to some of the church visitors and workers at the church yelling at our group. It was a little uncomfortable and awkward to be honest. Once this settled down a little bit we took a pass through the church, this was one of the first times i have ever been in a group where we continued to use the headsets throughout the church. Normally the guide will tell you a few details about what you are seeing and you visit on your own without the audio portion. Not doing this unfortunately continued to upset the church visitors and workers which caused some more yelling throughout our walk through and on the way out. YIKES! I didn’t catch 100% of what was said but all you needed to hear was the tone. At this point we all needed a free moment to breathe! We walked around the city independently before heading back to our bus. After about a 15 minute bus ride we arrived at the Antica Cantina Leonardi Winery where we would be enjoying lunch. We tried 3 different wines - a white, a red, and a dessert wine with our 3 course lunch of Lasagna, Salad, and Cake. Lunch was a little underwhelming but the wine was pretty good. Overall the shore excursion was as good, outside of the akward experience in the church we enjoyed the day. From here we drove back to the ship, it was about an 1.5 hours to get to the city and another 1 hour to get back to the ship from the winery but beat the 2 hour each way bus/train ride to rome. We got back to the ship around 5pm and it was very dead. We got ready and headed to Luminae for dinner. It was filet night and didn’t disappoint. we ended the day catching the tail end of sunset & looking for the full moon on the retreat sundeck in the pool/hot tub.

One other thing i would add to this post is there are quite a few events hosted for Elite guests and above featuring entertainment & free alcohol/food. These are a few we have attended - 1) music & mixology- a loyalty event with live music and cocktail demonstrations with the cocktails passed for all who want to try (these were full sized drinks and 4 per person were available) 2) Helipad event - complete with cocktails 3) wine tasting class - complementary and a great event to attend 4) backstage tour - complementary with your elite status 5) wine blending event - this is unique to Celebrity Beyond as a complementary event as I understand it 6) Loyalty event similar to the top tier event with cocktails however they also pass appetizers, it’s typically in a venue such as eden

Ciao from Italy and welcome to day 4 of the live blog! After another good night of sleep we woke up around 7am and got ready for our day in Cinque Terre. We headed up to the retreat lounge for a quick breakfast and coffee and made our way off the ship. In La Spezia ship guests are not allowed to walk around the Industrial terminal so we headed on a bus which took us to the official terminal area for free. From here we took a 15€ taxi to the train station. You can also walk(around 25 minutes)but the goal of today was a relaxing day/beach club vibes. We arrived at the train station and boarded the train to cinque terre. I pre-booked our train ticket through the cinque terre national parks site and they are good for 1 day no matter which direction/village you are headed for 20€ per adult. If you are visiting La Spezia and want to go to cinque terre I highly recommend the train. On our honeymoon in 2018 we did the boat tour offered through the cruise line at around $250 PP and while this was a lovely experience our entire day today was half of what we paid for the boat experience including the beach club, lunch, transportation, and drinks. Also one takeaway from today is my phone would not connect to the wireless at&t network. If you buy a train ticket in advance make sure you pre-download your ticket or take screenshots. You dont need to validate the daily tickets purchased through the national parks. Also want to note because I literally just realized this but each ticket comes with its own username & password for the wifi5terra network on your ticket download . This would have come in handy around 10 hours ago ! We took the train to Monterosso al Mare the furthest of the 5 villages first and made our way to the Bagni Eden beach club. This is the very famous orange and green umbrellas you have likely seen on instagram or Pinterest. It was 38€ for 2 beach chairs & an umbrella for the day. We also ran off the ship without beach towels by accident but luckily we were able to rent 2 for 10€. we enjoyed a few cocktails at the beach club, a spritz ran 7€ each. We had to order inside the restaurant but this wasn’t an issue. Despite the weather saying it was only 65 degrees outside it actually was the perfect beach day. It was warm, the water was warm, and the crowds of the summer had died down for the most part. Around 1pm we decided to grab lunch at La Cantina Di Miky. The ceviche was fantastic and so was the pasta. I finished off the meal with a 10/10 espresso martini. I also have an espresso martini instagram @theespressomartinicritic for fun if you want to check it out! After lunch we grabbed some gelato and took the train to Vernazza. the crowds picked up at this point so we didn’t stay for too long and moved onto Manorola for some beautiful views and some bruschetta. Once we wrapped up our snack we headed back to La Spezia station. Once we arrived back in the city center we caught a taxi with two women who were also headed back to the pier for 10€ per group. They mentioned they headed to Portofino in the morning and made their way back to Cinque Terre in the afternoon. A great option if you are ever sailing and miss Portofino for any reason. We got back to the ship around 5:15pm and decided to head to the Ocean View for dinner. I was so glad we did as they had a nice mix of options and we were craving some comfort food. I have to admit we hit the “kids” section of the buffet with chicken tenders, mac and cheese, burgers, fries, and more. We grabbed some ice cream and headed to the sunset bar for sail away. It was a beautiful sunset! We wrapped up the night at the martini bar and caught the show again! I think its so funny we have almost hit the martini bar show every night at 8 because we missed it every night on Beyond due to our specialty dining with the villa. If you are wondering why we haven’t been going to the shows at night it is because nothing has really appealed to us. We aren’t into the singing shows but tomorrow night is a magic show so we will be catching that one! Headed to Citavecchia tomorrow for one more day in Italy!

Thanks for the shout out! So glad you enjoyed the meal and trip look fantastic!

So glad you liked it!!

Weather forecast is looking good! Clear skies and a little cooler than normal but would rather be a little cold vs too hot!

Day 3 update- the unexpected sea day we woke up super late, 9AM which is totally unlike us. We are early risers normally around 6-7am but we didn’t set an alarm in the hopes we would put the jet lag to bed…literally! We had missed breakfast at Luminae by the time we got dressed so headed up to the Ocean View for a quick breakfast. I ordered some made to order eggs and they were perfectly medium. If you like your eggs this way you know the art of perfecting the temperature. I noticed they had a full English breakfast in the buffet including fried toast! After breakfast we grabbed some mimosas at the pool and went up to the retreat sundeck to relax and read. Around 1PM it started to rain so we headed to Luminae for lunch. I got the veggie stir fry but asked to add a protein like chicken or shrimp and no surprise the kitchen added both! It was fantastic. Once we finished lunch we headed to cafe al baccio for a proper coffee. After our caffeine break we gave the casino our daily donation! We did see a man in the casino win $4000 and my husband said he had $75,000 in the machine! Holy moly! By this point the waves had started to really pick up, we heard about the ship accident in Mallaorca and we’re feeling very grateful for the decision of the captain to not go to Portofino today. I started to feel a little sea sick so we headed back to the room for an afternoon nap. I woke up feeling better so i got ready for dinner and we headed to Blu. As i mentioned in my previous blog post as a suite guest you are able to go to dinner at blu as long as they have availability. We chose blu tonight because they had the lobster noodle appetizer that was a favorite on our last celebrity sailing. The food was fantastic, i think i liked it more than Luminae the first night. After dinner we headed to the martini bar for some cocktails and the martini bar show followed by the majority rules game show and some trivia. Off to bed soon for our early arrival in Italy we are headed to La Spezia tomorrow to visit Cinque Terre!

Agreed! The simplest of dishes with quality ingredients are always the best!