Personal | Jim & Kathleen Travel

Day 2: Not a lot of improvement

by Jim Bellomo | Aug 3, 2019 | Uncategorized

The first part of this was written on the afternoon of our second day on Ovation of the Seas. As you can see, things did not improve on day 2.

Breakfast and lunch this morning were in the buffet and the place is a freaking zoo. Seriously. We actually heard three announcements asking people to eat quickly and leave so others could sit down. (I HAVE NEVER HEARD THAT BEFORE IN 28 CRUISES) The food is some of the worst buffet food I have seen. Really bad. Even the lemonade is beyond watery. It’s yellow colored water. So sad. The burgers were cold, the pizza lukewarm, the salads mediocre to say the least.

It’s not just the food. It’s the crowds. They are oppressive. And because of the poor systems for handling them on the ship, it makes it worse. We later learned that there were at least 1,000 children under age 12 on this cruise. That means that the ship was almost at full capacity. You could really tell on sea days and when you tried to get an elevator or in the buffet. And their systems and scheduling were ludicrous.

A pretty awesome area for kids that was almost IMPOSSIBLE to get into. It took our grandkids six days to find the area on the left open and available. RIDICULOUS!

What I mean by that is that everything is controlled and scheduled in a really poor way. Let me give you an example. After lunch on our first day on board we took the kids to the outdoor pool. It was a beautiful day and the pool wasn’t as crowded as we thought it would be. There are three parts to the outdoor pool area. There is a large pool that is about 5 feet deep, a small round pool for younger kids. They can get in it and go around and around. And there is a bunch of water slides and sprinklers for kids as well. When we first went out and went to the pool, it was about 1:00 pm. The two parts for little kids were closed. When I asked a lifeguard when it was open and he said 2:00 pm. Great, we nursed the kids through an hour of swimming and ice cream cones and then went to see them open the kids area. Guess what, they only opened the little round pool that would hold only about 20 kids so a line quickly formed. We never did see the water slide area open—The one thing the kids really wanted to do. RCL—open your damn facilities. We found this to be true so often. For instance, the bumper cars which you have to strand in line for, are only open between 4:30 and 6:30 pm. And if you have early seating as we did, that’s when you need to get ready for dinner and eat it. Get it together people! We can’t count the number of times we have seen people wandering around empty venues with no one to open them. The activity staff on this ship must either have very few people or they get a lot of time off. Or it is POORLY SCHEDULED which I believe to be the case.

We have had a really hard time finding things for the kids to do these first two days. We took them to the “Ocean Adventures” Royal’s highly regarded children’s program and my daughter and son-in-law were met by some of the most bored and uninterested-in-children people on the ship. Their answer to what the kids would be doing, is a gesture and them saying, “playing in here.” Nothing was going on except some unruly kids running around while others were trying to play. No real supervision at that point. Add to that, that our granddaughter who will turn 6 next month was put in the 3-5 year old group while our grandson is in the 6-8 year old group. Our granddaughter is quite mature for her age, so she did NOT want be left in a room full of three years olds while her brother had a good time with kids more her maturity level. So that program was out the window for us.

Then we have a daily schedule for a ship where almost a quarter of the people onboard are under the age of 12 and practically nothing for them to do. I am going to put a copy of today’s schedule online when I get home and point out all the things that are available for kids (next to nothing). We ended up spending the entire morning in the arcade, spending grandpa’s money playing skeeball and air hockey and some free foosball. Even if the Kid’s Club had been viable for our kids, they have a limit of how many kids can participate at one time and they exceeded that regularly as many parents just want to dump their kids for as much time as possible.

Then this afternoon at lunch, the cherry on the top of all this. I asked Joel (my awesome son-in-law) to make sure it showed on his daily schedule that they had reservations for the evening show that night—Pixels. It was the only thing I had been able to reserve before the cruise. Nothing else had been available for reservation (even thought now that we are onboard we keep hearing crew ask us if we made reservations) other than shore excursions. I tried on a regular basis for at least 12 weeks prior to the cruise to reserve things like the iFly, the Northstar and other attractions and not been able to do so. The only thing I could reserve were things that cost money. If they couldn’t charge you for it, it wasn’t available to reserve online. I even went so far as to call Royal’s travel agent line and discuss with them why we weren’t able to make reservations. We were told not to worry, that we would be able to make reservations once on board. Excuse my language but that was BULLSHIT! At no time could we make a reservation for any of those activities but the only thing we could make reservations for was this show, Pixels. So I did. I made the reservations for us, my kids and my grandkids. And they showed up on our reservation cruise planner right up until we came aboard. Then all of a sudden when I checked at lunch time today, my kids and grandkids no longer had reservations. I went to Customer Relations and they couldn’t figure it out and all they could do for us was offer us the show tomorrow night, immediately after we get back from a day-long excursion. The show starts at 7:00 and we don’t get back in time to eat dinner before the show. The woman who arranged it for me suggested we drop by the buffet for dinner after the show. She obviously has never had hungry 5 and 8 year olds traveling with her. Just another screw up. It’s funny how the only things they have not screwed up is things we pay money for. All the shore excursions I paid money for are there just fine but the “complimentary” reservations I made at exactly the same time, disappear.

