Maasdam Review
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Additional details
Background Information: My husband and I are in our mid 70s. I have done eight previous cruises on HAL (out of 20 total cruises), five of them with my husband. They gave me my 100 day medal while I was on this cruise. I booked this cruise because there were three places it was visiting which I had not been to before - St. Barths, Grenada and Bonaire. We have cruised on this ship before - we were back to back on the Maasdam in 2006. We like the ship. We drove to the cruise because my husband does not like the hassle in the airport. This also meant that I could take as much luggage as I wanted for no extra charge and I could take my scooter in the trunk (broken down to five pieces) which I need because of reduced lung capacity. I have difficulty walking the distances required even on a small cruise ship. I am interested in photo documentation of cemeteries and we have very little information on most Caribbean islands, so when I did not take a ship tour, that was what I did ashore.
Travel To Port of Embarkation: We drove from Maryland to Ft. Lauderdale. We left on Jan 1st and did about 350 miles a day. We did not stop to sightsee or visit. Just straight down I-95 instead of byroads like we usually do. I had the hotels we are stopping at on the GPS and the GPS just had I-95 on it for miles and miles and didn't talk to us hardly at all. So we listened to NPR where possible.
Hotel Info: The night before, we stayed in the Hilton Garden Inn which has a tour package. Breakfast, free parking for the cruise and a shuttle to and from the port. The Hampton Inn apparently has a similar package which may be cheaper, but it was farther away from the port. We had the 11:00 shuttle. When we checked in with the shuttle guy, he gave us two stickers to wear, and two more for the shuttle back to the hotel, and also gave us a number to call if there was no shuttle there. At 11:30, the luggage including my assembled scooter were loaded into a trailer and we were on our way to the port by 11:35.
Cabin Review
Lanai Ocean-View Stateroom
Stateroom - We have a Lanai room (CA) on the Lower Promenade Deck and I had thought I might be able to get out onto the Promenade Deck from our room with the scooter. But the Lanai door has a lip of about 4" and no ramp so it would be hard to get the scooter over it. The scooter hangs up on all the thresholds out to the deck anyway - the ramps are too steep and I/we have to lift it over. We have two reserved deck chairs outside our room and the two mats for the chairs were in our room. The door is mirrored on the outside. I went out on deck through our lanai door to take pictures of the sail-away. To get back in there is a white plastic card which you have to hold up to a sensor and when the light is green (and it is very hard to see - sometimes I could hear the click but couldn't see the light), you can quick open the door. It is a VERY heavy door. A weaker woman than I am would not be able to open it. I enjoyed being able to get out on deck quickly, but did not make much use of our reserved deck chairs. Bob didn't care for it and he never used that door. The windows were cleaned each morning about 7:00 so they were always clean.
The bed was made up as a king, and there wasn't enough room for me to get the scooter past it to the other side of the room so we moved one of the night tables over under the desk and shoved the bed over. That made enough room for me to come in and park by the bed, although I don't have an easy time getting to the nightstand or out of bed. We ran an extension cord from the desk under the bed to my side of the bed to plug in the power strip (for the scooter and computer). I eventually put the phone on the floor next to the bed as I had other uses for the nightstand. There was a small couch on the same side as the bed, and on the other side is the TV, with the ice bucket under it and the desk. The TV had Fox News on it which pleased Bob. We've moved the chair from the desk over next to the couch because of the nightstand under the desk. There are only two drawers in the two nightstands and three more in one of the closets which also has the safe in it. We had a safe which was opened with a number instead of a credit card like last time (this is better). There are two hanging closets and we had plenty of hangers, and one more closet with shelves. The steward kept the room clean and the ice bucket filled and made us towel animals, even though he had so many rooms to do. A couple of times he didn't get to us until after we were back for dinner.
The bathroom had a tub and I asked for a shower chair so I could sit and use the handheld shower, but they said it would be a safety hazard. I think getting into and out of the tub is the hazard - not sitting on a stool in it. I also had a real hard time getting the shower to give me water that wasn't too hot. The bathroom had shelves where Bob could keep his razor plugged in. He
had his pill keeper also on that side. I had mine on the other side, but the soap dish was there, and it kept getting wet, so I moved it to the bottom shelf.
It is really nice to have a door that we can just open and it stays open without having to put a chock in it. Bob opens the door and then stands in the hall so that I can get out without running over anyone. The same with the bathroom door. It opens out flat and stays stuck to the wall rather than swinging. From the photos I took on our first Maasdam cruise I can see that they have redone the bathrooms