Just as I was afraid of…

by | May 4, 2022 | Uncategorized

Well, we are onboard Celebrity Cruise Line’s Millennium and it is just as sad as I was afraid it would be. And I am just as mad as I was afraid I would be. Let me explain.

We have been sailing on Celebrity since 2004 when we did our first Panama Canal crossing. This will be (I would have to check to be sure) our 22nd Celebrity Cruise. And on any of their ships other than Flora in Galapagos, we are done with them. And today’s first few hours on the ship explain exactly why we are done with them.

Example #1–I can’t see forward

About 10 minutes ago (it’s 3:25 on May 3) I left our stateroom to go up on deck and take some photos of the San Diego skyline. Having been on this particular class of ship before (like 11 times) I knew (or at least I thought I knew) where everything is. But this ship is one of four in her class and she has been “Edgesized,” That means that they took the ship into dry dock and made a bunch of changes. Many people have raved about those changes. Having sailed on her sister ships and now having been aboard for a whole 5 hours, I can say that while the surface stuff is nice (better linens, better beds, etc.) the big stuff sucks.

I went up to the top deck to take photos. On this class of ships I have taken photos from the top deck of so many places. Our Panama Canal crossings (twice), Vancouver, BC, Alaskan glaciers and so much more. But now when I tried going to the front of the ship to take in the San Diego skyline, no luck. Every deck forward of a certain point at the front of the ship says, “Stop, Retreat Guests Only.” Which basically means rich people only. And the other place that we photo nuts knew about was in front of the gym. You could walk out on a large deck from the front side of the gym. Well, that is gone now as well. They closed it in to add more exercise machines. To me, that’s just saying to anyone besides the suite guests, “Ha Ha Ha, you should have bought a suite.”

I have no problem with anyone spending their money to get a suite or a larger stateroom. We ourselves like to sail in X’s Aqua class which gets us dinner in a different dining room with s0-called healthier food and a little nicer ambiance. And there are a lot of others things I don’t mind them doing to give those who spend more a little more. But when they cut off everyone but those rich folks from any place that they can go to the front of the ship to see the view or take a photo, they have gone too damn far.

Example #2–Don’t give me CRAP for “free”

One of the new “innovations” on Celebrity is the Always Included program. Now some things you would normally pay extra for are…Always Included. Things like a Classic Beverage package, included gratuities and free WiFi. Well, Celebrity—why bother giving me free WiFi when it is so horrid that I either can’t use it or if I really need to be able to get online, I will be forced to go and buy your faster package. The illustration shows what I got when I launched a speed test website today. Our download speed is 0.4 MPS (megabytes per second). At home, we get almost 250 MPS. So this isn’t just 4 MPS or .4 MPS, It’s .04 MPS. That means for a single web page to download and just show what’s on it it can often take more than 15 minutes just to bring my e-mails down. And there are fairly simple web pages that won’t download anything other than text. They call this “Basic” internet service and it’s what you get for free.

I am going to guess what you are thinking, “Hey Jim, it’s free. What’s the big deal?” The big deal is that in the past you could buy these items for (most of the time) less than what they increased the cruise fare by, to pay for them. And when you did buy them, you got a lot faster internet speeds than this. It’s just sad. And yes, I could go and upgrade my web speed and I have no problem doing that but don’t tell me I get internet service and then make it so bad that if I need to use it, it is worthless. Lastly, some of you are going to ask why I need internet on this trip—we are on vacation. Yes, we are, but we are also closing an escrow on a bridge loan to buy a new house when we get back and that means we need to be able to Docusign a bunch of stuff and doing it with this slow speed is a pain in the proverbial donkey. I also need to be able to get e-mail from my travel clients. Just this afternoon I had to cancel a cruise for two clients who came down with COVID.

Example #3–I am not a fan of beige.

Some cruise ships are downright gaudy. Circus-like almost. Celebrity never looked like that. They were nice, muted colors. Shades of blues, golds and other subtle colors. Well when they redid Millennium to “Edgeisize” her they just decided that they wanted the opposite of gaudy, they wanted blah.

I am sitting in a stateroom typing this where every single surface and linen are some shade of beige. The ship’s interior furnishings with a few notable exceptions were converted to beige. This is now the most blah ship I have ever been on and if they are going to do this to all the Celebrity ships, I am glad we won’t be back on any of their standard ships (we still plan on going to the Galapagos one more time on the amazing Flora).

OK, enough griping. Let me check in tomorrow about our day in Santa Barbara today.

 

Going again

by | May 1, 2022 | Uncategorized

I bet you thought I died…or worse. But we are still here. And tomorrow, we leave on a two-week vacation that will find me posting a whole bunch. First, we are headed to Southern California to spend the night with my brother and his family in San Juan Capistrano. Then Tuesday, we head further south to San Diego, where we board Celebrity Cruise Line’s Millennium for a cruise back up the coast to Vancouver, BC.

