Cruise notes: MSC Seascape, June 2024

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Since my short solo experience in 2022 on Meraviglia, I’d wanted to come back to MSC on a longer sailing. The Ocean Cay marine reserve, a port exclusive to the cruise line, was an excellent and relaxing time at no additional charge. The polarizing and negative reviews about the ships, food, service, and entertainment just seemed wildly different compared to the decent experience I’d had. And the value-for-money was certainly appealing.

In late June 2024, we had the opportunity to take the immediate family on MSC Seascape (easily confused with – but distinct from: MSC Seaside, Seashore, and Seaview.) On this booking, I made a minimum upgrade bid to a Yacht Club balcony cabin that was accepted, so we spent most of our week in the premium areas of the vessel.

There were certainly many perks and features that came with the Yacht Club experience, but we’ve had similar high-quality service on other cruises when staying in a “regular” cabin. Outside of Yacht Club, the early evening shows at Cabaret Rouge and the Chora Theatre entertained our children, but the kids club did not work as well for us as Camp Discovery on Princess.

We came out of the experience with a desire to try the MSC product again but wouldn’t necessarily spend the extra money to stay in the luxury area. While we did enjoy many premium amenities such as the restricted-access pool deck, flexible dining, and Top Sail Lounge – the butler service, “upscale” food selections and the YC-exclusive beach area weren’t as worthwhile for us.

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Cruise notes: Discovery Princess, May 2024

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Discovery Princess was our second sailing of a very cruise-heavy 2024, our first ever trip on Princess, and just over 10 months since our last cruise with children. With kids in tow, the round-trip to Alaska from Seattle was a much different experience than our sailing on Infinity in 2018, but a positive one, earning Princess a spot in our “definitely would cruise again” category.

Highlights included the RFID Medallion concept and the Princess Plus package, but the OceanNow delivery service was inconsistent in terms of timing and the Princess phone app wasn’t always reliable. The casino location and wafting smoke was also a negative, but apart from a few dinner snags we had very friendly, responsive service from the onboard team. And in a deal-clincher for Princess, the Camp Discovery program was a complete hit for our kids – who came home with a great attitude, a suitcase full of arts and crafts, and a desire to cruise again.

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Cruise notes: Celebrity Ascent, March 2024

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We made an attempt to sail with friends in early 2024, which did not come to fruition due to a childcare scheduling conflict. While they ended up sailing Norwegian Epic in February, Kayla and I opted to stick with our originally planned booking on Celebrity Ascent the month afterward. Along with the previous ship, Beyond, Ascent had some layout improvements over Edge and Apex that I was excited to investigate – such as an extended Sunset Bar, more navigable Martini Bar and infinity pool.

Since we were sailing without kids, there were a few opportunities to treat ourselves to a shore excursion, a Chef’s Table experience, premium drinks, and specialty dining at Eden. I also splurged on a behind-the-scenes ship tour where I was able to indulge my curiosity and catch a glimpse of the “future” bridge.

Like all cruise lines, Celebrity has its quirks and rough spots, but this sailing was a good counterpoint to our less-than-ideal early 2023 experience on Bliss for what an adults trip could be. The service, food, onboard experience, and drinks were solid with only a few exceptions. We were happy with our choice to sail Ascent and would certainly pick it again in future under similar conditions.

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Cruise notes: Carnival Celebration, July 2023

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Beware: I didn’t get this cruise documented in a reasonable amount of time after sailing, so have lost some context, but still want to keep track of all sailings for key reminders and later reference.

A childcare annual shutdown week loomed in early July, and it was clear that we needed some solid plans to avoid early summer boredom, irritation, and sloth. The same week in 2022, Kayla and I were able to sail by ourselves on Norwegian Joy while the kids stayed with their grandparents. In March 2023, though, we’d already gone on Bliss child-free for a week and didn’t want to make the same request of my parents for only a few months later, so thoughts once again turned to a full-family sailing.

With time, we’d also suppressed the challenges of our January 2020 trip with infants in tow on Escape. Things would surely have improved in the intervening 3-and-a-half years! Issues such as mobility, solid food, formula, diapers, and special sleeping arrangements would no longer be in play. And the fully supervised kids’ club, with potty-trained children who were old enough to attend on their own, might give us adults a few occasional hours to relax.

It turns out that cruising with children at this age comes with a new set of things to account for, which made this sailing challenging in several ways. Our kids had a good time on the ship, but not in the Camp Ocean program, and it’s important to catalog this in contrast to many positive reports of the kids club experience.

From my cruise enthusiast perspective, and as someone who had not sailed on Carnival before, I enjoyed seeing what the largest mass-market cruise line had to offer on their newest ship, and was especially impressed with the pool facilities and food options like Big Chicken and Deco Deli. This was also my first sailing without some type of beverage package. I wasn’t a fan of paying by the drink, even if financially Cheers! wouldn’t have made sense for the week.

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Cruise notes: NCL Bliss, February 2023

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Beware: I didn’t get this cruise documented in a reasonable amount of time after sailing, so have lost some context, but still want to keep track of all sailings for key reminders and later reference.

Norwegian Bliss was, at the time we sailed her in 2018, the best sailing I’d been on yet. It certainly outranked our previous five cruises from an amenities and service perspective, and was one of the reasons we started and ended with NCL for future bookings. When we were able to arrange a child-free sailing with some of our best friends, Bliss emerged at the top of the pack, despite not being the newest ship or best value in that timeframe. Thus in February 2023, we embarked Bliss from PortMiami.

