Noordam Review
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We are a couple in our late 30’s/early40’s who sail about once a year (and have sailed most lines) and travelled on this cruise with our 3 year old (her third HAL cruise – she hasn’t sailed any other line). We live in New Jersey and sailed out of Fort Lauderdale.
We had a rocky start to this cruise owing to our daughter being sick (that would be two car seats covered in vomit the first on her way home from school and the second on the way to the airport), arriving late to the airport (due to vomit) to realize we had left our passports at home. Luckily we were flying in the evening before embarkation and my husband was able to standby a later flight, go home wash the second car seat and get our passports. What is funny is that we didn’t even really forget the passports – we never even thought to take them in all our packing – just dumb I know. We had booked a flight the night prior to embarkation as insurance against the weather it also worked as insurance against stupidity.
We stayed in the Holiday Inn Express Convention Center/Cruiseport – free transit from the airport to the hotel. When my daughter and I landed about 930pm it took quite a while for the transport to make it through the airport traffic, which was horrible. We arrived at the hotel about 1015 and received a nice goody bag of water, pretzels and cookies. When my husband arrived at 1am the driver had gone home for the night so the hotel told him to just take a cab and they paid the cabfare. Breakfast in the morning was quite a nice variety but very crowded. We ended up sharing a table with others who would also be on the Noordam though we never saw them again. After breakfast my daughter and I walked to the Total Wine and picked up our internet order –we returned one bottle as the neck was too tall to fit nicely in the box and picked up a replacement bottle that fit better so the box could be closed. We didn’t need to stop anywhere else as we couldn’t come up with anything we had forgotten.
Cabin Review
I loved our obstructed view room – we have always sailed verandah before but they were sold out by the time we booked and we couldn’t afford a suite…We had the aft of a life boat and were the last obstructed view room in the line of lifeboats and with the floor to ceiling window half was unobstructed, also at the two tender ports “our” lifeboat was used to tender and we had a full unobstructed view. I would absolutely book this room in the future. The one downside to the oceanview room with three people is that the couch comes closer to the entrance than the bed (as opposed to the balcony room when it is the bed then the couch). When the couch is unfolded and made up into a bed there are about 3 inches of clearance between the foot of the couch and the desk making it nearly impossible to get into the room and to then get up and use the bathroom at night. Luckily our daughter is still small so after the first night we had them not unfold the couch and they just made up the couch as a bed.