Traveler

We went down to the rabbit hole 

21 minutes ago, mom2mybugs said:

 Do you have any advice for Barcelona (tours,  specific hotels/ areas to stay,  restaurants we can't miss)?  We will embark on vision in summer 2019 and have never been to Europe before!   Jane

Thanks , 

Barcelona is a wonderful city , with wonderful food and  sites .

Regarding hotels , it depends what level of hotel you are looking for ,  If you are OK to use public transportation I would stay away from the La Ramblas hotels and by doing that you can save allot of money. This time I stayed at region 22 which was very nice and I think I would try it again next time , I was in the Sheraton four points Diagonal, it was clean, room was big enough and near by supermarkets, malls and restaurants. 

For cruise , the best hotel I guess will be the W but it is quite isolated from the city and very expensive. when we will come back from the cruise we will try another hotel and another area so I can report how it was. at the past we stayed in the Hilton which was also nice but quite far from the city center.

Barcelona has a good public transportation buses and subway which are easy to use even if you do not speak Spanish.

For restaurants there are many options , every mall has many small restaurants for a quick eats and tapas bars are spread around the city , I can just advise you to avoid  any resultant in the old port as they are mostly tourist traps . 

If it is you first time in Europe you are going to enjoy it very much as almost any ports has so many interesting things to see. 

When I will back home I can send you some more detailed recommendations for restaurants and hotels.

How many days your are planning in Barcelona ? base on that I can recommend on tours (the market , the church ,etc ...)  

2 hours ago, twangster said:

But is it any good?

It's not Sabor but it is better than what I was expecting.

It's fresh and I could find some Avocado chunks in it.

I will sure consider it as another option and will eat there again

Good news El Loco fresh has guacamole

On 4/14/2018 at 1:45 PM, JLMoran said:

Does it still have that new ship smell? ?

Oh yes 

Even the lazer tag 

We made it ! 11 AM 

6 hours ago, mworkman said:

Nice..I'm sure you can't wait for tomorrow to come. ?

Can not wait and can not sleep , 

No matter how many cruises I will do I can not sleep over 5 am on the cruise day and I think it happens to most of us.

Every cruise it's like the first cruise 

I better not comment 

  Day -1

So we arrived to Barcelona after a very long night which I did not catch too much sleep checking if no one decide to escalate a certain situation which will bring to  cancellation of the flight but as you can see all was ok.

We left the airport after around 20 minutes so it was quite fast including collecting our suitcases.

We took a taxi to the hotel which was around 20 minutes and 45 $ ,not a big surprises.

On the way to the hotel we passed near the cruise  port , there were still some ships ibut nothing even close to the Symphony , RC have their own league.

The hotel we took is in Zone 22 on Diagonal Av  (not Diagon ,  no wizards here) , again I used some points I collected during my business trips , they were kind enough to offer us also a free  breakfast as a gift for the status (SPG) we will check how is it tomorrow .

The hotel is very well located near many restaurants and several malls.

We went to buy some water and wine for tomorrow at a huge supermarket, I almost bought a huge Jamon leg but I understood it does not make much sense to carry it with us during the cruise (or in other words it was vetoed ? )

We drop the stuff at the hotel and went to eat at one of the tapas bar we found.

The food was fresh and tasty.

Now I am preparing the suitcase tags which I had to create almost from scratch as our guarantee room  was not assigned to us until this Wednesday so the tag RC site gave me were blanked …

Tomorrow finally  it happens , Symphony here we come  

Preparing for Hooked. 

Some Papas Bravas , when I go to a tapas bar I always order Papas Bravavas , it is simple dish but it give a good indication if the place is good or not as it is very easy to ruined it. If the Papas are ok , I order more things, It was very good here

The view from our hotel window 

First part went ok , we made it to Rome , waiting for the next flight 

Day  -2

Well after few months it is time again for funny spelling mistakes/bad grammar and near real time blog.

If everything will be ok and nothing  change our flight we will be on the Symphony Of The Seas at this Saturday from Barcelona.

So why this ship ? – really should I explain why one wants to go on Symphony ? ?

