My Review July 11, 2010 Sailing MS Veendam New York to Bermuda

Our day (Sunday July 11) started out with Blue Diamond Limousines (Click the link to see their "Facebook" site) picking us up early. We got to the Passenger Pier in NYC at about 11:10am. We boarded the ship very quickly and headed for the MDR for lunch. This was the first time that we had ever did this and let me tell you it was very nice. A lot better than dealing with the crowds in the Lido. The smoothness of the entire boarding process is a testament to HAL's personnel. They really know what they are doing and this set the tone for the rest of the cruise.

They announced that the cabins were ready sometime between 12:30pm and 1pm. We went to our cabin (049 on the Navigation Deck) to await out luggage which arrived pretty quickly. We spent sail away on our Veranda. As a side note I love to sail out of New York Harbor. I am not going to talk about all the different foods we ate. But it is enough to say that for the most part most of the food was up to HAL's standards. We went to the first nights show. This show was to highlight the Veendam's dancers and singers. After seeing this show my only thought was it was OK but not great, I was proven wrong. Over the course of the next 6 nights one show was better than the last. HAL has really stepped up the quality of their singers and dancers. On all other cruises that I have been on the dancers have outnumbered singers and the singers were OK. But on the Veendam there were only 2 dancers and 5 singers and they all had been on either Broadway, A National Tour of a Broadway show, or on TV (Like American Idol). The only exception to this was the singer with the HAL Cats when they played around the Lido Pool she was just OK at times I think that she tried to do things that were out of her range and her range seemed to be very limited. Read more