Tag: cruise

Was this cruise really that bad? Yes and no.

On By Jim BellomoIn Uncategorized7 Comments

I have been posting this review as a day-to-day live blog on the Cruise Critic website and here. They don’t get the photos. I have been taking a lot of heat over there. I have been called entitled, whiny and SPOILED (their emphasis). Sorry, I don’t think that reporting what has happened to us (all eight of us in our group) and others that we spoke to is being whiny. We have been cruising long enough that I think we can give an accurate view of what happened to us on Koningsdam and call HAL out for it. And I write these to make people aware of what is going on.

Kathleen got really upset at one of the posts because they keep saying that they have done this or that and we must be wrong. She rightly pointed out that these are our viewpoints of what happened to us. Others may not have felt the same way. That is their experience. Certainly, some of those people who had a different cruise than we did have commented on that thread, and I would never call them names or impugn their character. I guess it takes all kinds. And sometimes I can’t believe the loyalty some people have to cruise lines that obviously need to improve. We are Elite Plus cruisers on Celebrity, and we are finished with them as well (except for Flora in the Galapagos). But I still hold out hope that they will come around and get back to their roots someday. It could happen.

But all that said, I did want to come back after a day or so to think about it and give you a final report with some good things and some bad things. I also realize that so many people who disagree with me have not read the entire thing. They have commented on my main dining room problem, and that is it.

The Good Stuff

There were good things we really liked about our cruise on Koningsdam. Here they are:

  1. The food and service in the specialty restaurants were both OUTSTANDING! We loved the dinners we had in all of them even though we were forced to eat in two of them because we couldn’t get into the main dining room and didn’t feel like eating in the buffet. On the drive home with my daughter-in-law and her husband, we rated the order of how good they were. My DIL surprised me when she rated them in this order: Rudi’s, Canaletto, Tamarind and Pinnacle Grille. I was surprised because she is a real Asian food fan, but she thought the Italian food was better. At all of them, the service was great as well. I just think Tamarind is the perfect specialty restaurant…great food, great service and the prettiest setting on a ship.
  2. The muster drill. Kudos to HAL for not returning to the old way of doing the muster drill. Being able to watch the video on your stateroom TV and then going to check in at your muster station in your own time frame was great! Keep that one. The best thing in cruising that came out of the pandemic was this improvement.
  3. Our stateroom was kept clean and shiny by our two very overworked stateroom attendants, Faisol and Mafa. They always had our room completely made up while we were at breakfast. Their speed and high standard were impressive.
  4. Just about every single crew member we encountered was doing an awesome job. Special kudos to the Activity Director (I wish I could remember her name), who is from South Africa. She ran some of the best trivia contests we have ever had on a ship. The rest of the crew is so overworked it is sad. And felt so bad for the new people who were on their first contract and just thrown to the wolves (so to speak) without adequate training.
  5. The entertainment was super. The band in BB Kings rocked. The comedian truly made us laugh. I should point out that he made a number of jokes about how bad embarkation was and got a lot of applause for doing it.
  6. Bettianne is an excellent cruise director. We sailed with her on Nieuw Statendam in January 2022, and it was great to touch base with her again.
  7. The HAL Mariner App isn’t bad. With eight people in our group, I wish they had a group chat. It would have been great to be able to send everyone when we were meeting for dinner without having to copy-paste to everyone. I did love that you could see the entire day’s activities and then click to add them to your schedule. Then I would get an alert on my Apple Watch about five minutes before whatever I wanted to do.
  8. Unlike our last cruise on Viking, the beds were great! With my wife’s hip being replaced and both my shoulders surgically repaired a good mattress was essential.
  9. Our stateroom was very nice, if a little small for us. If you are six foot two, the placement of the toilet leaves much to be desired, but the shower is one of the best in a standard stateroom that we have encountered—great water pressure and lots of hot water as well.
  10. Disembarkation was wonderful. They let us off right on time; we were through Canada Place in no time and home and starting laundry in just about three hours flat. Please compare that to the three hours and thirty minutes we stood in line in Canada Place to board the ship.

That about covers it. Of course, for us personally, the fact that we were traveling with our best cruising buddy Bob and his family, as well as taking our kids (both over 40) on their first cruise, really was the best part for us. I think that may have been a big part of our frustration—the fact that we had built up cruising so much with Michelle and her Brian, and then to have them tell us that even though they liked being with us, they didn’t think cruising was for them. And for Bob and Judy, it was their first cruise since the pandemic, and we wanted that one to be great as well. As the travel agent who booked them all (as well as having clients on Koningsdam later this summer), it was a disappointment.

The Bad Stuff

I think you know what these are, but I just want to walk through them quickly for those who have criticized me for only complaining about the Main Dining Room and, sadly, add one more.

  1. Embarkation. It was the worst in 35 cruises, and we cruised right after 9/11. Even in Singapore, when we had to wait three hours due to the crew doing a thorough norovirus cleaning, we were kept abridged of everything that was going on, and Azamara did the best job of getting us on board quickly.
  2. The things we missed out on due to the late embarkation including not being able to make Main Dining Room reservations before 8:15 pm, having lunch (the first time we have ever not had lunch on embarkation day) and getting to take the kids on a tour of the ship. By the time we got on, we only had time to unpack, check in to our muster station and get dressed before making our 5:15 Tamarind reservation.
  3. The long lines everywhere on board. You name it, and there was a line for it. Especially bad were the ones getting into the main dining room, but also horrible were the Dive-In, Guest Services, the Dutch Cafe and many stations in the buffet. They never went away.
  4. The fact that the ship was obviously understaffed. When you see the Dive-In that has always had six people prepping and serving food reduced to three, the gelato bar with one poor guy (on his first contract) or our stateroom attendants who had more than 35 staterooms to deal with, when we started cruising, you never had a stateroom attendant with more than 20.
  5. Staff was not allocated correctly. HAL could have fixed many of the problems with food staffing by assigning long-time crew members to work with new staff. We ran into many crew in the buffet that were on their first contract. Many had joined the ship in Australia or Hawaii within the last few weeks. On the other hand, long-time crew members who were on their sixth, seventh or more contracts and were working alongside other long-time crew in the specialty restaurants. I totally get seniority but put some of the more experienced people in with the novices to mentor them in their new jobs. One of the saddest things we saw was a person manning the buffet waffle station on disembarkation morning who could not understand why the waffles weren’t coming out of the waffle maker. He didn’t know he had to grease the waffle maker before he put the batter in. No one had told him. He had never been taught.
  6. The fraudulent scam that HAL pulled in Prince Rupert by buying out the only tram rides in the town and jacking up the price much higher than it would have been had you have been able to pay cash for a tour. It sounds like the entire Carnival Corp is doing this.
  7. And here’s the new one. Bob pointed out to me that when he met his stateroom attendant, they offered to make up his room whenever he wanted. Once a day, twice a day or not at all. For the five-day cruise—they could do whatever he wanted. This reminded me that ours had said the same thing. And we learned from Brian and Michelle that theirs had said the same thing. We opted for once a day. With all the new cruisers, it is highly possible that many, like Brian and Michelle, said not to bother at all. This seems to be a new thing—offering not to service a stateroom at all. Bob thought (and I agree), what about the $18 per person, per day gratuity we must pay? Now I realize that those gratuities go to a lot of people. For those of you who didn’t cruise in the old day, you used to tip your stateroom guy $6 a day, their assistant $4 a day, your waiter $8 a day, and their assistant $3. And the assistant maître d $2. So, if you don’t get your room cleaned and you don’t get into the dining room, where do your gratuities go? HAL’s pocket?

Things I wish I had known and what I would have done differently

I did come up with some concrete suggestions that I wish we had done ourselves.

  1. If HAL assigns you a time to board, ignore it. Everyone else does. Go as early as you can and get in line. They may make you wait before you can actually board, but getting through the Customs and scanners will get you to where you sit in chairs and for my bride, that would have been a godsend.
  2. Book fixed seating. Do not do Select Dining unless that’s all you can get especially if you need to eat early.
  3. If you can’t get fixed seating, as soon as you get on board, make a beeline to deck three next to the Ocean Bar, where they make dinner reservations. Reserve for the entire cruise. I think this is wrong but if HAL allows people to do it, play that game.
  4. If you want a hot dog, see if you can order it on the HAL app or go late (like 3:45).
  5. A great and empty bar is the one that is part of Tamarind on deck 10 aft.
  6. Book private excursions in every port. Try Tours By Locals or ask your local travel agent.
  7. Use the HAL Mariner app. It really isn’t bad once you figure it out. It helps if you have an iPhone and an Apple Watch to get notifications. Make sure to turn on notifications for the app on your iPhone.

So, was it a bad cruise? Yes. Did we have a terrible time? No. But that was not because of Holland America. Some of my long-time cruising friends think I should ask for a full refund. I understand where HAL and the entire Carnival Corp are at this point. Their stock is down (although coming back), and they are deeply in debt from staying alive during the pandemic. But is not the old HAL I sailed on before. After our Nieuw Statendam cruise, I came into this Koningsdam cruise with the thought that when we wanted to sail on mainstream ships, HAL was the way to go. I no longer feel that way. That makes me sad.

In deep sadness, there is no place for sentimentality.
—William S. Burroughs

Koningsdam Day 4-Prince Rupert

On By Jim BellomoIn Photography12 Comments

Every time I think that things will get better, they get worse. So many bad things have happened that I can’t remember if I have already written about them or if I still have to. I have to say I have not talked to a single person on this cruise that is happy about it. Not one.