Actually, when the first itineraries were published we already booked a cruise for September time but six weeks ago we decided we need some extra vacation until September, we thought first to travel to Thailand for some land vacation but after checking the April/May weather over therel we dropped this idea.

I started to look for April  cruises and I preferred something around Europe to shorten the flight  time , apparently the only available ship was the SyOTC , so well we decided to volunteer and as  @Matt says : do it for the research.

For sure I have not canceled the September cruise as I believe it’s going to be two different experiences.

Europe April Weather  can be still cold and rainy while  September weather will be much warmer (in Italy too warm) so we are planning to focus  doing internal ship activities and some shore excursions while in September focus on other stuff like the water slides and water activities.

Another difference  is that for this cruise we booked Ocean view room as I do not think we would use the balcony too much (too cold) while in September we do have a balcony.

Here is the itinerary: (this is the third time we are doing the same one with Harmony OTS and Liberty)

Day -1 – Barcelona (getting to the hotel and find a nice Tapas restaurant)

Day 1 – Barcelona (We have BOGO deal)

Day 2 – Palma de Mallorca, we will take the bus to the city see what is new.

Day 3 -  Marseilles , we took a  ship tour around the city ,  last time we went on a  tour  to one of the small cities in Provence  .

Day 4 - Florence/Pisa (La Spezia) – We will stay around la Spezia which is a nice small city , Florence is quite far and we already have a tour booked  for the next cruise to visit Florence. I guess we will do some of the shopping there (wine, Balsamic vinegar and yes maybe shoes)

Day 5 - Rome (Civitavecchia) – We have a ship  tour that will transfer us to Rome , we will have around 6 hour to tour Romr  by ourselves , since we already been to Rome (land tours) I think we can find our way. I took the ship transfer to make sure we will be back on time, train and buses can be delayed from time to time.

Day 6-  Naples (Capri) – We did not plan what to do there yet , we might take the bicycle tour if the weather will be nice or just go off the ship and tour the city (by tour the city I acutely mean go to eat a pizza ? ) . From all the ports of call this one is the closet to the city center, walking distance .

So tomorrow early morning we are planning to catch the train to the airport (15 minutes) and start our journey to Barcelona (the flight will be via Rome which is funny consider our itinerary, but it was very cheap comparing to the direct flight, so cheap that it would not make sense to use miles).

Drinking – No drinking package this time, we will bring two bottles of wines  and we are planning to buy drinks from time to time (it is a very heavy port itinerary and they want 49 $ per day for the package ).

Special restaurants – We got the BOGO first two night restaurants , I hope one of them will be Hooked and will try Wonderland (even if we need to add some money) but almost everything will be nice, but must have Hooked at least one time to write a report for the blog.

Please feel free to ask questions or ask me to take  pictures of certain things on the ship, I will try to bring as much information as I can.

My partner finally got her SLR camera back from where we left it last time (long story) so maybe we can have some better pictures (although still it is a basic SLRs).

Tomorrow Barcelona

 Hey , you do not need to buy me ticket , I will be in the suitcase , no one will notice 

31 minutes ago, Flacruiser99 said:

Article is a bit technical on the website update but it explains a lot,

https://www.cio.com/article/3156806/cio-role/cruise-ship-cio-jettisons-aging-application-infrastructure.html

Thanks for the article , 

I did not find explanation for what was the issues that made this roll out to a disaster (5 weeks of unstable front-end application is a disaster) .

There was one clue ...   moving to microservices   (and some other buzzwords) it seems that the CIO decided to push every IT buzzword to this new application/roll out.     

As always was pleasure to read your blog, thank you.

The fact that Mr Poole will blog is not excuse for you  not to blog  its two different points of views , even without your SLR the photos you take with the Iphone 8 are fabulous  . 

But if you are tired from bloging its a different story, after all you cruise to enjoy ,  not to work as a blogger .. 

6 minutes ago, WAAAYTOOO said:

 I’m going to try and post some pix but since I have no f’n idea what I’m doing I may lose the entire post, which would ruin my entire day !