On the way, we have stops in Santa Barbara, on Catalina Island, two days in San Francisco, Astoria, Oregon, Seattle, Victoria and finally Vancouver. And of course, I will be writing all about it and posting photos, so watch for my daily posts. I am happy this cruise has a couple of sea days, so I will do some posting and photo processing on those days. Hope you enjoy coming along.

But the real reason I haven’t posted in more than a month is that we are moving. And so we have been doing all the things you do to get your house ready to sell and dealing with all the fun of buying a new one. So I hope you will excuse my absence, but now it’s time to travel again. See you soon.

Flora—What a ship!

by | Jul 17, 2021 | Uncategorized

Now that I have told you all about the cruise and the adventure and shown you the islands and the animals, it’s time to talk about the ship. I can honestly say, Flora is my favorite ship we have ever sailed on. She is also the smallest ship we have ever sailed on. But I wanted to give you a little bit of an idea what our overall accommodations were like and the public areas of the ship as well. First, as you can see above, she looks wonderful in the water. Almost like a private yacht…a BIG private yacht.

Let’s start with the staterooms. Here’s an iPhone pano shot of the bedroom part of our “suite.” Celebrity calls it a suite. Other cruise lines would call it a suite but to me a “suite” means you get more than one room. At the EB Hotel in Quito we had a suite…a bedroom, two bathrooms, a dressing room and a living room. That’s a suite. The really big “suites” on Flora are true suites.

Those suites have other rooms as well (living room, two bedrooms, two bathrooms). But we had a traditional verandah stateroom. That said, it was the LARGEST stateroom we have ever been in. It was even bigger than the suite we once had on Century. At more than 330 square feet with an 84 square foot verandah we had more than 400 square feet to ourselves. To give you something to compare, on our last cruise on Reflection to Mardi Gras our stateroom had 194 square feet with a 54 square foot verandah. We found it interesting (at least to us) that we are going to go from the largest stateroom we have ever had on a ship to one of the smallest we have had on our next cruise. In December we take a Viking River cruise to the Christmas Markets on the Danube. Our stateroom on that ship will only be 204 square feet with the verandah. We were very pleased with this one. I did a quick video tour of the stateroom and the bathroom (the largest and nicest we have ever sailed).

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The ONLY complaint we had about the stateroom was the lack of places to charge electronics. This ship was built three years ago. It’s not like she was built in an era before we all carried numerous gadgets. But there were exactly FOUR electrical receptacles in the room (not counting one above the sink in the bathroom for shavers).  One of those was a European plug. I always have a converter but the receptacle was inverted so my adapter/converter would not work with it. That left us three. One at the desk and two in the wall next to one side of the bed. Except that the two next to the bed were vertical and VERY THIN! So thin that if you plugged any kind of adapter or charger in to one of them, you could not use the other. That is crazy. No USB plugs at all. They have those on other, older Celebrity ships.

I know what you are thinking…how many things can you have to charge? Well, we travel with the following: Kathleen has her iPhone, her iPad, her Kindle and her Apple Watch. I have my MacBook Pro, my iPad, my iPhone, my Apple Watch, my Nikon battery charger, my Kindle and my GoPro battery charger. Twelve items to charge with two plugs. That’s crazy. I certainly hope when they dry dock Flora in a few years, this is one of their big upgrades. It is needed.

The rest of the ship

Flora is beautiful from top to bottom. The best way for me to show you that is to add some pics and explain in the captions. So here you go:

A couple of the places on board that I don’t have pics of include The Boutique and Darwin’s Cove on Deck 3. The boutique has a few trinkets, magnets, shirts, jackets and postcards but they are very spendy. See my previous Q&A. Also on Deck 3 is a science lab where you can investigate things like geological samples from the islands under a microscope. As much as our interest in science was piqued while onboard, we never got there. One cool thing to do when you back from an excursion is to go to the Boutique and look through the windows as they bring the Zodiacs in and store them. It’s a really cool operation. Also on this deck is the infirmary, but let’s hope you never have to visit there. Decks 1 & 2 are either crew quarters or storage for the Zodiacs.

On Deck 7 forward there is the Observatory. It looks like a very quiet place to just relax and face forward on the ship. It is right over the Bridge, so it has great views but they play loud techno music in there so it is NOT peaceful at all. They need to turn it off or  change the music. On my first night while trying to find somewhere to write I found the music BLARING at 3:00 am.

Just above the Observatory is the Stargazing deck. DO NOT MISS THIS! We went up twice (cloudy other days…or we forgot) and it is worth the trip. They keep the area very dark and you would be amazed at the stars you can see when there is no light pollution from the ground. And your perch is right at the equator. You can see the Milky Way, the Southern Cross, the Big and Little Dipper and so much more.

This ship is amazing. We can’t wait to sail on her again. Other than my two very small complaints about the outlets and the techno music, it was about the best a ship can be.

Day 6–South Plaza and Santa Cruz

by | Jul 13, 2021 | Photography

Good day readers! As I write this I am sitting in our good friend Cathy’s living room in Wellington, Florida. As I think I mentioned before I am planning on doing four more posts after this one. One to cover Day 7, another to answer questions, a third to talk about the ship and our stateroom (with video) and the last one to kind of sum things up…with a very few complaints, so stick with me please.

