VoidoftheSeas

I'll wait for the second Icon class ship, I guess. I'm sure it's a wonderful ship, but I can pay for two vacations at that price point.

Honestly, I'm such a huge geek that I will still pay for the LotR stuff, even if it is overpriced. We're going to be looking into self-guided or non-RCL tours too, since there is no language barrier, so we're open to those options as well.

My wife and I are on this sailing for our 15th anniversary! It's the last Kiwi cruise of the season before Ovation heads back up to the PNW. Anyone else on this sailing?

My wife and I are sailing the last 10-night NZ cruise (Ovation) of the season next April (3rd-13th). We're looking for suggestions or recommendations for the ports: Picton Wellington Dunedin Christchurch We're open to RCL excursions or rebooking and managing things ourselves - no restrictions on activity level. What have you enjoyed? What would you stay away from? Thanks in advance!

Always good advice. We (and by we, I mean my wife) track room rates regularly for cruises we've booked (daily, sometimes!). We've probably saved $10k in the last 2 years as a result. Especially in the last few months that Royal has been cranking up the rates on everything, price watching gains a lot of value.

It was nice to be back on Oasis after 10 years. Great cruise, great ship, lots of fun. Safe travels home everyone!

We just did this on the Oasis! It was so much fun. We finished in record time (sub-30 minutes). Great group of other Star Class guests and just a ton of fun overall. Not the hardest escape room I've done, but well designed to make sure everyone can participate regardless of their puzzle solving ability.

It's cruise day! See you all on board!

Packing today for an 8am flight tomorrow. Miami, here we come!

10 days! Can't get here soon enough.

We'll be on this one as well, with my parents and our two kids. This will actually be our second time on the Allure with the same group, so everyone is experienced and knows what to expect. My kids are distraught that we're not going to CocoCay, but we'll be doing a few excursions at the ports, so I think they'll be just fine.

Always happy to take credit for good news. 26 days! The wait is killing me.

They did! Ruins booked and now just counting down the days! It's probably coincidence, but I did email the private journeys team on Thursday. I got a response that was basically, "That's weird, let me poke our inventory team," and then they were up online the next day.

It's this exactly. The edge case where people were burning their last few vouchers after midnight on the last night of a cruise is probably not large enough to warrant trying to save $40 a cruiser (I'd bet this actually made them money on people buying drinks after their vouchers run out). This is the second update to make the voucher program into a real benefit for Diamond rather than a conciliatory afterthought. This doesn't save them money on drinks - it saves them money on customer service staff.

Agreed. This is our first time to this port, and I'd really like to visit the Chacchoben ruins. At this point, I'm planning to email the Private Journeys folks on Friday, if I don't see them updated before then. I might look at other private tour options as well, but I'm a big chicken and dislike the risk of booking outside of Royal Caribbean.

I'm growing increasingly irritated that there are still only 5 excursions listed for Puerto Costa Maya. Feels like they're cutting it pretty close with barely more than a month from the sail date.

I love CATS - it's weird and quirky in exactly the right way. But it's also really hard to do well, and for some reason the quirkiness of it always seems to bring out the worst in producers and directors. The version of Phantom of the Opera that ran in Vegas for several years took this approach. I saw that back in 2009 and I thought it worked really well.

CATS is blech? Or the Oasis cast's performance of CATS is blech? (Or both? )

The email subject line is always "The Wander is headed to...." and 100% of the time I think it's an email about the Wonder being moved somewhere. First world problems, I guess.

Thank you so much for the kind words! I had such a great time writing and keeping everyone updated. I'm looking forward to doing it again for our next sailing in January.

We just finished up a really great cruise in the Mediterranean on board Wonder, and, as a result, we'll be Diamond once the points come through (yay!). Our next couple of cruises are going to be Star Class, because I'm addicted now, though we will probably grab some in-between cruises to really leverage the Diamond benefits from balcony rooms or junior suites. My question is really related to sailing Star Class as a Diamond member, though. It seems like, for the most part, the Star Class benefits outshine the Diamond benefits (which makes sense). Are there any perks for Diamond that I should be aware of that could still be leveraged during an SC cruise? Is the 'nightly Diamond event' in the Diamond Lounge worth it? Is the Diamond Lounge itself worth it?

