Time to review our North Atlantic crossing on the Century! This will not be a terribly orderly review, I am afraid. So if you don't want to slog through it, just know we found it to be fabulous. The ship was charming, in an aged ocean liner kind of way, and the food was very good. The service was extraordinary, however, and the crew left absolutely nothing to be desired. They were magnificent. Going across the ocean in a sky suite on the Century turned out to be brilliant!

We boarded in Miami at around eleven thirty in the morning through the suite line and were on board in minutes, sparkling wine in hand. We wandered up to our cabin and knew immediately we were going to have fun. The sky suite is perfect. It is a misnomer to call it a suite,really,since there is no suite of anything; just a large very comfortable room with a huge veranda with two loungers and a good size table and two dining chairs and a large marble countered bathroom with nice jetted tub and shower. (Be sure to ask for the padding for the loungers. They make it that much nicer.) The cabin was not posh, but it was extremely nice, nonetheless. It had a large round coffee table which served as a dining table when we had dinner in, brought by Challs, the hero/butler. It had a flat panel tv with lots of free and payperview movies on it as well as the usual Celebrity info and it had a dvd player and a list of assorted older but good movies we could take out from the dvd library. We never used it, however, because the ship was too much fun to spend much time watching movies.

Speaking of Challs, our butler ... he really was our hero. Every morning at seven a.m. or so, Challs came and collected our 20 oz. coffee mugs we had brought with us and returned fifteen minutes later with our nonfat lattes. Then we got to lay on the loungers and welcome the day with our coffee. In the afternoon at four, Challs came to the door with a cart and served coffee or tea on china, with little sandwiches and pastries. He would have come back an hour later with canapes, had we let him ... but that would have been ridiculous! I lost my seapass while walking the deck and mentioned it, chagrined, to Challs, thinking I was on my way to guest relations to beg a new one. My mistake. Challs said he would take care of it and a new one appeared a half hour later! Absolutely anything we needed, Challs took care of it. When we wanted to have breakfast on the veranda before the ports, Challs came very very early in the morning and brought it to us ... always with a smile and a sincere desire to please. He was truly wonderful. I hope to some day meet up with him again, he was that kind and nice to us! One evening, after touring Seville on a very hot day, we realized we had to get ready for our second seating dinner and we looked at each other and realized we really did not want to have to deal. We called Challs. He appeared with the dinner menu, just like in the MDR, and we ordered. He set our table ... tablecloth, china, wine and water glasses, flatware ... and then proceeded to serve our courses and leave us to eat them and then return to collect and serve more. It was great! That was the evening we watched a movie after dinner and then, as always, walked the deck late at night. Our steward, Edwin, was pretty invisible, but the cabin was always very well cared for, and the assistant steward, Sarip, was always around to help and smile and open doors for us. Very kind. Read more