When my wife and I looked back over our previous trips we realized the strongest memories came from our longer cruises, so we opted to once more do a back to back, this time on the Celebrity Silhouette cruises of September 3 and 15. This review is written from the perspective of a paraplegic using a wheelchair and will hopefully give insights for those who also use wheelchairs.

I’ve already, in a review of our previous Holy Land cruise on the Silhouette two years ago, covered our views and memories of the ship itself. This time it was just as enjoyable. We booked an Aqua cabin for the September 3 portion and an outside for the September 15 portion. They were both enjoyable cabins, but what amused us was what we felt to be an attempt to make a dramatic distinction between Aqua and "lower” categories. This is understandable as Aqua is billed as a unique experience, which it is, with all sorts of extras and additional "luxuries” which were appreciated. Both cabins were similar, with the exception of our balcony in Aqua. But what made us laugh was the flimsiness of the towels and facecloths. Having less plushy towels was fine (although we loved the plushier towels and bathrobes of Aqua), but the facecloths we couldn’t believe. We couldn’t buy such flimsy and thin facecloths in any store in our city, not even the dollar stores. They had to be seen to be believed. We did notice that as the days progressed we did receive a few that were a bit more substantial. So much for showing the difference between categories.

Another observation. Blu was excellent as usual and we enjoyed the menu, the small cafe feeling and the very focused service, not to mention the wall to wall, ceiling to floor window overlooking the sights and the sea (it was fun to come sometimes at 6 p.m. and see the couples who were always there already every time waiting to claim their window-side seats). But we were very pleasantly surprised on the second leg of our cruise to find that in our view the food in the main dining room, which had always been excellent, had actually improved, with lighter but enjoyable sauces, etc. In fact we commented to each other that we never really felt overstuffed at the end of a meal, even though we had enjoyed all the courses. Read more