This cruise was twelve nights to some great southern Caribbean ports, some not visited as often as the more northerly ones. Barbados, St. Lucia and Antigua are a nice change and St. Thomas an St. Martin are more frequently visited favorites. In order to make it that far south from Baltimore it was necessary to do three sea days at the beginning and end of the visits to these islands. This sounded really appealing. I thought that the first and last sea days would be a bit rocky and cool, but that the others would be fine, even sailing mid-fall.

I was wrong. It was a very rough ride each day in both directions. Some days in the Windjammer buffet, which is at the very forward section of the ship, there were times walking around the serving tables where you were actually momentarily weightless due to the extreme up and down movement of the ship. This was compounded by the fact that if you had a cabin in the front of the ship you got this movement all night long. That would have been tolerable were it not for the fact that all night long there were regular extremely loud banging noises each time the ship crashed into the waves. I woke up regularly each night and had to get up extremely early and take a nap each afternoon. I have had outside cabins in this area of ships and they have been noisy, but never like this in an inside cabin. This greatly reduced the enjoyment of this cruise. Things were better once we reached St. Thomas, but as soon as we started back from St. Martin it was repeated all over again only worse. At that point the captain made caution announcements and the air sickness bags appeared on the stairwells. We were not sailing in the usual shipping lanes and I only saw a few other ships, all freighters rather than cruise ships. Our course was in the mid-Atlantic, hundreds of miles from land, according to the Captains daily announcement.

Because of all this I cannot comment too much on many shipboard activities that we would normally participate in because they were skipped entirely on the return journey. One of the production shows, "Broadway Rhythm and Rhyme" is the same show as on the Vision. Never encountered that before. Both shows were weak in the singing department, but the dancers are always excellent. The cabaret performers were all poor except for the Beatles tribute group. Royal really needs to start thinking outside the box a bit in this area. Some of these performers have been on the ships for a very long time. Read more