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).
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.