I now need say that when I went back to our stateroom later that afternoon, just before dinner, there was a phone message from the woman in Guest Services telling us that she had found four cancellations and that we now had our reservations back. While I appreciated her help, this never should have happened in the first place. The show, by the way, was excellent. The kids loved it. A really great multi-media show. And a great way to finish our second day which was a mild improvement over the first one.

The best way ever to wake up on a ship—look out your verandah and see your grandson.

And then seeing whales from our verandah

Never seen so many whales from a ship before

They were everywhere

And so were boats

This is the Northstar. More about this later.

When we ran out things to do, we hit the pay as you play arcade

But the kids had fun

Lots of fun

Maylee liked her bike

Lots of fun!

There was roller skating but you had to get there about an hour early to get a wrist band.

We played multiple games of foosball

But it was a bunch of fun. For everything that the ship didn’t do for us, these kids did.

When you have this face to look at, nothing can really be all that bad.

There’s always room for improvement no matter what. —Ali Krieger

This did not start well

by Jim Bellomo | Aug 2, 2019 | Uncategorized

A note before I post this—We had little or no internet access onboard our Ovation of the Seas cruise we have been on since July 26. Certainly not enough to post anything but I kept writing it, day by day. Now my intent is to post it day by day as if we were leaving today. So here’s what you would have read last Friday if I had been able to post.

I am starting this first post on the afternoon of the second day of what I so far consider the WORST cruise I have ever been on and to be honest, that includes our Carnival cruise from hell back in 1998. This one is worse because I had such high expectations for it. One thing after another have turned this into our new cruise from hell. The worst part for me is that I am constantly disappointing my kids and grandkids. So many things we had planned to do that I had been trying to arrange for months are “not available.” Reservations I have had for months are suddenly gone. But that’s just the tip of the proverbial iceberg.

I guess I should begin at the beginning—getting onboard. The worst boarding experience ever. When we had filled out our boarding pass information on Royal Caribbean’s website before the cruise, we were asked what form of identification we wished to provide for boarding. Because our passports needed renewing, we chose the Royal Caribbean listed choice of using our Nexus cards. If you are unfamiliar with the Nexus card it gives us easy entry into Canada by land, TSA Precheck at all airports, Global entry and more. We had to go through all the interviews, fingerprinting and background check to get them that you do for any Global Entry type card. We were thrilled it was a choice on the RCL website that we could use to check in with so we could send our passports in for renewal without having to pay for expedited service (quite expensive). I even called RCL pre-cruise to make ABSOLUTELY sure that we could use them before I sent our passports in for renewal. I actually have an e-mail stating that it will be no problem.

Guess what? RCL forgot to tell the people at the Port of Seattle that they would accept Nexus, so our friends with passports and our kids with just birth certificates were allowed to board. But we were held outside the security area until someone came all the way down from the ship to tell them that it was OK to take Nexus cards. Are you kidding me? Were we really the first people the entire Alaska season to walk up with Nexus cards? Give me a break. Our friends from Canada had also tried boarding with their Nexus cards and the same thing happened to them but luckily they had brought their passports as well. Ours were (and are) someplace in the State Department being renewed.

Once we got that screw-up fixed (took about 25 minutes), we were told we could go through security and that the young man (who looked to be 12) would scan our cards and our boarding passes. Of course he messed that up because he scanned Kathleen’s boarding pass and paired it with my Nexus card and then could not figure out how to undo what he had done. So we had to wait while someone could escort us up through the security line, get us cleared through the X-ray machines and then take us to someone who could fix the young man’s screw up. All this time, our family and friends were getting further and further ahead of us. I know that may not seem like a big deal for you but I paid for the kids to go so I could see their faces when they first boarded a cruise ship. Thankfully we did get almost everything cleared up in time for us to do that, but…

One of the other things the woman fixing the mistake told us was that we were now on a completely cash account. She said the credit card we had registered when we did our boarding passes had been compromised and somehow been linked to another stateroom with a family named Anderson in it and NOT Bellomo. She apologized but said that meant that we could not use that card. I told her that the Andersons were my daughter, her husband and my two grandkids and that my card was supposed to be covering the charges to their room as I was treating to this cruise as their Christmas presents. The woman could not fathom that? Seriously? It took her about 15 minutes to figure out what I was trying to do and to fix the problem.