And I feel so bad for the crew. They are working as hard as they can, but they are HUGELY understaffed and HUGELY overworked. Having talked to some crew members, they work 11, 12 and sometimes more hour shifts. Everything to do with food is being manned by fewer people than they would normally have. Here’s how the end of yesterday and today went.

I posted early this morning, but I think I forgot to mention that we had a comedian who performed last night in the BB King venue, and he was pretty funny. The place was packed, and there were lots of people standing around the edges. He did two shows, we were at the first one, and the laughs were quick and numerous. See, there’s something positive.

We did dinner at the buffet, where only one side was open. That meant there were no seats on that side of the room, so we sat on the other and walked back and forth. I ate what I call my “not willing to stand in line” menu. I would get anything that I didn’t have to stand in line behind ten people to get. Not much selection in that lineup. 

I have not mentioned how HAL is handling the buffet. In about 85% of the buffet, you cannot serve yourself. There is a plastic shield preventing you from doing that. In 15%, there are tongs and a space to reach through for a roll or a small sandwich. The only problem is that if you get a roll and want butter, you must get in line to ask for the butter. Or (like I did last night) I grabbed a sandwich and then took the same tongs to reach a little further back for potato chips and was quickly scolded by the person behind the counter that I was not allowed to reach that far and if I wanted chips with my sandwich, I would need to get behind the 11 people in the line. I was welcome to as many sandwiches as I could eat, but not the chips. Go figure.

Breakfast in the Main Dining Room

This morning, against my better judgment, Bob talked us into going down to try to get into the dining room for breakfast. We had not eaten any meal in there as of yet and really wanted to see what it looked like. So we went down expecting a long wait. Lo and behold, we were second in line and ushered to our table at 8:10. Keep track of that number; it’s important 😜.

At 8:40, we were still waiting for water and coffee and had not had a waiter stop at our table for anything. Judy was coughing and really needed water, and Bob pointed out that there were water pitchers on a table behind me. So I grabbed one and poured us all some water. Before I could set the pitcher back down, a waiter grabbed it from me. He finished pouring and went and brought us back to carafes of coffee, one with decaf for Bob and the other for the rest of us. Sadly, they were lukewarm and became cold pretty quickly. 

The server came back about five minutes later to take our orders. He told us that it might take a while since they had just had a big group of people come in, and there were a lot of orders coming in. By this time, it was close to 8:55. I really wanted to point out that if he had taken our orders when we came in, we would have had our food by then, but I didn’t. I want to point out that this situation was NOT HIS FAULT! He was covering a lot of other tables, and the food was NOT coming out very quickly. We knew we would be waiting a while for the food to come back because the tables near us had been seated before we were, and they didn’t have food yet, either. 

The food finally showed up at about 9:20. This is where it really gets good. Kathleen had ordered buckwheat pancakes, and they were OK but not hot. Just lukewarm. Judy had ordered banana pancakes, and as you can see from the photo above, they came with exactly THREE slices of banana on them. I asked her if there were any mixed into the batter, and she said, “No, these are just buttermilk pancakes with three slices of banana on top.” 

Bob and I had both ordered the same thing—the ham and cheese scramble with hash browns, and I also ordered an English muffin. Now wouldn’t you think that a “scramble” would have the eggs scrambled into them? You know, scrambled eggs? No, when Bob moved aside the tortilla chips that were, for some reason covering his “scramble,” there were two (kind of) soft-boiled eggs on top. When I moved mine back…there were two hard-boiled eggs on top. That is NOT a scramble. It just isn’t. The ham, cheese, green bell peppers, onions and potatoes looked great, but the entire dish was dry without the scrambled (or poached, soft-boiled or any other kind of egg other than hard-boiled) eggs.

Not being willing to eat hard-boiled eggs, I called another waiter over and asked them to take them back and get me some scrambled eggs in my scramble. He did, and miraculously within about 5-7 minutes. But one small problem. The veggies and ham that were on the bottom were not cooked. Basically raw. The scrambled eggs were on top, and they were almost raw, very runny. And the cheese? Nowhere to be seen. It has probably run off with the hash browns and English muffins because they weren’t there either. So I pushed the veggies and ham aside and ate the wet eggs. Just as I was finishing them, out came two servings of hash browns. One was cooked almost well-done, and the other was close to raw. 

We just gave up at this point as the coffee was cold, and it was obvious that my English muffin had gone to HAL food heaven with Bob’s Dive-In hot dog. I hope they are doing OK together. We left the dining room at 9:50 according to Kathleen’s recollection. 

HAL rips off everyone on the ship…or at least attempts to

So after this wonderful breakfast, we decide to go and check out scenic Prince Rupert. Regular readers of this blog know that I walk a lot. My daily walk is always between four to eight miles. Kathleen, on the other hand, is not a big walker. She has a few things that make it difficult for her to walk long distances, and she can’t keep up with me. When we do go out together in a port, I try to walk slower so we can stay together, but she knows it is driving me crazy…but we make do. This also means that we like to tour by tram or bus. 

So today, we get off the ship, and there is a tram that takes you around Prince Rupert. Super! When we go to buy tickets, we are asked for our sea pass card. Now this is NOT a HAL excursion. Anyone can walk up and take it. But once they knew I was off the ship, they wanted my sea pass and would not take cash. So I gave the woman the card, and she wrote us a receipt. She had told me the trip around town took 90 minutes, and the cost for us would be $59.95. She handed me the receipt to sign, and I was SHOCKED to see it was $59.95 EACH! For a 90-minute tour around a very small town. We decided to skip that. 

Then we started talking to a couple of local people who worked for the tram service, who were only too glad to fill us in on what was going on. It seems that HAL (and all the other Carnival Corp lines who stopped here) were buying out all of the trams for the days they have ships in port. Then they set the price for that day for everyone. Even if you happen to drive to Prince Rupert and want to take the tram, you pay the price set by the cruise line that is in town that day. He said the day before when Princess had been there, the price had been $69.95 per person. I don’t know about you, but this is just WRONG as far as I am concerned! They buy out the entire set of 15 trams (the only ones in town) to be able to charge their own customers more. Shame on them! 

And later on, when I went out walking on my own, I passed one of these trams and saw them stopped in front of a house with the driver pointing at the house. That’s cool. Then as I went past him, he moved up one more house and started talking about that one and the people who had lived there. I walked another 300 yards to the corner where I was going to turn and looked back, and he had pulled up two more houses and was doing the same thing all over again. You see, I think Prince Rupert must not have that many things to show people who are from out of town, so they probably tell the guides/drivers to take as long as you can describing things to stretch this out as long they can. I am fully willing to hear from anyone who took this tour that it was a good value. 

I also want to point out that when we got off the ship, there was not a single vendor selling any kind of tour. No boats, no helicopters, no airplanes, no taxis. Nothing near the port. The collusion between the city and the cruise lines is really evident here in Prince Rupert.

Lunch on board Koningsdam in Prince Rupert—how sweet it ISN’T!

After we had tried to go out (we did walk around for a short time), we came back to the ship; I changed into my walking shorts and a tee shirt and went out to do my four miles. Had a very nice walk as the weather was uncharacteristically (we were told by a local) beautiful and sunny. And then, when I came back, I had to again…stand in a 20-minute line to get back on the ship. We took our grandkids to Walt Disney World in February, and we were told by Disney that it was the most crowded four days in the park’s history. We have stood in more lines to get places on this ship than we did there. And at least at WDW, they give you something interesting to look at while you wait in line. 

Once I was back, we went up and got a sandwich/slice of pizza on deck 10 (above the buffet, next to the indoor/outdoor pool). Got it pretty quick (which was awesome), but then we both felt like something sweet afterward (I had missed my English muffin at breakfast, remember?), so I went down to check out the desserts in the buffet. Above is the list of the desserts they had on offer today. Below is a picture of the actual desserts that were available directly below the sign. This was the only place to get sweets (except for a small ice cream station serving two flavors of ice cream with a line of at least 15 people waiting at all times) on the entire buffet. This is the second day in a row that this has happened. Nothing there for sometime before the meal is set to be over. At the point I took this photo, they still had more than an hour before the time the buffet was scheduled to close. I did walk by a little later and they were putting out a few apricot tarts but as soon as they were out, a swarm of people grabbed them all. Ah, the hoarding of desserts.

They did get me to spend money on gelato again. HAL has been doing really well getting me to spend money on extra stuff. Besides the gelato, I have purchased meals in specialty restaurants (which have been really great so far) on four of the five nights of this cruise. We are eating in Canaletto (the family-style Italian place) tonight and Rudi’s (Fish house) tomorrow night, the last night of the cruise. 

For your viewing enjoyment here’s my selection of my favorite Prince Rupert photos from early morning and my walk around town. Don’t forget, if you click the first shot, you can then scroll through with your arrow keys or by swiping…and PLEASE…don’t look at my photography on a phone. Please…

Early morning as we were sailing into Prince Rupert.
The sky was kind of layered.
This boat looked like it was going to sink, bow first.
But it didn’t sink and it was overshadowed by a huge freighter waiting to take a load on.
As I walked off the ship on my walk, there was a crab boat unloading right next to the gangway and these women were sorting them.
This guy would hook up the crab pots to a winch and they would be hoisted to the dock.
This guy guided them on to the dock to start the sorting.
When I came back, this guy had his crab waving to us.
As I walked up a fairly busy street, this deer ambled by and just started grazing next to the parking area.
These two Mounties were in full dress greeting people as they came off the ship. Later I saw them taking photos with people at Service Park.
Found the very cool, old and falling apart church at the top of the hill.
It makes an interesting subject but it desperately needs a coat of paint.
My Prince Rupert Panorama.

