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Cruise Review - S.S. Norway May 19 - 26, 2002 Scheduled Eastern Caribbean Itinerary: depart Miami Sunday 4:00pm at sea Monday at sea Tuesday St. Maarten Wednesday 9:00am - 6:00pm St. John/St. Thomas Thursday 6:30am - 5:30pm at sea Friday Great Stirrup Cay Saturday Noon - 6:00pm arrive Miami Sunday 7:00am Actual Itinerary: depart Miami Sunday 4:00pm at sea Monday at sea Tuesday St. John Wednesday 10:30am - 6:00pm St. Thomas Thursday 9:00am - 5:30pm at sea Friday Great Stirrup Cay Saturday 1:00pm - 6:00pm arrive Miami Sunday 7:00am I was traveling in a group of four adults between the ages of 33 and 41. Three of us are very interested in classic ocean liners-two could be considered fanatics, but they prefer the word enthusiasts instead. This was my second cruise. I previously sailed on the NCL Sea in June '00. My roommate previously sailed on the QE2 in August '97 and the NCL Sea in June '00. The other two in our group sailed on the QE2 in August '97 and a RCCL cruise to Alaska in '01. By trade, I am a technical supervisor and the others are all in church vocations. We all prefer traditional cruising to free_style_ and we all think that dress codes should be appreciated and followed on cruise ships/liners. We chose the Norway more for her history than for the ports of call or amenities. My roommate and I booked our entire trip through a travel agent that we have used many times in the past. We purchased NCL's air/sea package and a 2-day pre-cruise package at Loews Miami Beach Hotel in South Beach. The others booked their cruise and air separately online and flew into Ft. Lauderdale on the morning of the cruise. Overall, booking everything through NCL simplified our arrangements. Even though we could have saved a little money by booking each part separately, we appreciated not having all the headaches that it could have caused. In this review I will include some information about the pre-cruise package because we purchased it through NCL. I will also talk about some of my observations on the ship. My traveling companions would echo most of the observations, but their opinions may vary slightly from mine. We flew into Miami on Friday, May 17 and arrived on time despite rainy conditions at San Antonio, Houston, and Miami. Once we gathered our luggage, we went outside to catch the Super Shuttle as we had been directed in our cruise documents. I found it interesting that Carnival, Royal Caribbean, and Celebrity each had representatives at Miami International Airport to greet passengers, but the NCL representative was nowhere to be found. Super Shuttle was total chaos, but after a 20-minute wait our van arrived and we were off to Loews Hotel. We arrived at the hotel and checked in by 2:00pm and decided to have lunch. Loews Miami Beach is a beautiful hotel with a wonderful pool area, private beach, and very nice rooms. We were on the 10th floor. Our room had a balcony, with incredible views of the Atlantic Ocean and the Miami skyline. The food at the hotel was very good, but also very expensive. The same could be said for the sidewalk cafs along Ocean Drive and Lincoln Road. One thing we noticed in Miami/South Beach was that gratuities are always automatically added when you receive your check at meals. They even left a blank for you to add additional gratuities on your credit card receipt if you so desired. I thought that was very kind. Also, the mini bar in the hotel room was extremely expensive. A can of soda was approximately $3 plus 8.5% sales tax and an 18% restocking fee. If you wanted them to empty the mini bar for you, they would be happy to for a $30 surcharge. We found an Eckerd Drug across the street and bought some sodas there to take on the ship. The concierge at the hotel was not able to answer any questions about how the cruise line handles transportation to the ship on the day of embarkation. The bellmen, on the other hand, told us that the bus would be outside at 1:30pm and that the driver would come inside the lobby with an NCL sign and pick up all passengers for the cruise. We were in the lobby by 1:00pm waiting. I noticed a Cruiseline Express bus outside at 1:15pm and we asked the bellman if that was our bus. He said that it was and helped us get our luggage out to the bus. The driver said that he had been waiting since 1:00pm and he was angry that people would wait until the last minute to come out to the bus. The other two passengers he was picking up at Loews did not come out until 1:25pm. The driver had certainly not made an effort to come in and see where the passengers were. After he picked us up, he had four more stops. Apparently all of the passengers at every stop were told to be ready at 1:30pm. Once again, the driver was angry because he could not be in five places, up to 10 miles apart, at the same time. He also mentioned that NCL tells him how many passengers he will be picking up, but he is not given any