At this point they started boarding the ship in the absolute worst way I have ever experienced in 28 cruises. Even Carnival never did that back in 2001. No numbers, no lines, no priority, just everyone going for the door. Mass chaos. Total anarchy. Thankfully most of the people waiting were nice about it but I still can’t believe there was next to no supervision. From time to time someone would make a totally unintelligible announcement on the public address system but after hearing at least six of them, I have NO IDEA WHAT WAS SAID ON ANY OF THEM. Sounded like the Muppets Swedish Chef speaking Korean. I was told later that he was announcing that Crown and Anchor Diamond members (their loyalty club) which we are could board first. Even if we had heard the announcement, how were we supposed to get to the front of the massive crowd of people??? And they were also making announcements for Celebrity Solstice at the same time.

So now we are with our kids going out of the terminal and up the gangplank. We get to the top to get on the ship and we get on! Yeah! But wait, the kids and grandkids who have been cleared and even have giant RCL stickers on their boarding passes that says
“CHECKED IN” are told, “You haven’t checked in yet.” Please excuse my French but WHAT THE HELL! How did they get through to that point and how did they those big CHECKED IN stickers on their boarding passes. Luckily a very nice lady from the ship got them taken care of in about 10 minutes but once again, a Royal screw-up.

Once the entire family was onboard (our Canadian friends were way ahead of us), I was sure that everything was going to finally get better but I was wrong.

We decided to go get lunch (we had planned to do some other reservations before lunch but we were held up for so long, the kids were really hungry and you don’t mess with a five year old’s lunchtime) at the 270 Cafe, a little bistro type place that Kathleen and I had scouted out on our travel agent visit two weeks before. They served (from the looks of it when we went by on our visit) sandwiches, salads, soups and desserts. They did but it was our first introduction to Ovation food and it has proven to be true through lunch today—their food sucks. Only dinner last night was remotely passable. And we lucked into that one. Will explain what I mean by that later.

The paninis were sad little things that remotely resembled a panini sandwich, a tiny slice of meat with some melted cheese that they microwaved, not pressed. Awful. After trying the sandwich I decided to try one of the salads so I ordered the “chopped salad.” The guy at the counter scooped me up a bunch of lettuce mixed with a few other ingredients, tossed it in a bowl and said, “Here you go.” I said, isn’t a “chopped salad” supposed to be chopped? He shrugged. I said, “Could I at least get some dressing on this?” His answer was that It was already dressed. Well you could have fooled me. And this was one of the better things I have eaten.

For dinner we have early seating (which on this ship is TOO early at 5:00 pm), which means we have two tables of six for us and our Canadian friends, right next to each other in the dining room. Early seating on this ship is 5:00 pm (our Brit friends Paul and Gail call that lunch) and at 5:15 they close the doors. We had not planned on eating in the dining room on our first night.

For the first night we had decided that the one thing the kids really wanted to do was drive the bumper cars. And the only time they do bumper cars is 4:00 to 6:00 pm. WTF? The only time? OMG. Talk about ridiculous. And there are more ridiculous scheduling things to talk about later. But let’s get back to dinner. We went ahead and did the bumper cars (which were tons of fun—pics below) but then thought we would head to the buffet to eat dinner. But this time it is 5:10 and the kids are getting hungry. We get to the door of the buffet and it is closed. It doesn’t open until 6:00. Again, WTF? We have NEVER seen a buffet with locked doors on any cruise before. And why would you start dinner in the dining room at 5:00 but not open the only free alternative until 6:00??? SO we rush down to the 3rd floor and barely slide into the dining room (I think they were letting people in late because it was the first night.) We get seated and have a wonderful time service-wise. Our waiter and our assistant waiter are awesome. But the food was just OK. Had I had any of it on a Celebrity ship, I would have sent it back. The prime rib was fatty, I ordered escargot to gross out my grandson and to dare him to try some and amazingly he did and liked them. Who would have guessed. But it was sad. Four tiny escargot swimming on a flat plate of melted butter. We did have a nice key lime pie for dessert.