South Plaza Island

Just off Santa Cruz Island (the Galapagos most populated island) are two very small islands, North and South Plaza Islands. On a map they look like two halves of a circle with missing pieces at the top and bottom. Smaller boats (up to 30 people) anchor in between them during the night. Here’s what our schedule looked like:

This morning we again had the choice of a long or short walk. Kathleen took the short walk and I took the long one. This one was a real eye opener. Not for the fauna (because as you will see in the photos, there were plenty of the usual suspects) but because of the flora. All of the islands we had been on before this had been either green (foliage), black (lava) or brown (scrub brush) but South Plaza was lit up like New England in the fall. Not on trees but on the ground. And the cacti looked like a forest sometimes…after a fire when only a few good trees are still standing.

It was drop dead gorgeous. Especially since the weather was also pretty good or a long walk. This was the windiest island we were on. And that meant the amazing seaman who drive the Zodiacs had a heck of time getting us on and off. We thought that was the toughest we had seen them have doing a dry landing…until that afternoon. So here’s my pics of our morning hike. I truly loved this walk as it was like being in an entirely different type of island.

Dragon’s Hill, Santa Cruz Island

In the afternoon we headed to the island of Santa Cruz for what we were told would be a “fast walk.” Which meant as our cruise director Betina told us, “More walk, less talk.” But it seems we found time for both. I want to add here if you take the longer walk, it is fast. We were moving. I walk 4-6 miles a day at home at just over 15 minutes per mile and I found this one to be strenuous. Mostly because of the trails.

This is called Dragon’s Hill because of the plethora of land iguanas of very large size. So you will have to endure a few more to those. But to me the big revelation (for the second time that day) was the geology. Many of my fellow walkers felt it looked like Mars (with water) or the Moon (again with water ?). Check out the photos to see what I mean.

One thing to know if you take this walk—it is HOT! Even with a breeze. So take lots of water. You will need it. And thus ends day six. I really liked this day. Just when I thought they couldn’t show us anything different, they did. These were two awesome hikes I would not have wanted to miss. But day seven was even more different. I should have that for you tomorrow but later in the day as we don’t fly from Fort Lauderdale today until 6:30 pm EDT and don’t arrive in SEA until 10:00 pm PDT. So who knows how we late we will get up. Plus I want to walk, need to shop for groceries and then collapse ?.

 

Day 5–Morning Fernandia, Afternoon Isabela

by | Jul 12, 2021 | Photography

First, if you are following this blog note that I posted twice yesterday (Sunday). I hope to get this one out early Monday but it may be later. So you didn’t get two e-mails by mistake, there is another post.

Morning on Fernandina

In our previous daily episode (interrupted by those pesky questions and answers) we had finished the afternoon of day four. Day five found us exploring Fernandia Island in the morning and going back to Isabela Island in the afternoon but we had moved to Punta Vicente Roca. Here’s our Day Five schedule.

As you can see, in the morning we had a choice of a long or a short walk. I took the long one and Kathleen took the short one. My long one was excellent as we got to see more of the usual animals and I finally got some good shots of the Sally Lightfoot crabs as well as lots more pictures I like of the marine iguanas, sea lions and a Galapagos hawk. Today’s walk was all over some incredible lava with huge fissures as you can see from the pics.

Afternoon cruising around Isabella

Our afternoon choices were fairly limited. Since we SURE would not be doing the “Deep Water Snorkel” we had a choice of a tender ride or a tender ride. We chose the tender ride ?. We took the earlier of the two because they wanted to use the later ones for the people coming back from the snorkeling.

This one was very cool. Even though we are seeing some of the same animals, we are seeing totally different habitat and varying landscapes. This one included sightings of lava gulls, female frigate birds, more blue-footed boobys, sea lions and penguins again! YEAH! We also got to see some amazing geology. Here’s what we saw:

As I write this, we are sitting in the airport in Quito waiting for our flight to Miami. Had to be awake at 2:50 to make this flight at 6:30. The airport is packed. It took us an hour to get through all the checks and we are in Business Class so we were quicker through check in. Then we had go through security (computers out, belts and watches off but you can keep your shoes on which is good since I have my boots on and they are a pain to lace)

It seems as if all the flights in and out of Quito are either very early in the morning or very late at night. Part of our group that was going to Houston left around midnight and others around 2:30 am. We did not hear of anyone who had a midday day flight so everyone was either up really early or still up really late. Looking at the departures boards it looks like very little departs Quito after about 9:00 am until late tonight. That is only a good thing in one way…unlike Miami airport where everything was closed prior to our 6:30 am flight down here, here everything is open. I told Kathleen with the schedules the airlines have in Quito, this is the only time they can sell anything. And when I say everything is open, I mean EVERYTHING! You can buy a Panama hat (which comes from Ecuador) at 30% off right in front of me ?.