It’s after dinner as I am finishing up this post; we are back in our stateroom. I have succumbed to the lure of a reduced-cost WiFi package and picked up the last three days of the cruise for around $25 US. Worth it to be able to check some things going on with Kathleen’s estate stuff and a medical appointment I have coming up, plus I get to post the rest of the way.

We had a very nice dinner at Canaletto, and we all ate way too much. When we had been on Nieuw Statendam with my brother and his bride, we had thought the food was kind of weak in Canaletto, but it is much improved here on Koningsdam. So far, we have eaten in three of the four specialty restaurants and we have had great food, efficient and friendly service and wonderful experiences. I just said to Kathleen, “this is where HAL is putting their experienced waiters and cooks—the specialty restaurants. Where they make money.” Again, that’s pretty sad, but I believe it’s true.

I’m scammed almost every day. Or, if not scammed, at the very least someone tries to scam me. Usually more than once a day.                     —James Altucher

Koningsdam Day 3–Ketchikan

On By Jim BellomoIn Food Experiences, Photography4 Comments

Yesterday when I signed off, I mentioned that I was sitting and waiting to try and get a reservation for the main dining room for dinner. At 11:30, the crew member showed up and started taking reservations. I was thrilled that I was second in line until she told the couple that was first in line that there were no reservations available for Select Dining before 8:30 pm for the balance of the cruise. It seems that on the first day of the cruise (while we were getting on), they allowed folks to reserve dining times for the entire week. So today, there was nothing available to reserve until late. And tonight there are two shows members of our group want to see. If we did dinner at 8:30, we could see neither of them. The same is true for tomorrow night. We didn’t even ask about the last night of the cruise as we have booked Rudi Sel de Mer specialty restaurant.

The lady making reservations said we could wait in line starting at 5:30, and they would take walk-ins as they came up. The couple in front of me said they had gotten in line the night before at 5:00 and finally reached the podium at 6:00, where the head waiter handed them a buzzer and said they could wait in the bar until it buzzed. They waited until 7:30 and then went to the buffet. It never buzzed. We aren’t getting into that mess. So it seems we are destined never to eat in the main dining room. We will do dinner in the buffet tonight, and then I am buying everyone dinner at the Italian specialty restaurant Cannoletto tomorrow night. Since I am the travel agent for everyone, I feel like I have misled them.

After that fiasco, I wanted to speak to someone in Guest Relations about it, but when I went up, there was a line of 20 people ahead of me, and I gave up. I am done. I thought we will just go with the flow. But at lunch, it got worse.

Mind you; this was a port day. Experienced cruisers know that if you stay on the ship on a port day, it is usually pretty empty. Not yesterday. The ship was packed. After we had tried to get the reservation, we figured we should go get lunch…in the buffet. Three of us wanted to go to the Dive-In, HAL’s hot dog and hamburger restaurant. What a mistake. When we got there, there wasn’t a big line, maybe 10 people. Kathleen grabbed a table while I ordered. They gave me a flasher and said it would go off when my food was ready. There were four people working in the Dive-In. On previous voyages, there have been seven or eight.

Our buddy Bob had gone off to help Judy find what she wanted in the buffet before he came and ordered his hot dog and fries right about 10 minutes after I had. About 20 minutes after I had ordered, I went over to see why it was taking so long. They were deep in the weeds and weren’t putting out a whole lot of anything. Finally, at about the 25-minute mark, my buzzer dinged. I couldn’t see anything that looked like my order, but when the frazzled lady shoved a tray my way, I had to tell her what was missing, which she supplied a few minutes later. At this point, we were 30 minutes from my order and 20 minutes from when Bob ordered his. Bob waited ten more minutes and then wandered over to see what was happening. In the meantime, I finished mine, got some gelato for dessert (that’s another story—keep reading) and told Kathleen and Judy I was going off to walk in Ketchikan. I passed Bob on the way out, still waiting for his hot dog. At this point, it had been about 40 minutes since he placed his order. When I returned from my walk, Kathleen told me Bob had waited another 30 minutes (a total of more than an hour), and he, like many others, just walked away. This is just wrong.

And I promised the “other story” about dessert. When I went back into the buffet, Judy came with me. We were just looking for something sweet to finish our meal. There are two entire dessert areas. On top of them was a list of today’s desserts. There were seven different items listed, including a chocolate cupcake, two types of fruit tart, a chocolate pudding-like mousse, a lemon bar and some other fruit cups. All were listed as desserts today. How many were under that sign? Just one. No, not one type of dessert, just one lonely chocolate cupcake. Not a single other dessert. When I asked, I was told they had run out.

When I am writing this, we have just finished eating dinner in the buffet. The food was mediocre at best. The funniest thing we saw was a huge, paella-sized pan filled with something—I wasn’t sure what. I asked the young lady who was serving it what it was. She said, “The people who baked it said it is apple pie. I think it’s apple soup with a crust. I had nothing to do with making it.” Cracked us up. At least she knew that what she was supposed to be serving was crap. So funny, but funny in a sad way.

Speaking of funny, yesterday morning at the buffet, Judy came back to the table with a pastry. She said she had seen another one she liked the looks of but wasn’t sure what the little things on top of it were. So she asked the person serving, and they said it was “beans.” Yup, beans. Now, I realize that you can make a great sweet topping for rolls out of some black Asian beans, but that isn’t what this was. I was intrigued, so I went over and got one. Those weren’t beans. They were tiny chopped pecans. The pastry was delicious. Now this is funny…but it is also dangerous. I asked her myself what those were, and the server told me, “Those are beans.” What if I had been allergic to nuts? Can you imagine someone at the buffet going into anaphylactic shock? That’s not sad; it’s scary. We did make a point to tell one of the managers, and he assured us there would be some education going on soon. He said he was sorry, but they had a lot of new people that were still in training.

I want to get this posted, and I promise to do my best to find something good about this cruise sometime before I get off on Saturday. In the meantime, here are some shots I took early in the morning from the ship and while off the ship in Ketchikan. Don’t forget, if you click the first shot, you can then scroll through with your arrow keys or by swiping…and PLEASE…don’t look at my photography on a phone. Please…

Early morning sailing.
More of the same.
Not sailing on this boat.
The scenery is beautiful and the weather better than we expected.
There were a lot less float planes than the last time we were here.
Coming into town.
The snow that’s still on the mountains is gorgeous.
Looking up the sound.
Saw a ‘merican drive by.. Loudest noise I heard all day.
The sun came out to prove it is possible to get a tan in Ketchikan.
Downtown with the gorgeous snow in the background.
Of course Ketchikan is the home to many totem poles.
Climbed to the top of what is called Married Man’s Trail. Now to get down.
This photo is the epitome of Ketchikan. The town is falling apart.
Back at the pier is the only place that looks good.
Kathleen on our verandah.
A quick panorama of the harbor with Konigsdam.

As I am posting this, we have just arrived in Prince Rupert—more tomorrow.

To the lover of wilderness, Alaska is one of the most wonderful countries in the world.        — John Muir

 

 

 

 

Konigsdam, May 2023-Embarkation

On By Jim BellomoIn Photography12 Comments

Well, we are on our way. As I write this, I know I won’t be able to get it online until tomorrow in Ketchikan, and I am not even sure I will be able to do that. YEAH! I WAS! We are sitting in Ketchikan right now.

Embarkation

So, let’s get this out there right now. After 35 cruises, this was the WORST embarkation we have ever experienced. To be honest, I am not sure who to blame here, but they better fix it soon. It could be Holland America’s fault, or it could be the management at Canada Place. Either way, it was horrid. 

I went out around 10:00 am (or should I say down) from our room on the 14th floor of the Pan Pacific to find out the best way to drop luggage and get into the lines to get on the ship. I had really good luck because I got some inside knowledge about dropping luggage from a very nice Canada Place employee. So Brian and I went down to Parking Level 2 and dropped our bags. If we hadn’t done that we would have gotten into the check-in line, had to wait in that line to go down an elevator, drop off our bags and then get in another line to go upstairs and check in. At that point, we thought we were getting ahead of the system. 

Check-out time at the hotel was noon, and our “listed boarding time” was 1:00 pm. We decided to go down to the hotel lobby at noon, and Brian and I would go down and scout out the best way to get in line and see if they were holding people to their assigned times. We discovered that we could go ahead and get in line right then. It looked like we would just go up an escalator and be off to check-in. We couldn’t tell what was beyond the escalator, but we could see others coming down and heading off to what we thought was a line to get on the ship. We couldn’t go up the escalator and come back down without going through the process, so we went back to get Kathleen and Michelle. 

Then we walked all the way down, got on the escalator and went up. By then, it was about 12:15. When we got to the top of the escalator; we were taken out into a hallway where we had to get in a line that ended way back in the lobby of the hotel…where we had just come from. We literally could have taken an escalator to the ground floor and gotten in line. At one point, this line went all the way out to the street. That’s the length of one and a half cruise ships.

I didn’t want Kathleen standing through that long line, so I suggested to her and the others that they step outside and sit on a bench and that I would stay in line and text them when I was close to the door it looked like we would go through. It was VERY warm in this confined hallway waiting in line, and it moved sloooowwwllllyyy—inches at a time. Part of the problem was that there were three ships embarking that day, and people kept getting in the wrong line, so the line kept growing. 