The Day at Sea and The Day of Sadness I cannot express how glad I am that we ended the trip with a sea day. My feet have been aching from all the walking. I have no regrets about any of that, but I am so incredibly glad that we got a day off our feet to wrap things up. We began the day with breakfast in our room from the Mason Jar. Since the very first day, I had an idea that I wanted to try out: Spicy Chicken and Waffles. While we were in the restaurant on the first day, I noticed that the chicken used with the waffles was the same chicken used in the chicken sandwiches (including the Nashville Hot), so I stored that away for later. It was pretty good, but it was actually a bit less spicy than I expected it to be. I'd love to hear from other people how they feel about the Nashville Hot chicken and if it lives up to your expectations regarding heat level. On other sailings, we've really tried to take advantage of everything on the ship during sea days, but this trip was a lot less about the ship for us and more about the ports. We were tired and just ready to relax. So we spent most of the morning sitting on the balcony (one of the best parts of an Aquatheater suite after all!) In addition to our food, we asked Marla to arrange a mimosa bar for us, which is just basically a bottle of champagne with pitchers of various juices - peach, orange and cranberry. We sipped on our mimosas and watched the scenery go by. I couldn't have asked for a better morning. Different from most Caribbean cruises, you actually sail pretty close to land in the Mediterranean so there was a lot to see as we sailed by. That kept our attention longer than I would have expected. After a few hours of relaxation, we got dressed and headed down to Izumi for some sushi. As I've mentioned in earlier posts, different people like different kinds of food. I love sushi, but neither Ashley nor I are really big fans of fried, crunchy sushi. Fortunately, the menu at Izumi is pretty expansive, so we were both able to get food that we really enjoyed. As Star Class, technically you can order as much sushi as you want, but I was pretty worn out from eating at this point, so we kept it light. One small word of caution about Izumi is that it is on deck 4 and there are tables right next to the window. I do not recommend sitting in those tables if you have any kind of vertigo or motion sickness, because the waves+wake do some interesting gymnastics around that part of the ship. It only bothers me a tiny bit, but vertigo is a concern for you, I'd find somewhere else to sit. After Izumi, we headed back up to the suite sun deck one last time. I will reiterate what I've said before - Royal knocked it out of the park with this space. It's easily accessible, has plenty of seating, and it has a great bar. If you are in a suite on Wonder, you owe it to yourself to spend a bit of time here at least. Later in the afternoon, we went down to Giovanni's Wine Bar for some drinks and charcuterie. Despite rebranding from Vintages, and a few updates to the food menu, I have to say that it doesn't feel all that different from Vintages. It's a nice spot for sure, but I think the changes are almost all entirely surface level. We enjoyed our wine, cheese and meats a lot. The wine bar, like Vintages, has a wine flight option, which is a great choice if you do not have a drink package. If you do have a drink package, you are better off ordering the wine by the glass, and just having them one at a time. The bartender should make sure to tell you this, but I know some people are caught off guard. We headed back up to our room to change for dinner: Wonderland! I really enjoy the Wonderland concept, but I am a food and science nerd, so molecular gastronomy really appeals to me. One of the servers was dressed up as the Mad Hatter, which was a lot of fun. He was entertaining, at least! We've been to Wonderland before, so we tried to choose options we hadn't had the first time around. It was a very different experience than previously, since we didn't have our kids this time, so we weren't trying to work around their limited food preferences. The individual items in the restaurant might seem small, but you actually end up with a seven-course meal, all things included, so the size isn't that much of an issue. The only thing we tried that I would probably not order again is the Tomato Water. It's an interesting novelty, but it's only about 1 oz of liquid, and it just goes so fast. For dessert, I ordered the World (again), and Ashley ordered the Mushroom Garden. They were both delicious, just as expected. Marla came to visit us during the meal and we also asked her to send some desserts up to our room too! Sort of a final send off for the trip. I ordered the Fried Cheesecake (I may have mentioned that this my favorite dessert on the ship), and Ashley ordered the Go Bananas! from Giovanni's. Honestly, it might have been a bit too much, but we loved it. We had thought about finding a nice spot after dinner for one last drink but we were honestly just so tired that we couldn't bring ourselves to do it. We did eat our desserts, and sit out on the balcony for a bit, but mostly we spent the evening packing and preparing for the worst day of the cruise: debarkation day. Our flight out of Barcelona was pretty early at 9:50 am. In hindsight, we should have probably picked a later flight, but it all worked out in the end, even though things were a bit tense at the airport. We had a light, early breakfast at 6am and put our bags outside at 6:30. Not having to set out your bags the night before is another really nice Star Class perk. We met Marla at the elevator at 7:00 and began the long walk of sadness to the terminal. It was super easy to grab a cab right there, and we headed to the airport. On Friday, the US government announced that negative Covid tests were no longer required for flights entering the US as of 12:01 on Sunday June 5th. This was awesome news as it reduced the likelihood of any last second disasters. We had read a post on Facebook from someone who left the ship in Rome on Thursday, tested positive, and had to quarantine for an extra 5 days before they could return home. That would have been worst case scenario for us, so not having to worry about an accidental positive test was really nice. Side note: we tested as soon as we got home to Seattle. Negative. So I feel pretty good about that. The downside to the announcement was that the airlines, who had all been clamoring for this change for months, were completely unprepared to actually handle the change when it happened. Online check-in basically broke for everyone, so we had no choice but to stand in line at the airport to get our boarding passes and check our luggage. The line was long. Long enough that we got pulled out of line finally to ensure that we could make our flight (that's pretty common on international flights), we were right up at the front so we ended up being next in line to check in from there. At that point we scrambled as quickly as possible to security and to the gate. I would have been super stressed if I'd been any further back in line, because we literally got to the gate the moment our zone started boarding. Since the first leg of our flight was just to Paris, the boarding times are really narrow. I'm sure they got everyone on board, but I'd have been screaming if I got there much later than we did. The situation was pretty similar in Paris. After a brief 2 hour flight, we had a 1.5 hour layover in Paris, but that's really not that much time. The international gates are pretty far from the 'domestic' gates in CDG, so there's a lot of walking involved, as well as a brief stop at passport control, even though we were catching a transfer. We managed to find a food kiosk to grab some salads, but we had to carry them on to the plane, because boarding started so quickly. From Paris to Seattle is about 10 hours, which isn't terrible, but is still a pretty long way. We had economy seats on the way back, which might have been a mistake, but we survived somehow . The airline food was decent, and they did an excellent job of coming by often with water (something that did not happen on the Delta flight on the way out). We needed to stay awake as much as possible to fight the coming jet lag, so we just watched a lot of movies. Finally, after what seemed an eternity, we arrived in Seattle! After a quick/eternal 45 minute ride on the train, we were back home to our kids, our puppies and our bed. Whew! What an absolute adventure! We had so much fun, and it was exactly the break we needed. Thanks everyone for coming along the ride with us. I loved reading your comments and seeing everyone's reactions. I hope you enjoyed it!

Thank you for reading! This has been such a fun trip, and I'm so glad you've enjoyed the blog!

Thank you so much! It has been so much fun to write, and I really appreciate all the support and feedback from everyone.