We cruise about once a year, and selection of the trip is primarily driven by the itinerary. This cruise from Lisbon to Rio was very attractive because we had never been to any of the ports, and it was a repositioning cruise with never more than 3 consecutive sea days. We had heard so much about the food on Oceania that we thought it would be a perfect match for us (we love cooking and I have a big vegetable garden in the summers), but it was not to be.

We went early to Lisbon to see the area before the cruise, so we simply took a taxi from our hotel to the terminal. We had a PH suite (our first suite ever) and had been told we could board around noon. From the Cruise Critic boards, however, I had learned we might be able to get on as early as 11, so we arrived then. There were already huge lines of people waiting to board. There seemed to be little differentiation between who was allowed to board and who wasn't. We walked around the lines and asked and were told we could go ahead and board because we had a suite. But others who did not have suites were also being allowed on. If we had waited until noon to arrive, I think we would have been swallowed on a flood. I would term the whole situation lightly-regulated chaos.

Once we were on board, we looked around the ship to get a feel for what was where, and we went ahead and booked spa treatments for the sea days. We sat to have some coffee at the wonderful Baristas (where we would later discover their superb frozen coffee drink), and our cabin was announced as open. So we went on there, dropped our carry-on luggage, and decided to have a light lunch (we fortunately had eaten a large breakfast at our hotel). Read more