After those last photos, let’s get down to business of closing this out. Here are a few things we might change about Octantis: Pretty much nothing. She is an amazing ship. She has an amazing crew. She is one of the most beautiful ships I have ever had the good luck to sail on.

But if we really think about it and do my best Victor Meldrew (my Brit friends get that reference), I will gripe about our evening at one of the two “specialty restaurants,” Manfredis. The service was meh, and the entire place seemed like they were in the weeds all night long. Our waiter took the orders of the table next to us before ours, even though we had been sitting at the table for more than 20 minutes before they were seated. Then he took our order, served the appetizers, and came back to ask if he could get our entrée orders now. WHAT? And the food was pretty bad as well. I mean, seriously, how does a restaurant purporting to be an “Italian” restaurant screw up lasagna? When most people make lasagna, it has layers. There’s pasta, sauce, cheese, repeat. With their lasagna, there was cheese, one piece of pasta, a bunch of ground-up great stuff, and another piece of pasta on the bottom. It was not only ugly, but it was also disgusting to look at. All in all, it was the only major screw-up on the entire trip, and it really wasn’t that major.

But it does make me want to discuss the food. I haven’t really addressed that yet. In general, the food was excellent. I found it better overall than either of the Viking Ocean cruises we had taken, especially the baked goods. They had a full-blown bakery right in the middle of the kitchen, where you could watch the baker making all the goodies. And the bread…OMG, the bread. As I mentioned during the tour of the ship, there is no Main Dining Room on Octantis. There are two “specialty” restaurants (the aforementioned Manfredi’s and The Restaurant). But most guests ate most meals in the World Cafe—the buffet.

What a buffet. There were stations for the usual hot meals, salads, seafood, a hamburger grill, and sushi, but each was top drawer. At dinner every night, there was a decent steak and lobster to go with it. Every night, you could have this as your entrée. I think my buddy Mike did. And there were King crab legs, unlimited shrimp, and unlimited sushi. I really don’t think we wanted for any particular type of food, except for many veggies. They were sometimes in short supply outside the salad bars. Here are a few quick shots of some of the food. My good buddy Mike will have a lot more in his review when it is ready. You can reach his website by clicking here. He will even have menus as well. If I remember, I will post when his review is online.

One last little thing about the buffet that needs improving, though it may not be possible due to design issues. When you walk down either side of the buffet, there is the hot food station, then the salad bar, and then a ways beyond that on the starboard side is the grille (burgers, steaks, lobster, etc.); then still further down is the Aquavit Terrace. On the port side, you have the same two stations for hot food and salads, and a ways further down are the seafood and sushi stations, and finally you reach the Aquavit Cafe, where you can cross to the other side of the ship. We were always sitting on the starboard side, just aft of the salad station. It was a nice table for six and close to the grille station. But since this is a REALLY long ship, it is quite a hike from there to the sushi/seafood stations. By the time you get back, your dinner is cold. It’s enough that if you have trouble walking long distances, you never get to the other side. If only there were a way to make a hallway or cut through so about halfway down the space, so you didn’t have to walk all the way to the far end of the ship in order to come back halfway up the ship to your table. It’s a loooooonnnngggg walk. But it does help you wear off some of that amazing bread.

To close this out, I want to thank someone who really personalized this trip for us—Octantis’ general/hotel manager, John Flynn. On almost every ship, there is a board with photos of the officers. On our second day, I happened to walk by that board and saw John’s photo. He looked so familiar. I took a photo of his photo with my phone and showed it to Kathleen and Mike to see if they recognized him from a past cruise. Kathleen thought he looked familiar, but Mike didn’t think he had seen him before.

The next morning at 5:00 am, he walked by me as I was writing a post in The Living Room. I stopped him, introduced myself, and asked which ships he had sailed on because I was sure we had sailed together before. He said this was his first contract with Viking, so we probably hadn’t. I asked where he had been before coming to Viking, and he solved the mystery—he had been the hotel/general manager on Celebrity Flora in the Galapagos. We had met him when we sailed on the VERY first cruise for that ship after the pandemic. On a ship that small (100 passengers, but only half capacity for that cruise), we saw him a lot. He had helped us get back on board from the Zodiacs numerous times. We had seen him all over the ship. He was thrilled that we had remembered him, and we spent the rest of the cruise running into each other—seriously.

He asked me how we were enjoying the cruise and if there was any way he could make our experience better. I jokingly asked how he was at fixing loud doors. You see, across from our stateroom was a door that led to the crew area, where room service brought food and our stewards stored cleaning equipment and more. When they went in and out of it, the door tended to slam. During the day, that wasn’t a problem…until Kathleen got sick and was napping a lot. But in the late night or the early morning, it was irritating. It could wake you up from a sound sleep.

So I mentioned it to John that morning. The next day, he asked if things had improved. I said I had noticed they might have…a little bit. He took a couple of notes, and that was it. The next day, when I saw him, he asked again. I thought about it and realized it had gotten better. He said they had worked on the problem for two days and realized that no matter how people went in and out of that door, it would slam at the end. So they created an entire rubber gasket to cushion the final closing…just for us. Now that is service. Thanks, John, and it was GREAT seeing you again.

I guess that does it. We had a great time. We loved Octantis. As I have said numerous times, it's the best-designed ship I have ever sailed on. We loved seeing our October Bunch friends again. This may be our last October Bunch trip, as Mike and Cathy have something different planned for next year ??, but we shall see. We loved our time in Chicago. I had the best dining experience of my life at Rose Mary while we were there. And for us, the biggest surprise of the trip was Milwaukee. We truly loved the city. Except for the winters, we could live there. Such a vibrant and thriving town. Go Brewers! One more win and it’s the World Series for you!

I hope you have enjoyed following along on this trip. Not sure when you will hear from me again, as we have nothing planned until late May when we head to the UK: Leeds, Scotland and a London West End Theater tour with the Trilogy Travel Club next spring.

“There is no real ending. It's just the place where you stop the story.” — Frank Herbert