Few option to reduce such risk of deleting all the post :-)   , 

What you can do is or first save the post without the picture and when you are ready just do edit to the post and add the picture , in the worse case scenario just do not save so the original post is always there ... 

Second option is just to put the pictures in a separate replay.

Regarding the Casino , first , excellent news about the privileges,  hope they are not calculating the tier just base on this cruise ..  

Enjoy the cruise ,  always nice to read the posts. 

7 hours ago, tonyfsu21 said:

I’m currently sailing on Enchantment and when I introduced myself to the host I was informed of the fact that we all start from scratch and I receive NOTHING (no free drink sticker, no nothing) based on our past years of play. I was told that we need to earn a tier and must start over. Anyone else had this issue? I am seriously considering abandoning the program. I thought we were supposed to be “mailed” a tier and would start from there????? Not the case. I am not happy. After years of spending double (or more then double) the cruise fare in the casino I am out. 

At the past I have heard they said the tier level will be based on cruises you have done between July 2016 and Dec 2017 , 

Not sure what happen but I guess base on the way they roll out the new site they had some issue to calculate the tier level so they have done the easiest solution start from 0 . If this is the case its a total unfair.

The only way to handle will be to let them know how unhappy we are and to play less , they are doing allot of money from the casino , if they will start to see recline in the revenue  due to this behavior maybe they will get the message 

4 hours ago, JLMoran said:

I haven’t forgotten about this blog, but the last three days have been jam packed! What free time I’ve had (and it hasn’t been much) was only enough to edit my (many, many) photos and take notes for the daily recaps I’ve yet to write. They are coming and right soon! Now that we’re clear of our four port days and have a sea day tomorrow, plus a chill day in Fort Lauderdale on Sunday, I’ll be getting back to writing about everything that we’ve been up to!

Remember , you are there to have fun not for working  live bloging ... we will wait for the updates later 

Guac and drink package well used , who needs more 

Thanks for sharing.

5 hours ago, JLMoran said:

I just spent an hour writing up yesterday’s summary, and the fracking WiFi died again and caused my post to be wiped out. Sorry, no narration now, gonna just give the pics and executive summary.

Since I never trust the WIFI what usually I do to avoid such issues is to write the blog entry on a word document (anything you can cut and paste from will do) and when I have good connection I just copy paste it to the site and add the pictures . 

Guarantee room was assign and then delete.

For the 14-April-18 Symphony of the seas sale I  booked GTY ocean view room, a week ago I finally got assigned room (Ocean view) , today I notice the state room came back to GTY , 

Anyone encounter such thing ? , I have already printed my sell pass with the room I had assigned , not sure I need to print it again.

I will  not be surprised if they will say they had to postponed the roll out of the new program due to the issues they had with the RC site.

On the other hand I will be surprised if they will announce anything and not just ignore the date and hope no one will notice. 

excellent live blog , waiting for you and your family  to go on the ship .

3 minutes ago, jurrjurr said:

Ask the wait staff if they have Dijon mustard for the sandwich

good idea , I love Dijon Mustard , it will also give a good option to give him a tip , he/she should not be blame for RC pricing  

I promise to report the reaction in the live blog.  

3 hours ago, Lovetocruise2002 said:

Like a late night menu?  Never thought of it from that perspective.  I can definitely see how that might be appealing to some.  But still cheaper to do room service like @twangster mentionIed.  That's the good thing about cruising though right...something for everyone 

I hope that such late night menu will be cheaper ...

I do hope for better prices. 

to protest the price I am planning to take some sandwiches from the cafe and take it to the play maker in two weeks from now

31 minutes ago, Dan G said:

I think I speak for a majority of people when I say I definitely do not have a countdown at all.  

 It's Clear your website is better than mine haha

#BlackCats

Maybe they put the countdown only certain time before the cruise ? I do not know .  

Do not get me wrong , even now almost four weeks from the roll out still many things are not working and some things are working only some times.

The site itself , I do not really like the new design (some will call it minimalist clean design , I will call it something else but this site is family friendly site so I will skip it   ) 

9 hours ago, Renee Siao said:

I don't see a countdown on my dashboard..

This is what I see