Just got home from the August 12 New England/Canada cruise on Enchantment. I'm not going to repeat facts about the ship or ports - but just give our opinions of what we liked and disliked. When reading this keep in mind that we aren't the typical cruiser - we think of cruises as a fantastic means to easily get to experience different places to which we have not been. We don't in general like sea days; we don't drink alcohol; we don't stay up late when most of the "good" music starts; and don't look forward to dressing up and having six-course meals - and that eliminates most of what makes cruising special to many people.

We were in stateroom 7564 - loved the location, size of the room, and storage available. Yes, you could tell that this is a very old room but we could care less and we did spend a lot of time in our stateroom.

We prefer to eat in the Windjammer (buffet). Even though we have nowhere to go, meals are not an event for us and we can't stand how long it takes to get through a meal in the dining room. However, this was by far the worst buffet we have ever experienced. It was so bad that if we hadn't been assigned to late dinner seating and if I had appropriate clothes with me, I would have tried the dining room. Highlight was the salad bar and, that's about it. It was very rare to find anything that we could say was good at any meal. Of course, you can get an omelet which would be fine and they always had fruit - but only watermelon, pineapple, cantaloupe, and honeydew - , but the other breakfast items were usually cold or just terrible tasting. I'll lump lunch and dinner together as you can't really tell one from the other except that lunch had the hamburger/hotdog area and dinner usually had the stir fry area. I ended up having a salad and stir fry most nights - the stir fry saved me - but no shrimp was ever available. There were two or three better than average items throughout the cruise, but that's all. People did seem to pile their plates high, however, so I guess most people found the food acceptable. Desserts were pretty bad as well. I kept thinking that they must have one huge freezer on the ship as just about everything seemed that it was once frozen - think stale Sara Lee for breakfast sweets. On the third day we tried eating breakfast in the dining room thinking that it had to be better. We asked to be seated at a table for two, but we felt forced to sit at a large table. Then, since we appeared to be in a hurry, they took our two orders and brought our food before anyone else was served. Very strange. The French toast I ordered tasted just like it came from the buffet, so we never went back to the dining room. Most of the time we found seats - but often, half of the room was closed off. A few times we gave up and took our food outside and even those tables were full so we either sat on a lounge chair or went back to our balcony. This never happened at dinner - only at lunch on sea days and breakfast just about every morning. Read more