After about 40 minutes, we finally reached a door where we thought (hoped) we would get checked in and get onboard. But just like waiting for rides at DisneyWorld, there was an entire other room with winding back-and-forth queues. We spent another 35 minutes or so getting through this room and then had our picture taken by HAL (even though we had submitted one in their app), and they confirmed that it matched our passports. Once we were done doing that, we were sent down the other side of the escalator. We had come in on to what we hoped would be the ship…but that was not to be. 

We were funneled into a room with airport-like scanners to have our carry-on luggage scanned and to walk through metal detectors. To get to the detectors, we waited in another line (with people from all three ships) for at least 40 minutes, hoping against hope that when we got through that line, we could get onboard. 

But it was not to be. Once through the scanners, we found another large room with around 15 lines going up and down to get us to Canadian/US Customs. It took us about 40 minutes to get to the front of that line where there were machines you shoved your passport into, and then it created a little receipt-like sheet of paper that you handed to the Customs person as you exited that room. 

When we finished that, we were told we could board the ship. But we still had a way to walk. So far, we had traversed the length of Canada Place (a building long enough to have two big cruise ships docked next to it) at least twice on two different floors. We walked about the ship’s length back to where we could board Konigsdam, and someone asked us for our boarding passes (after all this—where else could we have come from), and we had to bring them up on our phones again. (Next time, I am printing them out and pinning them to my shirt.) It felt like I was asked for them and my passport about 25 times. Notice, I said it felt like. Probably only 24.

Once we got past that guy and got on the gangway, we were up and almost on the ship, but again…we were asked for our boarding pass…come on, people…talk to each other. 

Total embarkation time—THREE HOURS and 15 MINUTES! We got in line at 12:15 and got on the ship at 3:30. I should also mention that Konigsdam was supposed to sail at 3:00. Glad they didn’t. We didn’t end up sailing until after 5:00. The captain announced it was because we were parked in by the Princess ship behind us, but I am sure the truth was that about half the 2,900 passengers on this ship were still being processed. 

We will admit that we were spoiled. On our last cruise with Viking, we embarked in Athens, Greece. We were picked up by the Viking bus and taken to the port. We got off and walked through a single metal detector, had our bags scanned and walked onboard. Less than 15 minutes from the bus door to being sitting down to a glass of rosé in the restaurant. 

I am hoping that all this is because this was only the fourth day of ships leaving from Canada Place in 2023 and that things will get improve…soon. They better improve or people will stop sailing from Vancouver. 

Here are a few things that would have made this better that you might want to know if you are sailing from Vancouver. First, I made the mistake of checking my rolling bag. I should have taken it on board with me. Not that our bags got lost. We were in line for so long that when we finally got on board, not only was our stateroom ready, our bags were on our bed. But because I had thought that it wouldn’t take too long to get through check-in, I checked my carry-on-sized, wheeled luggage. And that meant that I had to carry my computer/camera bag on my shoulder for more than three hours. Just an FYI: fully loaded it weighs about 15 pounds. Today my shoulder is really wishing I had kept the rolling bag so I could have just pulled the camera bag on it like I usually do.

Another tip for getting through the lines quicker is to bring a cane or be with someone with a cane or crutches. Our buddy Bob had brought one with him (that he borrowed)probably just to hit me with it, and when an attendant saw him, she whisked him and Judy off to the front of the line. It really didn’t help that much since he only got on about 30 minutes before we did. Another trick is to be fairly high in Holland America’s loyalty group, the Mariners. We are two-star, but you don’t start getting priority bookings until you are four or five-star. Lastly, if you book a Neptune suite, you get right in a different line, and you get to board first so no one is ahead of you.

Let’s close this sad story with one piece of advice for everyone. If they say you can board at 1:00 pm, get in line at 10:00 am. You might get on by 1:00. Pay no attention to the boarding time they give you. No one else does.

On board the Konigsdam

We kind of know this ship. Long-time readers of this blog know that we sailed on her sister ship, Nieuw Statendam (NS), back in January of 2022 down in the Caribbean. Konigsdam was the first ship in the Pinnacle Class of Holland America ships, and NS was the second. They are virtually alike, with NS having some tiny improvements. 

The biggest differences between us were two things. First, on NS, we had a Neptune Suite. If you forget what that was like, you can see a video of it by clicking here. It is the largest stateroom we have ever been in at sea. On this ship, we have the basic verandah stateroom. The Neptune Suite is HUGE. Massive king-size bed, huge verandah, full desk, full-size couch and the bathroom…oh, the bathroom. This is the best comparison that I am sure of; our entire bathroom on this cruise would fit into the shower of the Neptune Suite. Seriously. Queen-size bed, miniature couch, tiny desk, barely any room to get around the bed. (Photos of our stateroom are below.) Don’t forget; if you click the first shot, you can then scroll through with your arrow keys or by swiping…and PLEASE…don’t look at my photography on a phone. Please…

Here’s a big pano looking from the entry way.
Two bathroom shots
There is no way a grown man can sit on the toilet facing forward. Not one who is taller than six feet.
The verandah looking forward.
And looking aft.
Looking back from the verandah

We are truly spoiled. In our last three out of four cruises, we had either a suite (on NS) or two of the most amazing staterooms in the world—Celebrity’s Flora and Viking Ocean’s Penthouse Verandah. Both are almost twice the size of the stateroom I am writing this post in. 

The other reason our NS cruise was so much better…the number of people on board. This morning we spoke to the cruise director here on Konigsdam, the delightful Bettianne. She just happens to have been our cruise director on NS as well. We told her facetiously that we thought the ship was a touch more crowded now than when we had sailed with her last in 2021. She reminded us that she had warned everyone on NS that it would probably never be that way again. You see when we sailed on NS, it was when restrictions were starting to loosen up from the pandemic. Masks and vaccinations were still required. This ship holds 2,700 people when fully sold out. That’s just about what we are sailing with now—2,700 people. But back in January 2022, no one except the really brave was out there sailing, so when we did that cruise, there were only 900 people on board. It was like having your own private ship. Combine that with having a Neptune suite, and this is a totally different experience.

Food

Pre-cruise, I (as the travel agent) had booked all eight of us reservations at two (of the four) specialty restaurants on board. It’s really hard to get a reservation for eight. In fact, much to my disdain, they were only able to put us at two tables for four next to each other in the first place we went to last night. Ticked me off because there were many tables for two. They could have slid together so we could all be at the same table. It also meant the only nights they could accommodate us were the first night and the last night. 

So last night we went to Tamarind, Konigsdam’s Asian restaurant. We had eaten there twice on NS with our buddy Seth, who worked for HAL then. Both times on NS, everything about it was superb. And I am thrilled to say the same is true on Konigsdam. Outstanding food, outstanding service, great cocktails and one thing was even better…our server told us we could have as many appetizers as we liked. We all ordered two! Plus, I got each table an order of lobster rolls from the sushi restaurant that is part of Tamarind (sushi is NOT part of the one price for Tamarind; you pay for that separately—but it is a great price. Eight rolls for $7.95) and they are soooo good.

That was it for me. A couple of the group went to BB King’s Blues Club, but we were wiped out from the waiting in line (and for me, the six-mile photo walk at 5:00 that I posted pictures from yesterday). We went back to the stateroom, and we were out like lights. 

More tomorrow. Here are a couple of pics I took of the Canadian Inside Passage. Don’t forget; if you click the first shot, you can then scroll through with your arrow keys or by swiping…and PLEASE…don’t look at my photography on a phone. Please…

Shots from…
the Canadian…
Inside Passage.
And of course, a pilot boat. I do love pilot boats.

That’s about it at this point. All I can say to close this out is that the ship is CROWDED. There are signs at Guest Relations stating that there are NO empty staterooms, so no upgrades are available. I am guessing that has been there since we got on. We were not able to eat dinner in the Main Dining Room last night because the wait was more than an hour to get into Select (open seating) dining. We gave up and paid for dinner at the Pinnacle Grille. The food was very good but we really weren’t planning on eating there on this trip. Right now, as I am typing this, we are waiting to make “reservations” for the main dining room tonight. That’s ridiculous.

Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded. —Yogi Berra

The best and worst of 2022

On By Jim BellomoIn Uncategorized4 Comments

To quote Dickens, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” Isn’t that just the way life works? I always thought so. How would you know what the highs were if you didn’t have any lows? And sometimes, the lows lead to the highs. This brings me to the high and low of 2022.

To start the year, a quick substitution was just what we needed.

This one kind of slips in from 2021. If you have followed this blog for a while, you know that we booked a Christmas Market river cruise with Viking River Cruises that was expected to sail in early December 2020. Well, we all know that didn’t happen, so we postponed to December 2021, but then the Delta variant of COVID showed up just before Christmas. Even though Viking still sailed the cruise, we let them keep our money for another year because most of Europe shut down their Christmas Markets. But that second cancellation killed us. And that’s how we ended 2021.

But that brought us to one of the high points of 2022—our Sail with Seth cruise on Holland America’s Nieuw Statendam that we booked as a quick replacement. We went with my brother and sister-in-law and had a Neptune Suite (a last-minute upgrade), some incredible food, found new parts of the Caribbean that I actually liked (Bonaire and Grand Turk) and just generally had a great time.

Old condo problems lead to a new home that we LOVE.

