Explorer of the Seas Review

Wonderful and Terrible

Review for the Eastern Caribbean Cruise on Explorer of the Seas
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rybrns
First Time Cruiser • Age 20s

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Sail Date: Feb 2008

This was the fourth cruise for my wife and me; we had previously cruised on Princess ships for shorter itineraries, and now we were looking forward to a different cruising experience. Our first two cruises left from Port Everglades and making the airport-to-ship transfers was complex and very stressful. For our third cruise we left from Red Hook, Brooklyn and used a car service to and from the ship. This worked much better for us. So for our fourth cruise we wanted to see what would be available leaving from the New York area. We planned the cruise with my brother-in-law and his wife, who had cruised on a RCI ship out of Barcelona last fall and told us how pleased they were with that cruise. When they recommended that we consider this cruise, which was to leave from Bayonne, NJ, it looked like a winner based on its length, number of ports visited, and its embarkation point. When the date arrived the four of us took a car service to the port.

When we arrived at the terminal we checked our bags with the baggage handlers and registered. This went smoothly, but then we found that we would have to ride from the terminal to the ship on a bus! It seems that the terminal is about a half-mile down the pier from where the ships dock and we had to wait almost two hours for a bus, even though we had arrived at the terminal close to 12 noon, the starting time for embarkation. Most of the people we saw were pretty grumpy by the time they finally got to board the ship.

After we dropped off our carry-ons in our rooms, we went to the Windjammer Restaurant, the ship's buffet. We noticed at once that there were no hand-sanitizer stations. More about this later. It was difficult to find seating--the seating on this ship is not sufficient to handle the large embarkation crowd (our past experience on Princess vessels was that seating was more readily available). We were also disappointed with the quality of the food. It was nothing special, like food you find at a Perkins or Howard Johnson's. It was this way for the first three days. Our experience in the main dining room was the same. We were in the second seating group, and found the food to be very pedestrian for the first three days--and then it became much better.

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