Chaitali

Great write up!  I enjoyed hearing about the ports as we’ll be doing this itinerary next year.

I’ve seen vegan reviews where they were able to eat the pizza at sorrentos without the cheese, so they must have a crust option without egg.  But they did have to talk to the staff and have a special pizza made for them, but still only had to wait around 10 minutes.  That may have been because of the dairy and not the eggs, but just wanted to highlight that possibility that there could be a bit of a longer wait.

We were first time cruisers on the Freedom last month.  We had MTD and it was great.  We pre-booked at 8:15 pm every evening.  We would go to the early show and then head straight from there to dinner.  We liked our serving team the first day and stopped at the desk on our way out to ask if we could have them every evening.  They said they'd put a note on our reservation and we were at the same table every time.  We also wanted to move our reservation earlier one day and that was not a problem at all either.

There was a hurricane in the Caribbean while we were on the ship and it was fine but it did prevent us from being able to tender to Grand Cayman so that became a sea day instead.  They automatically refunded anyone who had booked excursions through the ship but if you booked independent excursions, you'd have to work that out separately.  There was rain one day and some rough seas.  I had motion sickness medicine and my husband never has problems with that so we were fine, but I would recommend keeping something with you just in case.

Speaking of movies, do they still have the small theaters on some of the ships or have they been removed during renovations ? I know the Jewel had one on our TA a few years back and I believe that the Freedom class ships had one up front on deck 2 or 3. On the longer cruises I often enjoyed going to see a movie on sea days. You never see them advertised though...they are rarely even on the deck plans which makes me think that maybe they've been removing them during renovations to make room for something else.

They still had an indoor movie theater on the Freedom and we did go see a 3D movie there one day when the weather was bad. It was a fun experience though everyone is right and popcorn would have made it better :)

Welcome back!

 

Glad to hear you had a good time and are already looking forward to the next one!

 

Tell us about your Freedom of the Seas cruise.  Which restaurants did you like? Any favorite activities?

Let's see... we had dinner at Sabor the first night with the discount and dinner at Giovanni's a later night since we had a voucher from our travel agent.  We really enjoyed both.  I'm a vegetarian and the waiter at Sabor and they made an off the menu vegetarian burrito for me that was really good.  But to be honest, I also thought the main dining room was great.  We had a wonderful serving team. I wasn't a giant fan of the Windjammer though. The sandwiches and pastries in the Cafe made for surprisingly good mid-afternoon snacks :)

We really liked the trivia and various games they played in the afternoons.  It was a fun way to meet other people.  I wasn't sure what the Quest was going to be about but I've heard in multiple places we had to check it out and my stomach hurt from laughing so hard!  The ice show was amazing. One evening we decided to watch the movie they were playing by the pool deck.  It seemed weird to just watch a movie on vacation when we could do that anywhere but I loved the feeling of watching it outside under the stars. I also enjoyed the dance parties they had on the pool deck a couple nights.  We are early risers so we tended to go to the pool early, which was nice since it wasn't too crowded at that point.  It was too crowded for us by afternoons on sea days so we generally headed back inside at that point.

I just wanted to say thank you!  We had a wonderful cruise on the Freedom of the Seas last week and I really appreciate all the tips I got on here.  It was my husband's first cruise and my first cruise since I was a kid and now we're both already trying to think of when we can get on another one :)