Our disillusionment with our former homeowner’s association started a long time before Spring 2022, but that’s when things went from bad to…we have to get the hell out of here. We had lived in our condo for 23 years (two months before we got married), and to be honest, we really loved living there. So we made the decision to start looking for a new place. To be totally honest, I was sure I would never leave that place and making the decision to move from our close-in, easy-to-walk-anywhere condo where we had the best neighbors anyone could ever want was both tough and quick.

Kathleen and I have always made joint decisions quickly. When we bought our condo back in 1999, we weren’t even looking. We just stopped to see an interesting model home, liked what we saw, went for coffee for half an hour and then went back and bought it. Moving this year was no different. We already knew the area we wanted to move to (Trilogy Redmond Ridge, a 55+ community about seven miles from our condo), and we found an awesome realtor (Hi Linda) who took us to see a grand total of one house—the one I am sitting in right now. We walked in, looked around for about 15 minutes and told Linda to make an offer. Then we went and looked at another place so that we could see what else was out there but to be honest; it could have been wonderful (it wasn’t); we still would have bought the one we now call home.

We love living here! And I would say this was the best thing that happened to us this year. Of course, there is always a downside. We had two big downsides. One, we had to leave behind the world’s best neighbors, Jayesh and Lisa. Sure, they are only 15 minutes away (we are having our annual New Year’s Eve dinner with them on Saturday), but it’s not the same as sticking our head over the fence or having drinks on the spur of the moment to celebrate that it’s Friday. And two, we actually had to pack and move. But that’s another of this year’s highlights.

A Moving Experience

I hate moving. In my past life (BK=Before Kathleen), I moved a bunch. But since we bought our condo in 1999, we haven’t moved. Not for 23 years. The idea of taking things down off our walls, packing all our belongings, dealing with multiple trips to and from the new house, getting the condo ready for sale, and getting all the stuff done we would have to do to move into the new house…I hated all of it. But sometimes, good things come from bad things. Like the day in April when all our kids and grandkids showed up to help us patch walls, touch up paint and clean our old place to get it ready to sell. It makes a dad and grandpa very happy to have his entire family coming together to help.

Unless you have been to our house, you have no idea how much art we have hanging on our walls. Just the downstairs powder room alone had 84 framed pieces of art on the walls. We know because Maylee (our awesome granddaughter) counted them for us. And in our kitchen, we had more than 60  decorative plates hanging on the soffit. Those all had to come down, have the holes spackled and then have the paint touched up. There were other things that needed doing, including moving a bunch of stuff to a storage shed. But everyone pitched in to help, and we got it all done. Special thanks to our eight-year-old (at the time) granddaughter and our eleven-year-old grandson because we struggled to figure out what to have them do, and they just grabbed the spackle and the paint and went for it. They did an awesome job.

We should add that they all returned again a month later to help us move out of the condo and into our new house. And all of them worked their butts off that day as well. As I said, it brings a tear to this old grandpa’s heart.

Our travels: some good and some bad

As I mentioned at the top of this post, we had a great time in the Caribbean on Nieuw Statendam in January; then, we sailed on a May cruise on Celebrity Millenium from San Diego to Vancouver, BC. And we had our BIG trip of the year—our Viking Ocean Mediterranean cruise from Athens to Barcelona that took us to Europe for almost a full month.

Since I have detailed so much of this travel before, I will just list the tops and bottoms of that travel:

The WORST parts

  • Kathleen falling and breaking her elbow when we were in San Francisco on the Millenium cruise. Six hours in the emergency room, two long cab rides, one surgery and about ten weeks of recovery, all while we were moving, was not fun. All of this happening on a cruise that proved to us beyond a shadow of a doubt that our favorite cruise line (Celebrity) was not what it used to be and that this might have been the worst cruise we had been on in years. It is just sad.
  • Catching COVID in Venice or at least realizing we had COVID while we were in Venice. No awful symptoms (just a slight sore throat), but still a pain. Kathleen’s cough went on for a month.
  • Kathleen getting food poisoning on Viking Sky and then being quarantined because of something the cruise line did.
  • Us realizing that 28 days is too long to be gone from home.
  • Being on Nieuw Statendam with our good friend Seth (Sail with Seth) and finding out from him that he had been let go from Holland America on the day before the cruise, with his last day being in July. That was not cool, HAL. They then expected him to do his job helping the sixty or so people in the Sail with Seth group have a fun time.

The BEST parts

  • Most of our Viking Sky cruise around the Mediterranean was great. We had a great time, and we enjoyed Viking, but our expectations were a little too high.
  • I had at least two ultra-amazing photo-shooting experiences, one in Venice and one in Tarragona, Spain.
  • We spent another amazing five days with the grandkids at the beach (we have been doing this for a few summers), celebrated Maylee’s birthday and played MULTIPLE games of Skipbo.
  • Going back to Amsterdam and the Banks Mansion.

Hopefully, I will be back tomorrow to finish the year with my best photos.

The good times of today, are the sad thoughts of tomorrow.
—Bob Marley

 

 

Panoramas just won’t fit

On By Jim BellomoIn Photography6 Comments

I love shooting panoramic (pano) photos. Not the kind you do with your iPhone. The ones I take are usually composed of a series of photos I have taken from the same place, with my feet firmly planted on the ground. I swivel my upper body and shoot anywhere from six to 15 photos. Before I start shooting them, I take a photo of my left foot. Then when I finish, I take a photo of my right foot. When I am doing my photo triage, later on, I know where the pano starts and ends.

Then I process those photos in Camera RAW and stitch them together in Photoshop. From that, I have gotten some pretty good panoramic photos. But I will let you decide. I decided to put together this post because I have so many panoramic photos, but I can’t post them on Facebook or Instagram because they crop them severely. When I do, you can only see the very center section. So here are a few of my own with a caption that tells you where I took them. As you will see, I take them both indoors and out, of scenery and people as well. Anytime I have a subject that won’t fit into one frame. My shortest (the indoor one in Naples) is only three photos stitched together. My longest (not sure which one) might have as many as 20.

Don’t forget, if you click the first shot, you can then scroll through with your arrow keys or by swiping…and PLEASE…don’t look at my photography on a phone. To really see these, you have to see them BIG!

My best pano…Puerto Vallarta sunrise
My most recent pano…The Boeing Museum of Flight
Victoria, British Columbia
Venice, Italy
Cinqe Terre, Italy
Split, Croatia-1
The first Olympic stadium, Athens, Greece
Taromina, Italy
Bonaire
Split, Croatia-2
Taromina, Italy
New Orleans, Louisiana
Toronto Aquarium
Athens, Greece
Niagara Falls, New York
Monte Carlo, Monaco
Mariner Spring Training Game, Peoria, AZ
View from the Acroplis, Athens, Greece
Athens harbor, Athens, Greece
Sedona, Arizona
The Parthenon, Athens Greece
Kotor, Montenegro
Dubrovnik, Croatia
Naples, Italy
Taromina, Italy
Monte Carlo, Monaco
Fort Lauderdale, Florida
Akaroa, New Zealand
Dubrovnik, Croatia
Dunedin, New Zealand
Interior of the dining room on Holland America’s Nieuw Statendam
The beach at Seaside, Oregon
The Biosphere outside Tucson, Arizona
Bonaire
Bonaire
Avalon Harbor, Catalina Island
Celebrity Century
Downtown Curacao
Dawes Glacier, Alaska
Allure of the Seas
Inside a mall in Naples, Italy

In the beginning, the cubists broke up form without even knowing they were doing it. Probably the compulsion to show multiple sides of an object forced us to break the object up – or, even better, to project a panorama that unfolded different facets of the same object.
—Marchel Duchamp

Expectations Not Met but That’s OK

On By Jim BellomoIn Food Experiences, Photography13 Comments

It was interesting to me that when we got our post-cruise survey from Viking, they had everything listed by expectations. For instance, a question might say, “Food in the main dining room: A) Exceeded expectations  B) Met expectations C) Did not meet expectations.” When I thought back on it, that was my problem with Viking. After listening to friends talk about how much they love Viking, reading a FaceBook group of Viking fans, and knowing that Viking clients are incredibly loyal, I was expecting an almost perfect experience. That was my problem and not Vikings. (Viking—do your surveys online. You are doing yourself a disservice because I truly believe you get more info that way. When I only have a tiny, multiple-choice survey with little space for comments, that’s all I give you.)

I also realized in retrospect that so much of what I knew I would love about Viking (I did a blog post about why we were moving to Viking, and you can read it here.) is things it does not have: kids, smoking (Ok, there is a tiny area outside, on deck 7 but Viking says “No Smoking” in their marketing), casino, ship’s photographers, art auctions and more. As little things went wrong along the way, I was thinking about those things, not the things that weren’t there that I loved them for. All those things were great; I just didn’t think about them because they weren’t there. But they really improved our cruise experience.

Since we got home, I have also been telling people who ask about the trip that “Now we know how long a vacation is too long.” A month is too long. Three weeks on a ship is too long. Especially when you are sick and quarantined or are self-quarantining. But if we were going to do three weeks, Viking is the cruise line I would do it on. So, without further ado, let’s get down to the nitty-gritty of what we loved and what we didn’t.