And that’s how our first day ended. Totally disappointing and it only got worse before it got better. More tomorrow.

Once we had lunch we headed to the pool on an 80 degree Seattle day

The kids liked the pool and their Mom appreciated the RCL life vests

Maylee liked the ice cream

We went to look at the bumper cars

So the kids could pose

A little while later we were in line for those bumper cars

Which was a bunch of fun

As you can see from the looks on my daughter’s face

Maylee and I aim for her brother

More bumper car fun

This was the best part of the day

Not worried about the cruise at this point

Neither was Joel

We sail through the Straits of Juan de Fuca at the end of the day.

Get used to disappointment—Inigo Montoya

A different kind of cruise

by Jim Bellomo | Jul 25, 2019 | Uncategorized

See how happy they make us. This may be our best cruise ever.

The most important people going on Ovation of the Seas tomorrow.

We have to take the tall ones to get to travel with the short ones.

Tomorrow we embark on a different kind of cruise for us. After 26 cruises, we are going to take one that is less about us than it is about family. On Friday of this week we are taking my daughter, her husband (who we love very much) but most importantly we are taking our grandson and granddaughter on their very first cruise. We are boarding Royal Caribbean’s Ovation of the Seas for a seven-night cruise to Alaska and we can’t wait!

Neither Kathleen nor I cruised until we were almost 50 so the very idea of starting our grandkid’s cruising life at five and eight years old is way cool! I am posting this news because I want you to know that I will be doing a complete set of posts on our cruise but I am not sure when I will be able to upload it. We won’t have (because that isn’t a perk that Royal gives its repeat cruisers…what exactly does Royal give its repeat cruisers that is worth a damn?) internet on board. We will have T-Mobile when we are ports so I should be able to post on those days. We are in Juneau on Sunday so hopefully I will get online there.

On the other hand, we may be having so much fun, you just might have to wait until we get back for a full report. Either way, more content is coming—hope you are ready. By the way, we are also going with two of our best friends, their kids and their grandkids as well so it is bound to be amazing.

AWESOME! I went looking for a closing quote about grandkids and found one by one of my personal heroes, Rita Moreno!

My grandkids are everything to me. For me, family is all! —Rita Moreno

Traveling with your cell phone

by Jim Bellomo | Jul 7, 2019 | Uncategorized

Note: this post is primarily for my readers who live in the USA. To the others, I hope it applies to you someday.

About two weeks ago (June 26), the New York Times ran an article about traveling with your cell phone called “A Comprehensive Guide to Taking Your Smartphone Abroad for Cheap.” In case you don’t have a subscription to the online NY Times, the basic conclusion of this article was: “To cut to the chase: There is a cheap way, which involves a lot of work. Or there is an easier method that will most likely cost you a pretty penny.” And then less than one paragraph later, they said, “There’s an exception to this. If you are a T-Mobile subscriber, you get free international roaming in more than 200 countries without having to make changes to your account.“ And to that I said, “DUH!”

I have been preaching to my friends, family and clients about the benefits of having T-Mobile as your cell phone provider if you travel internationally for quite some time. We have been T-Mobile subscribers since we left evil AT&T (why they are EVIL is an entirely other story but I don’t feel like crying right now, so it will have to wait for another time) in the autumn of 2014. And I have to say that I am as happy with T-Mobile as I used to be with Apple (before Steve Jobs died).

I don’t want to make this a commercial for T-Mobile but if you haven’t heard me go on and on about T-Mobile, then we haven’t talked before, LOL! First, they have some great programs for people like us…seniors (They also have special programs for military, veterans and government workers). When it comes to their senior program, I am not sure what the current cost is, but when we signed up for it we got two lines with UNLIMITED fast data and phone service anywhere in the US for $60 a month (TOTAL) FOREVER! Yup, forever. Each and every month our cell phone bill is $60 (for both of us, not each). It never changes. And that includes taxes, fees, etc. Has been that way every month since we signed up. (If you buy a phone on installments, your bill will be higher and you can add to it in certain situations which I will mention below.)

Besides having a great and permanent price, there is another benefit to T-Mobile that applies to us because we travel. Free 2-G data pretty much everywhere in the world. And free calls and 4G LTE data in Canada and Mexico which we use a bunch when we go to Chilliwack. On our October trip to Québec, we had 4G LTE fast coverage on almost the entire trip. I will tell you that they will limit the 4G fast coverage in Canada to 5GB of data but that’s a ton. I did run out on the Québec trip, but that’s because I tried to stream a Seattle Seahawks game. But when I went over the 5GB, they just throttled me back to 3G which was fine for everything but streaming video.

