Zaandam Review
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We choose this itinerary because of all the different ports it hit and we weren't disappointed. We got up close and personal with a couple glaciers and that was exciting. The captain always pointed out if there were whales nearby too which was really nice.The stops were interesting places and the crew on board was, as always, fantastic!! The food was good, not fantastic, but good. Their ice cream selection at dinner was great but the ice cream station in the lido was disappointing. They had vanilla, chocolate and strawberry everyday and then one other flavor which was never very exciting (rum raisin a couple days - I mean how many people do you know that like rum raisin??). Their salad bar was great! The trio in the Ocean Bar was great, as was the pianist that played there for happy hour. The shows were okay but not great and last but not least I do love to go to the movie theater and see a movie but whoever built it didn't think it out very well and there is not enough slope to see over peoples heads which is just annoying!
Cabin Review
Large Ocean-View Stateroom
This is the forward-most cabin on the starboard side, lowest deck. It is a odd-shaped handicapped room but I would not say a wheelchair or scooter could fit into it. It is a typical room with a very small "sitting" room off the bedroom that has two chairs and a table. We used it once. The bathroom is set up for someone to sit in the shower if need be, and there are handles on the wall to hold onto to get off the toilet. Past reviews mentioned the anchor noise is an issue but my thought was they only use the anchor when you have to tender, which we didn't do the whole cruise so we never heard the anchor line at all. There is a little more movement in this cabin because it is the most forward cabin on that deck but if you don't mind a little "motion of the ocean" it is great for sleeping! My biggest complaint is lack of electrical outlets, but I heard there is a lack of them throughout all the cabins on the ship. I use a cpap machine and they had to bring in an extension cord that we had to run from the night table to the desk near the door so we had to make sure we didn't trip over it. Also there are no reading lights that you can use to read in bed. Oh, and the tv is about a 15- inch size and takes up all of the desk top along with a dvd player. It would be nice if they would put in larger tvs and mount them to the wall and implement on demand movies. It is an older ship that just got out of dry dock and all the public areas are very nice but I heard even the neptune suites that did get revamped still have the 15-inch tvs with dvrs :-( There were two huge wardrobes in this cabin so plenty of storage space. The portholes: It looked like there were 4 of them when I looked at the ship plan, but there were only two and they were behind the bed where there was a large shelf about 4 feet long with the portholes at the end of the shelf, so you were never able to get right up to them to look out but this was not a huge problem. We just wanted to be able to look out and see what the weather was like in the mornings. Bottom line though is you really don't spend that much time in your cabin and the ship is beautiful so I would book this cabin again, it was nice and quiet!