What we loved

  • Our stateroom. We had what Viking calls a Penthouse Verandah. It was the largest non-suite stateroom we have ever had. 338 beautiful square feet. With so much storage. How much storage? So much so that we had an empty drawer and a junk drawer—on a ship. Here are some pics of one of the best staterooms we have ever been in.
    Looking in from the door.
    Looking back from our verandah
    The verandah. We have had bigger but this was nice.
    Not only a couch, but a chair and the most usuable coffee table we have ever had in a stateroom
    A really nice desk and bureau. Both (as well as the closet) had drawers.
    The bathroom
    And a huge shower for a cruise ship stateroom.
  • The mini-bar. On every single one of our previous cruises (except Celebrity Flora), one of the first things we would ask our room steward to do was to remove everything in the mini-bar. On Viking, we left it all in there. Why? Because it was all free. And it got completely refreshed every day. And if there were something you would rather have in there that wasn’t, all you had to do was ask. For instance, it was full of Sprite and Diet Coke—neither of which we drink. But we do love the Schweppes Bitter Lemon they served in the bar. So we asked if we could swap out the two we didn’t like for Bitter Lemon. Well, they didn’t regularly stock it, but they ordered it up from the bar at no cost to us.
  • All the upstairs food on the 7th deck. That means that we found some of the best food we have ever had on a cruise in The World Cafe buffet, Mamsens and the Pool Grille. I can count on my fingers the number of times in 30+ cruises we have eaten dinner in the buffet. We usually just do the buffet for breakfast or lunch but hardly ever for dinner. On Sky, we did. Almost every night because the food was amazing. I have never eaten so much outstanding seafood.
  • The service in the buffet is amazing. One of my complaints about the buffet on other ships is the absence of trays. Not because I like trays but because I only have two hands. One for a salad and one for the main course. Now, how do I hold the drink(s) that I want as well? So, I go and set my food on the table, and I run back to get the drinks, and by the time I am back, my food is cold. This never happened on Sky. Ninety percent of the time, within seconds of sitting down at the table with my salad and my entrée, someone was asking me what I would like to drink. The buffet also worked like a well-oiled machine. The managers were always coming by to ask how things were. Once I told one of the managers that the veal I had just grabbed was dry and tough. He immediately turned around, went to one of the chefs and told him to remove it and get new. That was impressive. I really felt like they cared what I had to say.
  • The room service was outstanding. Again, before this cruise, I could count on one hand the number of times we had done room service on our other cruises, but because of our quarantine situation with Kathleen’s food poisoning, we ate a lot on this cruise. We loved room service, especially breakfast. The order was always right, delivered hot, and except for one small hiccup with a pepper shaker, it was all outstanding. I do wish their non-breakfast menu had more variety, but everything we had was great.
  • The wonderful quiet places on the ship. I did an entire post on this subject a few days ago and I posted pics. Just click that link to read it. Suffice it to say; there were so many great places to sit and work on my photos and write posts. Or for Kathleen to go and read but still see the sights out the front of the ship or just someplace to have a quiet conversation.
  • Television choices. They were awesome. I know, who watches television  on a cruise? People who are quarantined. People who are feeling sick. People who are exhausted from being in a port and touring every single day. And we got to choose from quite the variety of shows, an excellent interactive map of our itinerary, old TV shows we love and more.
  • Embarkation and disembarkation. Not the transport from the pre-extension or back to the post-extension. But getting on the ship was a piece of cake. Viking under-promised and massively over-delivered. When we were checking in, we were told that our stateroom would be ready no later than 3:00 pm. So we headed up to the buffet for lunch (lots of tables available), and just as we were finishing up, our cruise director announced on the PA that all staterooms were ready—about two hours early. Under-promise, over-deliver. Both getting on and off the ship was about as easy as we have ever had in all our cruising.
  • Size of the ship. We loved it. It never felt crowded (except one night in the dining room). You could walk from one end of the ship to the other in no time. With only 9 decks and us on deck 5, we could get anywhere on the stairs, although we didn’t have to because the elevators were easily accessible. Kathleen hardly ever had to wait for elevators. But even though the ship is smaller than what we are used to, we never felt that much motion which we thought we would.
  • Fewer people. With only 928 total passengers, we never felt crowded.
  •  Laundry and pressing. In 30+ cruises, we have only sailed on one ship that had a self-service laundry. It was super to have clean clothes whenever we wanted them. And it was so great being able to not worry about it when we did laundry. I would go and toss stuff in a washing machine, set a timer with Siri and then go back when she went off. Same with the dryer. And since we were in a PV-class stateroom, we also got free pressing. So I would wash and dry my shirts and send them off to be pressed and they would come back the next day looking perfect.
  • The included WiFi. This was excellent. Very few glitches. No, I could not watch a Netflix movie, but I was able to upload all my pics, post to this blog, FaceTime twice with our grandkids and even watch Seattle Mariner highlights on YouTube. All for free. And it was only out on very rare occasions and never for that long.
  • The chocolate desserts. My brother just reminded me that I raved and raved about every single dessert that was chocolate. I am NOT a chocolate person. I prefer my desserts to have fruit in them or as the main taste profile (think lemon-polenta cake), but when we went to Manfredi’s, I had the best chocolate dessert I have ever had. From that point on, I made a point to try everything chocolate and almost every single thing was just as good. If you love chocolate, it might be worth going on a Viking Sky cruise just to eat it.

What we didn’t love

  • The entire food poisoning incident. I have written about it pretty thoroughly here. I personally was not happy with the way Kathleen was treated. It comes down to not listening to women when medical treatment is involved as well as jumping to conclusions. Everything worked out in the end, but it just should never have happened to the extent and in the way that it did. Kathleen had to miss at least three places that we had never been to before.
  • Any dining on decks one or two. This includes the main dining room (AKA The Restaurant), Manfredi’s and The Chef’s table. I want to look at them individually and tell you why we did not love them. None of these restaurants passed what I now call the “Steve Standard.” My brother Steve wrote this in his review of our May cruise on Celebrity Millenium, and I have stolen it from him because I think it is the best way to describe and evaluate a cruise ship restaurant. Here’s the “Steve Standard”: If this restaurant were in your neighborhood and you ate there, would you pay to go back? Pretty simple. And the answer for us for all three restaurants is no. They did not pass the “Steve Standard.” Upstairs, the World Cafe, Mamsens and the Pool Grille all passed. I would pay to go to any of them.
    • The Restaurant. On every other cruise we have ever been on, we have eaten 95% of our dinners in the main dining room. On this 21-night cruise, we ate exactly three dinners in the main dining room. Now I will give you that part of the reasons this happened was Kathleen’s quarantine when we ordered room service and long days onshore when we were just too tired and not at all motivated to get dressed to go to the dining room. But the times we did go, we were not pleased. Two of those times we felt the service was just weird. We are used to having the same servers for our dinners, but not only did we not get the same servers on these two nights, but we also had different servers for every course. And it seemed none of them really wanted to wait on us. Both dinners took more than 2.5 hours. That’s too long. We would be seated and then wait 20 minutes to get water or bread. Then another 10  to get our orders taken, then another 10 until the appetizers came, and it went on like this. And things would be missing from orders, or they would be cooked differently than asked. We were never offered a wine list, and when we would ask for one, it would take 15 minutes to get it. In the meantime, another server would just come around with the bottles of the evening’s included wines and start pouring those. We gave up. The third time we went to The Restaurant, we joined our new friends Corky and Larry, who told us they had cultivated a relationship with an outstanding server…and they had. He was amazing, and the wine steward showed up immediately to ask us about other wines. It was the kind of service we loved. And the food was great that night. But the noise level was deafening. We were sitting at a small table for four and could not hear each other talk. I still have no idea what half the conversation was about. I got tired of asking the other three to repeat what they said, so after a while, I just gave up and nodded my head. All in all, we just weren’t happy with The Restaurant.
    • Manfredi’s. One of the things we loved about Viking was that the specialty restaurants were free. On most ships, you pay extra for those. A lot extra in some cases. For instance, on Holland America, we went to Rudi’s, the seafood restaurant on board and paid $50 per person to go. So when we heard that we could get into Manfredi’s for $0.00, we were thrilled until we ate there. We went twice. The first time was the same sporadic service as The Restaurant. That got fixed the second time, but the food was never up to snuff. This is supposed to be Italian. I am an Italian-American, and I LOVE to cook Italian. I have lots of Italian restaurants I love. This is not a good Italian restaurant. Example: On Celebrity cruise line ships, there is an Italian restaurant called the Tuscan Grille. I love their calamari. I have been known to have it as an appetizer and an entrée at the same meal. I looked forward to that on Sky, but it was horrible. Reminded me of eating those old snack food, Bugles. Remember those? And their ribeye steaks (which are supposed to be amazing) were some of the thinnest ribeyes I have ever eaten. And my brother (who is a steak person) ordered one and got an entirely different steak. The only thing I had that I liked was a risotto with escargot. I might get that take-out from a restaurant at home. Suffice it to say that Manfredi’s was better than Olive Garden, but not by much.
    • The Chef’s Table. This is a matter of personal choice. The Chef’s table has a fixed menu that rotates every three days. We had four reservations there, but due to quarantines, we lost our first one. Then the second and fourth time, they were doing a menu that had nothing on it that Kathleen could eat. She is allergic to shellfish (two courses) and duck (the entrée). So that was out. The one time we went was on a night that they were featuring California food. She had one course she could not eat (crab cakes) and they brought her a very nice cheese plate. And the food they did serve was pretty good…for what it was. But as I said, this is a matter of personal choice and at home I would never go to a fixed menu restaurant if I could avoid it. While I thought that dinner was fine, there was not a single thing on that night’s menu that I would have ordered in a regular restaurant. The menu for two nights later looked good but we could never make it work with our reservations.
  • The included excursions. Another thing that drew us to Viking was that they included an excursion in every port. But those excursions just did not work for us. Either they were too long, the guides were incredibly boring and talked as if they were being paid by the word, or they just weren’t our cup of tea. I did love that Viking provided free shuttle busses in every port where we weren’t anchored right in the center of the city (Kotor), but the included excursions were just not up to par. I wish that Viking would give you a credit for excursions if you don’t use them.
  • The optional excursions. Out of 21 days in ports, we booked an optional excursion seven times. Only two of them would I do again (Dubrovnik and Messina). Two of them were pretty good for half of the tour (Naples and Bari) , and one was good for about a quarter of the tour (Olympia ). One was just “fine” (Kotor), and one was downright horrid (Monaco) because it was way too long, had the worst guide of the trip and included way too much crapola (like shopping). Our buddy Corky said that Viking should offer tours that were listed as “shopping or no shopping.” I totally agree. When you compare these to the pre-cruise tour we did in Athens with George of Tours By Locals, the post-cruise tour we did in Barcelona with Olga, also of Tours By Locals and the Cinque Terre tour we did with the amazing Luigi, there is no contest—there were all bad. I will give you that they were less expensive than the tours we booked ourselves, but I would gladly have paid more for better tours.
  • The weird weeks of this cruise. Our friends Corky and Larry, who are long-time Viking cruisers, told us that our 21-day cruise (and their 28-day cruise—they started a week before us in Instanbul) was NOT like any other Viking cruise they had been on because it wasn’t really one cruise. It was (for them) four one-week cruises, and for us, it was three one-week cruises. Did this matter? It kind of did. For instance, we could not see, book or change our shore excursions until the next week’s cruise started. Or the number of people getting off and on really was strange. Our first two weeks were primarily with a great crowd of travelers in our age group, and it worked well for us. Most were doing two-week cruises. But when many of them got off in Rome, the new group that got on was louder, ruder and generally younger. They were only doing a one-week cruise, and that meant they wanted to get all their partying in right away. We preferred the older, travel-oriented folks we had with us from Athens to Venice. Corky tells me that this particular cruise on Viking Sky is one of the few where Viking does this. We hope to avoid that in the future.