Unfortunately after that 7-night sailing, Norwegian cruises haven’t had quite the same shine in my mind. It’s not at all that it was a bad cruise, but there were some truly mediocre experiences and blatantly obvious cost-cutting measures that hadn’t been present on any of our previous sailings.

Perhaps this is the “new normal”, or an aberration on this ship or specific sailing, but the changes and onboard experience made a (fairly) brand-loyal customer think twice about which cruise line to book with next. I was glad, in a way, that I didn’t have any more CruiseNext deposits to use after this sailing. I absolutely value the quality time we got to spend with friends on this trip, but this experience on Bliss left me wanting more.

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Cruise notes: NCL Breakaway, November 2022

Beware: I didn’t get this cruise documented in a reasonable amount of time after sailing, so have lost some context, but still want to keep track of all sailings for key reminders and later reference.

Our first time in New Orleans was a delightful experience full of culinary excellence. Like many of my travels, though, the initial city is mainly a precursor to boarding a ship. After two days in Louisiana, Norwegian Breakaway would be our home for a week’s time. This was the same vessel Kayla and I took our semi-belated honeymoon on in December 2016.

On the voyage we revisited Harvest Caye and Cozumel – where we would repeat one of our first shore excursions, Salsa and Salsa. We also made good use of Vibe, saw and enjoyed SIX, and once again made out pretty well on NCL’s air program. The biggest complaint from this sailing was probably the pervasiveness of smoke from the casino – midship Deck 7, and the venues immediately above and below it, are noticeably affected.

I absolutely would consider sailing from New Orleans again. It was a great way to start a vacation, and really the main detractor is that Breakaway just lacks a few key features from Norwegian Joy and newer ships.

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Cruise notes: NCL Joy, July 2022

Beware: I didn’t get this cruise documented in a reasonable amount of time after sailing, so have lost some context, but still want to keep track of all sailings for key reminders and later reference.

We return to Norwegian Joy for a summer trip to Bermuda from New York City. This time, Kayla and I actually got off the ship and poked around for a while. Our triumphant return to NCL after just shy of two years and four months – and on the same ship – was also our first opportunity to experience Platinum Latitudes status after Norwegian’s adjustment to the program tiers.

It was a very reasonable cruise, but definitely not perfect, and certainly with some downgrades from pre-pandemic voyages. It was evident that supply chain issues and other logistics problems have impacted the availability of food, beverage and how Norwegian is able to staff the ships.

We also paid a premium for the date and destination, but the heat and humidity at this time of year were more intense than what we were looking for. With the exception of our 2018 Alaskan cruise, every other sailing we’ve taken has been in the winter or spring months, and in future I think we’ll keep cruising in the colder seasons or put Alaska back in contention.

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New Windows install, February 2024

I’ve been out of the Microsoft/Windows world for a fair bit of time – my primary work machine is an M1 MacBook Pro, I spend at least part of my day in some type of Linux terminal, and while I do have a personal Lenovo T14 laptop and a desktop running Windows 11, it’s mainly to run “Chrome” or “game” or “Office” and the underlying operating system matters much less.

A few months back, though, I picked up a couple Samsung 970 EVO Plus NVMe M.2 solid-state drives on sale, and took the opportunity for a fresh installation of Windows. My additional hope was that the new installation (on a desktop with a Core i9-9900K, 32GB RAM, GeForce GTX 1080 Ti) would actually seem performant, like I recall used to be possible on reasonable hardware in the Win2K/WinXP/Win7 days. On the desktop, a not-unreasonable number of tabs would often result in a text editor or browser, and so starting clean on a fairly performant SSD, then reviewing the latest hivemind guidance for security and performance seemed like it would be worthwhile.

I did remind myself that crucially, when I was running Win2K Pro, I also didn’t have a pair of 4K-resolution monitors running at 150% scaled resolution; at best I was doing 1280×1024 on a Sony Trinitron (but at a much higher refresh rate!) That era of software also didn’t contain embedded Chromium or Electron components, which chew system resources as a tradeoff for ease of development and cross-platform functionality.

I also expect that most of my tasks for this machine absolutely could be done on Linux – it is probably worthwhile to set up another SSD with a recent desktop distribution and a lightweight window manager – but desktop Office and video games are things I want to actually do with this machine.

What follows are a few notes that got me along the way as well as some personal opinions on why I made certain choices.

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Cruise review: Celebrity Edge, April 2022

This sailing with my wife Kayla and father-in-law Cliff was the end of a saga that began in August 2018 and wrapped up in April 2022 with a successful voyage on Celebrity Edge.

I had been excited to sail an Edge-class ship since seeing one in person in December 2018, but was hoping for an experience that wasn’t as full of upsell attempts as our Alaskan cruise on Infinity. With Edge, Celebrity has replicated things we like about Norwegian Cruise Line, brought forward differences we appreciated from Infinity, but still had a few odd, unexpected, traditional, or negative elements.

Celebrity’s All Included offers, great complimentary food options, ships with unique features and decent technology will be thoughtful considerations when booking a future cruise. While I expect Norwegian will still be our primary choice for sailing, it certainly helps to know what else is out there. Celebrity is a solid backup plan if NCL devalues their overall product too much for us as customers.

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Cruising solo: MSC Meraviglia, February 2022

Join me for my first-ever solo sailing and first time on MSC – probably the most reasonably priced and best overall value cruise I’ve taken so far. It’s certainly a cruise line with notable quirks, but they’re definitely a top contender for a future solo trip or family vacation.

Don’t believe everything on the Internet you might hear about MSC; I definitely wish my 4-day cruise on Meraviglia had been longer, and for the price it couldn’t be beat.

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