jticarruthers

Ordered on the 18th ... crickets since then ... not surprised though

In my experience they arent reading the results they are scanning for key data, in fact the last couple of times they thanked me for taking a highlighter and marking the data they were looking for: My name Date of test Test result It didnt look like they were looking for anything else so i wouldnt stress over it. (All my tests have been CVS/Walgreens)

Worked on Harmony over Thanksgiving. Fortinet VPN worked fine, able to get on my network and transfer files slowly but without issue.

Have done the one on Mariner, it was a fun group activity.

It was 6 weeks for my one picture from Mariner of the Seas.

Thanksgiving on Harmony they had some games on the TV at the bar at Sabor and put some of them on the Aquatheater screen if there was nothing happening there. Not optimal.

Onboard ship, TMobile is the same as everyone else, come off airplane mode and you are paying. Throughout the caribbean I get "free" data/text in all the islands but phone calls cost $.

Conceptually I prefer the "cleanliness" of the nay vote. In practice i found it extremely frustrating to stand and wait for servers to become available to do things like "hand me a glass of iced tea". "hand me a spoon" , etc. I could get behind a mixed method, some of the areas of service right now are flat out stupid ... put those back to self-serve and just focus the crew service on actual areas of concern like the food that you can touch with your hands, etc.

Yep first rule of RCI customer service, if you dont like the answer you get, call back and ask again ... eventually someone will give you the answer you want.

We decided to do a once around of the port area about 3 weeks ago (things may have changed). We did not get asked for cards anywhere but were warned that we should bring the vax cards in case we were asked. We did get asked to put on masks everywhere we tried to go in. Probably about 75% of restaurants/bars/stores in the port area were closed and those that were open were very desperate/aggressive, we beat a hasty retreat back to the pool deck on Mariner.

Based on the last 18+ months ... nope. Pretty clearly demonstrated to my satisfaction that the cruise protocols in particular are pure theater driven by fear of an overreaching government agency. Witness my first cruise in July with fewer protocols in place and statements being made by crew on board that they were prepping to reduce the protocols further in the near future and instead going the other way just to keep the CDC "happy".

Sad but true.

Guest services on board can help with reservations for at least some things.

You would be the "everyone" group is your kids are attending, could go to the vax area if the kids arent with you.

We did Mariner with a group of 10. Booked on board at guest services, i think the app was only doing groups of 6 .. not sure if they were then putting two groups of 6 in the room together or capping at 6. Don't recall seeing any signage about masks but we all had ours off already while waiting and the host didn't say anything either way so we left them off.

Responded initially without processing, Escape room is up again but Laser tag was not on Mariner

Interestingly on my 2 mariner cruises the whole "signing for it" thing has been out the window regardless of whether you have the package or not. They arent even looking at or asking for cards, just asking for room #'s and then coming back with drinks ... not sure if thats an official change or just random weirdness but I noticed it on the first cruise and the whole group commented on it last time. (We were a mix of package and not but they were doing it for all of the group).

The package has always been borderline financially for me, the beer only package they used to have made sense, the deluxe rarely does. Making the Diamond drinks an all day thing means it will never make sense financially now but sometimes i do still do it for the convenience factor, depends on the group i am with and what I think we might end up doing. RC Blog cruise coming up, at least one pub crawl on the events list ... beverage package booked

Logic really hasn't had a lot to do with any CDC action so this would seem perfectly reasonable. I'm just hoping they don't ask to demonstrate how to flood the ship in an emergency in order to "wash away covid".

Just did Mariner twice, no reservations required/needed for Windjammer.

Modern cruising, the crew certainly arent going to call you out on shorts as long as they dont like garbage. I didnt even bring shoes on my Mariner cruise this past weekend, shorts, polo and sandals every night in the MDR.

Hip height wooden railings also stop covid in the schooner bar, as do open doorways between vaccinated and unvaccinated areas in the Boleros/Playmakers interface and the balcony railing between the unvaccinated upper area of the theater and the lower vaccinated level of the theater....

Hmm must be getting close to bonus time for the lawfirms ... time to tee up another round of "I sue, you appeal, i appeal, someone reappeals. we agree to decide nothing and move on to the next year"

Mariner was only 1400, interesting that Freedom doing basically the same cruise is much more crowded.