Bryan’s RCCL Canada/New England Cruise (Sept 2018)

Thanks to our client Bryan from Colorado for giving us this report on he and his wife’s Royal Caribbean Adventure of the Seas 10 night Canada/New England cruise.

Above is a picture from our cabin in Quebec (City) and some thoughts about the cruise and the cabin in more detail.

• It had been six years since our last RCCL cruise in 2012, with Celebrity and Princess cruises since then. So my memories of the differences and subtleties between lines may have been lost. In general, the service was fine and having a gold suite card to whip out when necessary made it much easier to get pretty much anything. In general, it seemed like the dining room menus had suffered a cut-back on the number/variety of menu items that changed daily. Similarly in the Windjammer, although we had a couple of dinners in the Windjammer we truly enjoyed. Or maybe it was because we’d agreed that we wouldn’t be as bound to the formal dining as before (my daughter always loved and probably still does love dressing up every night and having the same waiters). Since she wasn’t around, we used our suite privilege to move to My Time Dining, a first for us on RCCL.
• My Time Dining worked well but wouldn’t have been nearly as nice without a suite. The first night we just showed up and went into the suite line and got seated right away despite a long line of people. The folks implied it would be better if we had a reservation, so the next day I called and tried to get a reasonable dining time but they were only offering 5:30 or 8:00 something, so I told them never mind, we’d just use our suite perks, to which they had no reply. As a result, service was often a bit discombobulated in that dining floor but generally worked out ok. Generally it went quite a bit faster since they were trying to turn tables, and that was ok with us. After that second day, I never attempted a reservation again.
• We typically went to the suite lounge every evening for our cocktail and a quick bite. The suite lounge was nice and reasonably uncrowded once we started going right after early dining started. The diamond lounge and viking crown lounge was overwhelmed with the other 700 diamonds, and had exactly the same “stuff”. I’d also not been around so many “pinnacle club” members who felt compelled to wear their fancy name tags everywhere. We used our suite privileges at the shows and ice show, but few were crowded enough to really matter. On tender day and debarkation day it was also handy to get to “cut the line” a bit.
• The cabin itself was very spacious and only beaten by the upgrade to a one-bedroom suite we got on Celebrity. It was cool and windy enough there were only a few times we’d have actually used the balcony, and on the cloudy and one day when it dumped buckets, it was fun to just watch it rain from our chairs inside the cabin. I’d highly recommend the cabin to any group with four or fewer folks. With one and a half baths, it was really handy even with just two of us. There were three nice chairs and a couch. And it would be ideal for a scenery-oriented but cooler-weather itinerary like this one or Alaska or the Baltics. The suite privileges were an unexpected perk, as the cruise critic thread pretty much said to expect junior suite-level privileges (i.e., not much). It was probably overkill for the two of us but my claustrophobic spouse likely would not agree.
• I did do the water slides one day but skipped the flow rider. I skated two days that they had open skating. I estimate we were in about the tenth percentile for age of passengers. Anybody young around the age of your kids or ours were either dancers or ice performers. In the suite lounge, everyone we talked to was retired and some had kids older than us!

Itinerary

• Bar Harbor we tried out electric bikes for the first time. We did about 30 miles of traveling with some pedaling and some “boost”. It was a great day for scenery and weather.
• Portland Maine we walked around and went to a Mansion and the Observatory.
• Halifax we walked around to the citadel, the maritime museum, and the immigration museum (adjacent to the cruise port). We’d done Peggy’s Cove on the previous trip.
• Saint John we rented a car (just down the street) and drove around. It turns out this day was the pouring down rain day and we drove through the nature preserve and “reversing falls” but mostly peered out the windshield.
• Sydney was another great day. Rented a car and drove to Baddeck and the AG Bell museum and around. Beautiful clear day with great scenery.
• Charlottetown. We spent the day walking the park and town. Also quite lovely small town.
• Quebec (City). I’ve spent a fair amount of time in Montreal and liked the European/French nature, but QC has it beat. Great day walking around–took a walking tour which was quite nice and informative. We picked up a rental car that evening and parked it at the cruise terminal to drive to Montreal to get home (much cheaper flights).
• Overall, nice weather and relaxing towns. Advertised as a “fall foliage” cruise that would be false advertising in mid-September. Maybe by now it would be more foliage-like. Also, nobody is going to confuse this itinerary with something like the Western Med or Baltics with huge capital cities and major historic sites. And that was ok for us as we knew what we were getting into.
• The first cruise with zero cruise-line based excursions and it worked out fine.