My wife and I booked this trip to celebrate our 35th wedding anniversary which occured during the cruise. Here is some context: while it was our first cruise (yeah, I know - pretty amazing especially given the extensive cruise experience of so many of the people posting on this site - but one has to start sometime) but we are not atrangers to travelling. I've travelled extensively internationally during my career, we've done a lot of interesting vacation trips in Europe and Asia, and we lived in Asia for a couple of years. So the comparisons we drew from the trip were from land based hotels, resorts, and restaurants. We picked this route for a couple of reasons: Norwegian free style dining, ability to drive to New York rather than fly, I've been to Bermuda on business but have wanted to go on vacation there, and the Breakaway seemed like a a cool ship. There are a number of detailed fact based reviews about the Breakaway (kudos to Gambee - after reading his ultimate review we knew so much of what to expect), so I'll take these few minutes to write about what we did and what we liked, and why.

First the cabin. We booked a balcony, because we wanted to use our room as an oasis to which we could periodically retreat from all of the hustle and bustle of the ship. So we got a mid ship balcony, deck 10, aft, port side. We got a lot of great suggestions from the Norwegian reservations guy we worked with to book the trip, who asked a lot of questions about the kind of stuff we wanted to do during the week. It turned out to be a very quiet room. There were cabins above below (public areas create sound!), it was near the aft elevator bank (this is big ship, that saves time), and as luck would have it, we were docked portside in Bermuda so that meant we overlooked the dockyard activity. We spent a lot break time out on our balcony - what a great place to have a bottle of wine. Sometimes good times are defined by little things - like the afternoon when we were sitting out and we saw a pod of dolphins coming by very close to the ship (glad we brought our stadium binoculars!) or the Wednesday morning the ship was arriving in Bermuda. We had ordered room service breakfast for 6:30 and sat out on the balcony eating breakfast while the sun rose, as the ship was making its way through the zigzags of the channel through the reefs, as the sun rose over the ship and the Bermuda coastline. Another bonus was watching the fireworks from our balcony on Friday night - they shoot them off port side. The cabin seemed reasonably big, it was well laid out and it was easy to unpack all of our stuff, store our bags under the bed, and the bathroom seemed well designed with lots of storage space and bigger than a lot of the bathrooms in European hotels we've been in.

We enjoyed the included restaurants. We had dinner in all three MDRS throughout the trip - the Manhattan dining room twice. We walked in to Taste and Savor and got seated right away. Once in Manhattan we had made reservations and were seated at the time of our reservations, and the other time we walked in and were seated right away. We always had tables for two. A comment about reservations - I had thought that one could only make reservations at the specialty restaurants. One night we had bookings for Rock of Ages and Second City with about 2 hours in between, so I called the reservation line that morning to see if I could make a reser for the Manhattan room and it turned out that we could. The person I spoke to said that they take resers for up to about 35% of the availability. That was great to be able to make that reservation - it was the only evening we sort of had a tight schedule. Otherwise waiting would have been a good excuse to enjoy the bar. (Not that we realy needed excuses!)I wouldn't describe us as buffet fans, but we really ended up liking the Garden Cafe and the Uptown Grill. The main reason is the way they are structured - with food stations rather than long buffet lines, with the chefs cooking for each station right at the station; the food was always fresh and attractive looking. And if you wanted something slightly different, they were always happy to make it for you while you were there. I have to say the Asian choices were great- one lunch I had a nice spicy Thai coconut curry that was fairly respectable. Read more