That about covers all of it. So what’s the final verdict? Well, we booked another Viking Ocean cruise while on board. So I guess that says it all. We have booked a 14-night cruise in 2024 from London up to the Norwegian fjords and ending in Bergen, Norway. We have never done this itinerary before, and it will give us a chance to compare a regular itinerary with this three week mess.

I hope you have enjoyed following along on our journey. I also hope if this was the first time you have read the blog, that you would both subscribe for future journeys and go back and read about some of what we have done in the past. I have been doing this since before the pandemic, and there are a bunch of other trips you can read about. I will be back in a couple of days with my promised treatise on how I do my photography.

True genius resides in the capacity for evaluation of uncertain, hazardous, and conflicting information.   —Winston Churchill

Disembarkation and our trip to Barcelona

On By Jim BellomoIn Food Experiences, Photography7 Comments

When we cruise, the first thing the real cruisers want to know about is the food. But the second is the embarkation/disembarkation. It’s been my experience after more than 30 cruises that if things are going to go wrong, one of these two times is when that will happen.

With this disembarkation, I am happy to say that nothing went wrong…except to say that they made us get off the ship (this is every cruiser’s lament). Pretty much everything went off without a hitch getting off the ship. We got up, had breakfast, and were asked to be out of our stateroom by 8:00 am. Sat for an hour in the Atrium, got our tag colors called, grabbed our luggage, took it to a van (since we were doing Viking’s post-cruise two-day extension), it was loaded into a van that followed our “luxury motor coach” into Barcelona from Tarragona.

That’s where thing kind of went bad. Viking now had to do something with the 35+ people on the “luxury motor coach” from 9:30 am when we got on until 1:00 pm when the Nobu Hotel in Barcelona would be ready to check us in. So they arranged a “luxury motor coach” tour that would drive us from the ship to Barcelona and then drive around Barcelona, showing us some of the sights. This started with them getting us lost before they even got the “luxury motor coach” out of the port (Seriously!).

Then they sent us a guide who admitted up front that he usually worked with Japanese tourists, so his English was not very good. On top of that, he also (like other guides we had previously toured with) felt like they had to fill every moment of the three-hour sojourn with the sound of his voice. He even started singing at one point. I overheard another passenger say, “I thought the guy with the flute yesterday was bad, but this guy is so much worse!” I had to agree. And since he was not confident in his English, he seemed to be much less confident in his directions and tour facts.

It took us about 70 minutes to get from Tarragona to the outskirts of Barcelona. He talked about 90% of the time. Mostly gibberish to us because his English was so poor. Our first stop in Barcelona was at the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya. This gorgeous art museum we thought was built high above and far from the city and not near anything. I took the header photo I am using today from in front of it.

We later learned that we were less than a mile from our hotel but that it would take almost three full hours to get there. And we didn’t stop to see the museum, just to use the bathrooms. Viking had bought tickets for us to get into the museum, but then we had 15 minutes to use the bathrooms and get back on the “luxury motor coach”…so we could be driven around and mumbled at while seeing the sights through a “luxury motor coach” window. As a photographer, this is my idea of torture. Seeing things I want to shoot but not being able to shoot them because the reflections in the “luxury motor coach” make it impossible to get a good shot. I did take a few when we got off at the museum. Here’s what they look like. Don’t forget, if you click the first shot, you can then scroll through with your arrow keys or by swiping…and PLEASE…don’t look at my photography on a phone. Please…

The inside of the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya
From here, I could have walked to our hotel in 30 minutes but, it took us 2.5 hours to drive there.
La Sagrada Familia from the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya.

Once we arrived at the hotel around 1:15 pm, we were told to go up to the second floor and that we would be checked in at a special desk just for Viking cruisers. When we got to the second-floor room they were using, there was about an hour’s wait to get registered. This is because they had planned well by sending the first “luxury motor coach” off and then not sending the second one for about 30 minutes. That way, we should have been staggered when we reached the hotel and able to check in without any lines. But this was not to be after our “luxury motor coach” driver got lost getting out of the port, and by the time he figured out how to get out, “luxury motor coach” number two was ahead of us, and we were not that far ahead of “luxury motor coach” number three. That meant we all pretty much got there at the same time. Viking had close to 250 people staying at the Nobu Barcelona. It was very much like the Marriott where we had done our pre-cruise extension in Athens. Both of them were four or five-star, high-rise hotels that were well outside (not in easy walking distance) of the main attractions of their respective cities. The rooms were nice, and the included breakfast at both places was delicious, but I would have traded that for something a little closer to where I wanted to shoot pics.

So instead of standing in line to register, we left our bags with the bellman at the front desk and took a taxi to a wonderful restaurant that Kathleen and I had eaten in when we were here in 2007—La Rita. The restaurant had been there for about 10 years before that and is still going strong. The menu was exactly as we remembered it. I made reservations almost a month in advance because when we go to Spain, we make our main meal, our lunch. People in Barcelona eat dinner around 9:30 pm, and we just can’t eat that late. So we have our main meal at lunch (around 2:00) and then grab some tapas in the evening.

After lunch, we came back and were able to check in easily, with no lines at all, and our rooms were ready. We unpacked, I did some posting on this blog and some photo processing, and we hit the hay for a very busy day on Sunday, our only full day in amazing Barcelona.

I had thought I could wind up the entire cruise with two more posts, one about Barcelona and disembarkation and one to sum up the cruise. But once I started talking about disembarkation, this one got too long to include our awesome day in Barcelona, so you will have to read two more. See you tomorrow. (BTW: we are home in Redmond after a hellacious day of flights and being up for 26 hours straight.)

You’d have a hard time finding anything better than Barcelona for food, as far as being a hub. Given a choice between Barcelona and San Sebastian to die in, I’d probably want to die in San Sebastian.  —Anthony Bourdain

 

Tarragona not Barcelona—it all worked out!

On By Jim BellomoIn Photography6 Comments

When we first booked this cruise with Viking, the itinerary finished in beautiful Barcelona. About three months later, we received a note from Viking that we would NOT be docking and spending an overnight in Barcelona. We would instead be docking and spending the night in Tarragona, a (we researched) small, industrial city south of Barcelona. (You can see how far apart they are above.) That kind of ticked me off because I was really looking forward to being able to wake up on the ship and then go for my pre-dawn photo walk and still be able to sleep on the ship that night.

We later learned that Viking had to switch because even though Barcelona is a HUGE port for cruise ships, there were going to be so many there over the two days (Friday and Saturday) that she would not have been able to stay for three full days. She needed four days tied up at a pier because we would have two days there (arrived Friday morning, disembarked Saturday morning) and then the cruise that followed ours would need the same (embark on Saturday afternoon, sail late on Sunday). Viking just could not take up a berth in Barcelona for that long. So that’s why we wound up in Tarragona.

In hindsight, I am so very glad that we did because it turned into one of my favorite photographic experiences on the trip. And I almost missed it once we were there. I almost missed it because we had tickets for the Viking-included excursion called “A Snapshot of Tarragona,” and when we got up, we just weren’t sure that we wanted to go. After being on the road since August 29, we were pretty much done. Kathleen wanted to just stay on board and pack, but she encouraged me to go ahead and take the excursion. I still (up until 15 minutes before it left) had not committed myself to go. But go, I did.

