- We went on a Celebrity Cruise with my parents over the past week, which featured three sea days and three days in port at Bermuda. (For the record: Four adults and one preschooler does seem to be a decent ratio so that everyone gets to relax and do some fun things.)
- Regarding Celebrity: The buffet was better than Norwegian, though the specialty restaurants were generally inferior (most of them weren’t accessible unless you were in a special class, and only one offered particularly different fare). The line is in general aimed at an older crowd: Norwegian had facilities for families; this was mostly retirees. The kid’s club was lovely (and ARR had a great time there, about an hour each day), but there were only a dozen kids on the ship total. Also, while the food service staff was great, the activities staff apparently couldn’t get their act together. They screwed up my mother’s room assignment (she was a guest lecturer and her room was comped), moved several activities after reservations had already been opened, cancelled activities with no notice, and just didn’t know when or where anything was supposed to be happening.
- Because of the relative age differences, (“Preschool Georg is an outlier and should not be counted”) and his general charisma, everybody knew ARR. He seriously charmed everyone. By the latter part of the week, random people in the halls and elevators would greet him by name!
- Captain Kate was a hoot: She’s only the fifth female captain in the industry (there are now 7, she’s the first from the US), and she looks like Sandra Bullock but tells “dad jokes” and “Confucius says” puns over the intercom.
- ARR’s eating habits on the cruise were actually much better than ours: He couldn’t eat most of the desserts, and we were eating cake after every meal. (I also had sausage and a variant egg benedict from the benedict bar almost every morning; and blintzes too.) He had a lot of fruit and veggies, discovered he likes hard-boiled eggs (egg allergy: clearly gone), and ate a lot of sushi and shrimp cocktails. I invented the “ugly-face salad” one day when he didn’t want lunch, pulling all of his favorites from the salad bar to design a face. (He did drink too much fruit punch, but soy milk was a little tricky to come by—it needed to be specially requested—and he wasn’t complaining.)
- ARR also seemed to master the concept of phone this weekend: He realized we could call my parents’ stateroom and really wanted to do so; and when he called he managed to have real conversations that actually transmitted information!
- ARR’s best line of the week: While my mother was sorting out her room, I commented that she’d just push people until she got her way. ARR got super upset, and eventually stammered out, “You shouldn’t push your friends! We need to find Gramma and tell her to calm down! You don’t push your friends, even if you’re angry!”
- On the first evening, we went to see the comedian. And I hate bandying about the word “problematic”, but he was a very talented, clearly intelligent black man whose routine included a lot of bad black stereotypes clearly aimed at the retired, middle-America white cruise crowd. It was uncomfortably like a minstrel show.
- We tried to take ARR to the production show (“iHollywood”) the following evening. He said “I don’t like it,” for ten minutes and then Papa took him to play elsewhere. The singers were decent (though most of the men were clearly singing parts written for someone else) and the costumes clearly came from Discount Costume Warehouse, but the aerialists were fantastic. Also, they abandoned the Hollywood theme by the second half and ended on an ABBA medley.
- The crew of the ship may not actually know how to measure the temperature: Everyone was insisting that the port days would be in the low 70s. It was definitely in the 80s; I’m not sure what they were smoking.
- On the first port day, we went to Snorkel Beach, which is a man-made beach five minutes from the cruise dock. It’s small and nothing special, but was perfect for ARR, because it’s on an enclosed cove and there’s a little slide…and there was a 5-year-old named Thomas from the other cruise ship who was interested in playing “icky sticky zone” for over an hour. Later that day (and the other two days) we went to the little playground next to it, which is a lame wooden affair that wouldn’t pass helicopter-parent safety standards, but meant that he could do some climbing and digging and work out some of his pent-up energy from the ship.
- ARR’s says his favorite part of Bermuda was the train; that is, the little trolley-shuttle that took people around the cruise dock.
- On the second port day, Jethrien and I went horseback riding. It was a delightful ride: We went through some greenery to one of the pink-sand beaches* and it was a glorious sunny day. The amusing hiccup was that I got the toddler of horses: He constantly wanted to stop to eat the foliage and needed to be “encouraged” to follow the pack; he was the only horse that forgot to visit the little horses’ room before the ride, so we had to stop several times so he could relieve himself; and when we stopped he’d either try to flirt with the mare Jethrien was riding or antagonize one of the other geldings. It felt very familiar.
- We did the ship’s kitchen tour, when they told us about their food production and walked us through the galleys, which occupied a sizeable portion of one of the decks. I’d never been in an industrial kitchen of that magnitude, and it’s an impressive affair, especially since they make their own pasta, bake their own bread, and even make the ice cream fresh every day.
- We tried the most noteworthy specialty restaurant, Qsine. It was billed as a tapas-style place where you could order up to 6 dishes each, and with the waiter and the couple we were eating with goading us on, we ordered 12 different dishes. This went poorly—when the meatballs that were the size of softballs came out (#9) we cancelled the rest of the orders. It was generally all very good, but we waddled out of there and could barely eat breakfast the next day. (This was especially surprising because cruise restaurant portions are usually entirely reasonable: A three-course meal in the main dining room feels like an appropriately-sized dinner, and I ordered a second entrée a couple of times.)
- On the other hand, they did a dinner and a show event on their film deck, and that was great. The film was The One Hundred Foot Journey, and the six dishes (all very reasonably sized) were French-Indian fusion inspired by the film. (The film is fun and well-made, incidentally. Recommended, especially for foodies.)
- The five of us attended family bingo, which was noteworthy in that ARR won a prize and picked out a pair of pink sunglasses that he wore very proudly for the rest of the week.
- We also hit family karaoke, because the time change made ARR attending a later-evening event more feasible. He didn’t seem entirely clear on what was going on, but enjoyed singing “Happy” with Daddy and Papa, and really enjoyed making roaring noises along to the little girls doing Katy Perry’s “Roar.”
- I think we’re all super glad to be home, despite the trip going really well. Back to all of our usual toys, back to our usual foods, and (starting tomorrow) back to our usual routine. There were a lot of family naptimes on the trip (including several I had to wrestle ARR down for), but the one this afternoon was probably the most peaceful.
*They have red coral mixed with the sand; I was reminded of the Hawaiian green sand beaches in that it was actually kinda lame. If we’d made the 45-minute trip just for that, I would have been disappointed.
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