In Europe and the rest of the world (more than 210 countries) you will have unlimited data at up to 128kbps, which is great for web browsing, e-mail, social media and occasional use of certain features like GPS/maps. On our Iceland trip, we had plenty of coverage in Scotland, England, Ireland and Iceland. On a previous trip to Europe in 2016, we spent almost a week in the Netherlands before we cruised and there we had 4G LTE the entire time. In fact the coverage in Amsterdam and Rotterdam was better than we have here at home. You should also know that making calls in foreign countries other than Canada and Mexico will cost you something. The cool thing is that as soon as you arrive in a country, you get a text from T-Mobile welcoming you to the new country you have just arrived in and telling you exactly what the rules are for usage in that country. For instance, when we arrived in Iceland, it said, “Welcome to Iceland. All texts and 2G data are free and part of your plan. If you wish to upgrade to faster data, please click here to see the cost. Phone calls are 25¢ per minute.” That was it. In other places, different rules but always a text to let us know. If you want to see how much it is going to cost (or if it is free) before you go, you can click here to go to their Travel Abroad page, put in the country you are going to and it will tell you if there is any cost and if so, how much that is.

By the way, I checked on upgrading my data speed in Iceland and it was $5 for a 24 hour day for 5GB of fast data. Not enough to stream a Netflix movie but I got to upload a few photos to this blog. And I should add that T-Mobile does a great job of letting me create a mobile hot spot to connect my Mac which in many cases (here at home) is faster than our Ethernet connection with Comcast. So if our Comcast internet goes out, we just start a mobile network with our unlimited data and we are good to go. Of course we make sure the phone is plugged into power since that really drains the battery.

Is that enough of a reason to switch? If you ever travel outside of the USA or you are over 55 or military or veterans and can get a lifetime guaranteed price, then yes! When we were with evil AT&T our monthly bill was NEVER the same. It changed every month. They always found something else to charge us for or some other fee or tax to add on to it. One time we uploaded a short (30 second) video from a cruise ship sitting in Victoria, BC’s harbor (we thought we were on the ship’s WiFi) and the bill from AT&T was in excess of $3500. T-Mobile rocks! If you travel, get them.

My cell phone is my best friend. It’s my lifeline to the outside world. —Carrie Underwood

Dublin on the way home

by Jim Bellomo | Jun 25, 2019 | Uncategorized

This is it. The last post of our more than three week 2019 trip to Europe. Yesterday I told you about our short and sweet visit to Cork and Cobh and the next morning found us sitting at the dock in Dublin. But unlike previous cruises, we did not have to get off the ship. Celebrity, in their great wisdom, had decided us to give us an overnight stay in Dublin before we had to disembark. So we arrived on Thursday the 13th at 7:00 am and didn’t have to leave the ship until 9:00 am on Friday the 14th.

This left us with an entire day to do something else in Dublin. This might have been really important to us if we had not just spent three full days in Dublin before the cruise but that all worked out since we were going to the Guinness Storehouse to celebrate Bob and Holly’s anniversary by taking part in the Guinness Connoisseur Tasting Experience.

If we hadn’t already known quite a lot about beer, this would have been a super learning activity but we had pretty much been schooled in beer by Kathleen’s daughter Michelle and her husband Brian who are level one cicerones (the beer equivalent of a sommelier). Since we pretty much had the beer facts down pat, it was a very fun way to spend two hours with friends and family and drink a sample of every beer that Guinness makes (six to be exact) plus learn to draw the perfect pint of Guinness (as we had learned about Beamish the day before in Cork). By the way, one thing we learned was that the Guinness Storehouse has been named one of the top tourist destinations in Europe. It’s a really slick presentation and very well done. If you are in Dublin, it’s worth the time and cost.

Once you have looked at the pics below, our trip is done. We have been home for more than a week now and if you missed the story of our flights coming home, you can read about that by clicking here. We hope you have enjoyed traveling with us and I plan on returning to posting about travel in general for the rest of June and most of July…right up until we cruise again, to Alaska on July 26th on Royal Caribbean’s Ovation of the Seas with our kids and grandkids. Can’t wait.

In the meantime, since it’s summer, we are doing ship visitations and those deserve some posts as well. Last Thursday we went to Vancouver to tour Cunard’s Queen Elizabeth, so you can watch for that one coming soon. This Saturday we are touring Norwegian Cruise Line’s Joy and I will get some info and photos from that one. Later in the month we will be on our old friend Solstice as well as Ovation. Watch for these.