The first thing to note about leaving the ship was that it was docked a VERY long way from the gate to the port. In other words, this was NOT a port I could have walked out of. And then, once you got out of the port, it was a long way to the city. To say it was a very long way is an understatement. When we got on the “luxury motor coach,” we were then driven for about 30 minutes, and we were still in the port. It is a HUGE industrial port, and we were moored all the way out as far as you can get before still being at sea. And the road out of the port had what seemed like continuous speed bumps that the “luxury motor coach” could not go over quickly. Once we were out of the port, it was another 20 minutes before we were off the coach at the edge of downtown.

At this point, I am beginning to think that I made a mistake in coming. Viking was running shuttles all day long, about every 15 minutes, so I knew I could go back whenever I wanted. Our guide for the day was another guide that seemed to be paid by the word. She walked us around some Roman ruins (as much as I love Italy, if I never see a Roman ruin for a few years, that will be OK with me), which were pretty cool, but they didn’t really hold that much interest for me. I have so many photos from my Tarragona day that I will put the Roman ruins and what we could see from them here. Don’t forget, if you click the first shot, you can then scroll through with your arrow keys or by swiping…and PLEASE…don’t look at my photography on a phone. Please…

The first Roman wall and turret.
Closer view
Looking behind me, this more modern church.
More ruins
Of a chariot race track.
More ruins.
More ruins still.
And the obligatory narrow street scene.
And more ruins.
Lived the cool patterns on this tile.
And another cool street.
On the other side of the citadel.
More narrow streets. But cooler colors.
More citadel but another view point.
Inside the ruins
Upstairs on the ruins.
More and more ruins.
Stop the ruins!
And the (even though they are cool) narrow streets.
But I did live this actual ruin that was left in place. Each door goes into a different restaurant’s patio.
Yes, more ruins.
With cool windows
And cool verandahs.
One more ruins for you.

What did grab my interest were explosions and gunshots going off about three blocks away. We had been told that there was a Catalunya-wide festival going on that weekend (Catalunya is the “state” that both Tarragona and Barcelona are in) so we were pretty sure that this was what we were hearing. We could also see fireworks and a parade at the end of those three blocks. Here’s what I saw when I looked down the streets and then walked around to do some more investigating.

You can see the crowds.
I took this from about two blocks away. You can see a lion “float” on the right.
Throughout the city center you could see people like this having a festival breakfast on the sidewalks.
And the crowds were growing.
The square was filling with people.
There were many more people having a meal together.
The wine was flowing at 9:45 am
Note the different colors of shirts everyone is where.
Here’s the green team.
And this is what they would be competing in later in the day—human pyramids.

No, I did not get to see the human pyramids in Tarragona. To show you the photo above, I took a picture of a picture. But we did get to see one being built on Sunday in Barcelona. We weren’t able to see one built in Tarragona, because around noon, it started to rain, accompanied by quite the thunderstorm, so they were canceled for Friday. After looking at a few more ruins, the guide said we would now have some free time, but not to go downtown, it would be too loud and dangerous near the parades. So you know what I did…I went right downtown where the parades were. I am so glad I did. An amazing experience, as you will see.

On the way downtown, I found people getting ready for a parade. It turns out they do the parades twice in the morning. Once from the square and once back. So I ran into a bunch of people getting ready to march on my way down. Here’s a quick gallery of those people.

The red team members getting ready.
Not sure which neighborhood these guys represented.
Or these
Or these.

When I finally reached the city square, I could tell they were getting ready for something. At this point, I thought I had missed it all. Then I heard (from a side street) firework explosions. I headed from the square to where the parade would be coming from, and this is what I saw. Don’t forget, if you click the first shot, you can then scroll through with your arrow keys or by swiping…and PLEASE…don’t look at my photography on a phone. Please…

What downtown looked like before the parade.
I heard the parade comiing so I headed up the side street where the explosions were coming from.
This curve was just a little up the street
But it was close confines.
All that smoke you see is coming from the fireworks and it was LOUD!
Costumed characters lighting off fireworks.
You can see how smoky it is.
The mascots of each neighborhood led their groups down the hill.
The mascots had fireworks attached to their costumes.
The fireworks would scream for a while and then explode.
It was beyond loud.
I will try and add a video so you can see how loud it was. Probably not on this post.
These people are placing the fireworks
And lighting them.
And now the bull is fully loaded.
When he snorts, they go off with their screams.
He rears up and they explode.
There were bulls, dragons…
…strange dragons.
Very strange dragons
Each mascot was followed by a band from that neighborhood.
All of them were followed by peopel with muskets that when they fired them, it was louder than the fireworks.
And another band.
Then the golden chicken
With a pigeon in its mouth.
Everyone cheered the pigeon while he danced.
The king golden chicken/
And there was a horse.
Kids would pose with the mascots before they started marching.
The horse would dance into the crowd.
And the bands play on.
Here comes the armadillo.
And his band
Did you know there were Spanish bagpipes? Neither did I.
Here comes the lion
Followed by some huge dolls.
And another band.
This is a sequence. The man on the real horse has drums…
…and recognizes a man in the crowd.
He decides to pull the man up on his horse.
Found out later, the man being pulled up…
…was the Mayor of Tarragona.
He had a heck of a time climbing on.
But he finally got there to the cheers of the crowd.
Hurrah!
Now he as to get off.
That may be hard than he thinks.
Friends try and help him off.
Quite the job
Ended up taking four people.
They finally got him down.
And our rider got his hat back.
More incredible figures in the parade.
They just kept coming.
People would greet each other on the steets like they hadn’t seen each other in years.
Everyone was so friendly.
Including this guy.
The red team gets ready to march.
Big heads.
The remains of the fireworks were everywhere.
Huge
This woman had no idea he was behind her.
More marchers.
Colorful costumes.
Spanish knights.
Ladies with swords.
Kids dancing.
Teens getting ready to dance.
And I turned to a side street and this is what it looked like. No one there.
Back around and ready to go again.
The teens dancing in the street.
Loved the action.
This festival was amazing.

OK, sorry to post so many photos, but it was a photographic bonanza where I got to combine travel photography with street photography, my two favorites. I spoke to so many other photographers during the parade. They would see my camera and comment on it, and I would ask about theirs. Or about what was happening in the parade. They all spoke some English, and I speak zero Catalan, but they were so hospitable, and they did their best to tell me about their city and the festival. This, to me, is what travel is all about. What an incredible time I spent shooting in this awesome city.

After I had shot all these photos, it was back to the ship (I actually shot more than 900 photos of the festival—aren’t you glad I didn’t put them all online?) I was actually back on the ship in time for lunch with Kathleen. Then we spent the afternoon with Kathleen napping and packing and my processing photos, posting the photos and writing about our adventures. Speaking of processing and writing, I have had a couple of people ask about what cameras and lenses I use and how I decide what to post and not to post. I promise to do a separate post about that when I have finished the cruise write-up.

Two more posts will finish this trip. One for our disembarkation and full day in Barcelona and another to sum it all up and review the cruise. We are sitting in Barcelona airport, ready to board our flights home. See you soon.

I saw a human pyramid once. It was very unnecessary.
—Mitch Hedburg

 

Marseille and Seti finish our time in France

On By Jim BellomoIn Photography3 Comments

Let’s get this out of the way quickly. We have been to Marseille before. We were not impressed the first time, and the ship was moored a VERY long way from anything worth seeing. So to make a long story short, we stayed onboard. No reason to get off and see the same 500-year-old churches and museums we had seen before.

Now let’s talk about Seti. It seems to us that in every country we have visited (except tiny Montenegro), Viking has planned a stop in a small but interesting village that did not have a major draw; they just gave the visitors a taste of what life is like in the real world. Sibenik, Croatia, Crotone, Italy and now Sete, France.

Sete is a tiny (by French standards) fishing village. It is so small that we could do a tour of downtown without leaving the port on a “luxury motor coach.” We did have to take that “luxury motor coach” from the ship to the front of the port because it was a very industrial port, and they didn’t want people walking around. It was kind of funny that the “luxury motor coach” we got on to go less than half a mile was the nicest “luxury motor coach” we were on for the entire 21 days.

We were doing the Viking Walking Tour of the village, and we had a guide who we thought was going to be great. He led us along by playing the flute. We looked like the rats being led to the sea by the Pied Piper. But once we were in town and he got down to the actual touring, he became just like every other guide—paid by the word. Instead of telling us that the town’s main canal held its fishing fleet, he had to tell us how you fish for this and that fish. To be honest, if I want to know how to fish for tuna, I will look it up. I wanted to know about Sete, France. Here are my pics from Seti. At least the ones that are interesting enough to share. Don’t forget, if you click the first shot, you can then scroll through with your arrow keys or by swiping…and PLEASE…don’t look at my photography on a phone. Please…

Our Pied Piper Guide
Markets were opening
They have a jousting tournament every year when boats like this have a man standing in the front with a lance, trying to knock another guy, on another boat in the water.
The main canal out to sea for their fishing fleet
Loved these boats and the colors.
The market was setting up.
It was a very nice waterfront walk.
Blue boat. Kind of a theme for me.
Cool, old hotel.
There is always that church steeple.
Loved how the 2nd floor was boarded over.
Great black and white art on the inside of the seawall.
A blue door. More theme.
Downtown Street.
Boats lined up to go.

That about sums up our time in France. Of course, we had Eze and Nice yesterday, but this tiny town, Sete, was the real deal. Just a sleepy fishing village.

I woke up one time coming out of a blackout, and I was on an airplane, descending to land in Charles de Gaulle Airport in France. And all I can think is I must have decided it was a good idea to go to France, and got my passport, and got on a plane.  — Joe Walsh, lead guitarist of the Eagles.