names. He has no way to know whether passengers are running late or whether they gave up and took a taxi to the pier. We arrived at the pier at 2:45pm and were on the ship by just after 3:00pm - a pretty simple embarkation. Since we are Latitudes members, we saved time by going through the Latitudes line. There was a little confusion at the pier. When we first entered the building, there was a line of about 10 people just to the right. I asked the NCL representative if we needed to be in that line. Her reply was that we could if we wanted to, but that it was not necessary. I don't want to wait in lines any more than anyone else, so we bypassed it and moved on. I still don't know what that line was for. When we got on the ship, we were immediately directed to take the elevator up to our cabin on Sky deck. The elevator was very tiny and stopped at almost every floor, whether it needed to or not. You had to keep pressing your floor after every stop or the elevator would forget and might not stop there. It seemed to take forever to get to our deck because the elevator was hot and slow and I was probably a little antsy. From that point on, we took the stairs everywhere. Our cabin was very nice. It was a Category AE suite, K018 on the Sky deck. It is a relatively new cabin. The Sky and Sun decks were added to the Norway during a major refit in 1990. Normally we would not have gotten a suite, but the prices were so reasonable that it was impossible to say, no . Category AE suites come standard with floor to ceiling windows, an in-room refrigerator, an in-room safe, complimentary bathrobes, available concierge service, a never ending fruit basket, a much larger selection of soaps, shampoos, and lotions than one could ever want and a full sized tub with a marble surround. Our cabin stewardess, Glenda, did an outstanding job of keeping our cabin clean, our ice fresh, and our fruit basket full. We could eat all of the grapes and bananas an when we came back from breakfast, it would seem like more had magically appeared in the basket. We are sure that Glenda was refilling it, though, because there was no magician on the cruise. We only had two minor problems with our cabin. The toilet refused to flush each of the first three mornings we were on the ship. On the first two mornings, a plumber was sent to look at it and thought it was fixed. On the third morning, it seemed to miraculously heal itself. We never had a problem after that. OK, maybe there was a magician on board. The other problem was that the lights on the mirror on our dressing table did not work most of the time. There seemed to be a short in the switch. Once or twice it would mysteriously come on. OK, maybe the room was haunted. That would explain everything. Our traveling companions were in an inside stateroom V203 on the Viking deck. This is an original stateroom on the Norway and still has many of its original furnishings from the Norway's previous life as the France. Their room was cozy and small, but had an ambiance that our cabin did not have. By the time we got settled it was time for the mandatory lifeboat drill. We endured that and decided that it was time for a drink afterwards. We met our traveling companions at Club Internationale on the International deck. This room was the original first class smoking lounge on the France. It is a beautiful room that looks very similar today as it did in 1962. After drinks, we went to our respective cabins and changed clothes for dinner. By the way, our luggage had been delivered to the cabin within a couple of hours of boarding-very impressive. Our assigned table was a table for 6 in the Windward dining room. The dining room is very much the same as it was when it was the first class dining room on the France. It is very noisy, though. Our waiter, Owen, and busboy, Louis Celon, served us a wonderful meal. The food throughout the cruise was pretty good, although not exceptional. Some meals were better than others. We found the Italian, Caribbean, and the Chef's Special dinners to be less desirable than the others. Breakfasts in the Leeward dining room were very good, but the service at breakfast was painfully slow. We only ate 2 lunches in the Leeward dining room, both of which were pretty good. The Leeward Restaurant seemed to be much quieter than the Windward Restaurant, especially upstairs. We had one breakfast and one lunch in the Great Outdoors Restaurant. We all found the selection to be minimal and the quality to be fair to poor. The exception in the Great Outdoors Restaurant was the dessert, especially the afternoon cookies. The chocolate chip and oatmeal raisin cookies were some of the highlights of our days. Drink selection in the Great Outdoors Restaurant was poor. They only offered Iced Tea, Milk, Coffee and Water. At breakfast, there were two juices. The juices disappeared by lunchtime. On the Norwegian Sea two years ago,
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