Cabin Review

Our cabin was excellent. Spacious, nice and soothing light green/grey/silver tones, with a decent size verandah. The bathroom is great with a reasonable sink area, shelves and a very large shower with all glass doors (I hope I never see another shower curtain on a cruise ship). It does have one oddity though – the toilet is placed at a roughly 45-degree angle between the shower and the sink. At first glance it looks fine but, without getting too graphic, neither of us could sit comfortably on it. Our right knees couldn’t clear the glass shower wall so we had to kind of side-saddle it. Neither of us are large people either. It didn’t prevent my Wife from using it but I actually found it more comfortable to use those off the public areas (which are kept immaculate also) which didn’t suffer from this issue. It’s not a show stopper and wouldn’t keep me from recommending the cabin or ship, it’s just kind of a weird placement decision. Whatever – it wasn’t that big a deal.

Bed’s comfortable and the heating and cooling system. Thank you HAL for giving me a thermostat that actually gets the room cool if I want it and not just…not warm. We were always comfortable and could get a good temperature easily. The desk and sitting area is nice and the couch is comfortable. Plenty of storage and closet space as well. The Bose rechargeable speaker in the room (connects via Bluetooth or cable if you happen to have one) is a welcome addition. We were going to bring one of our own so we could stream our own music from our phones or iPad but didn’t need to. Sound is great and it’s on a charging dock on the desk so you can pop it off and move it around the room if you want. Great addition.

Speaking of great additions – no more dinky little TV. There was a night flat screen TV on the wall across from the bed which sounded and looked good without taking up space in the room. TV and movie options were surprisingly varied with a lot of movies to choose from and well as seasons of various TV shows. There are a few live TV channels but they’re mostly news and that’s the last thing we care about or want to keep up on while on vacation, so we didn’t watch any of those. We did watch and enjoy some movies a few afternoons, the BBC Nature series and some reruns of our favorite TV series while lying in bed at night.

Other options on the TV were forward and aft ship cameras which were cool as well as a live map of where you were with the stops all noted. You could zoom in and out on the map which, if you find keeping track of where you are interesting like I do, was cool. There was a page with weather conditions which was good in port but at sea tended to be useless telling us most days it was -18F. Guess the satellite/GPS doesn’t feed the weather channel it uses or there are no forecasts available to it outside ports. Speaking of that kind of info, I miss the more detailed conditions you used to get on many ships like sea state (wave height), barometer, winds etc. I’m not sure why cruise lines seem to have stopped providing that info – maybe no one cares but I enjoy it so I remark on it on every survey. The moving map though is a cool addition. There are a few music channels as well if you don’t use the Bose they provide or didn’t bring anything to play.