After about a year and a half of watching the thread on this cruise here on CC, we finally departed for our first transatlantic cruise. We booked the flights and a pre-cruise package in Barcelona from Royal Caribbean though our travel agent. We flew coach from Dulles to Heathrow then on to Barcelona. We stayed at the Condes de Barcelona Hotel in the historic district, a good tourist hotel with included breakfast and a nice rooftop bar with great views at night. After a couple of the "hop on, hop off" bus tours to get a feel for the city, we went discovering it by foot. More Catalan than Spanish, Barcelona has a lot of fascinating architecture, but what we took away from it was the food. We had more fun trying different tapas than anything else we did.

RCCL contacted us and told us our bags would be picked up from our rooms and when we were to be downstairs for the shuttle to the ship. Very smooth. Short lines at the pier too. Nice operation.

We had a balcony cabin on deck seven. Nice size, adequate storage, everything worked. The Freedom class ship is only somewhat larger than the Voyager class, but didn't really handle crowd control as well as Oasis. The lines going into the theater and the crowds coming out were a mess. Bad crowd management was especially evident in the organization of the shore excursions. They used one venue, like the theater, for a staging area for a few thousand people. The line was one long bottleneck through the doors and all the way down to the stage where folks got bus assignments. Then they sit til they are called to head down the stairs to the gangway on deck one. One day the "bong bong" machines went down and more and more folks were stacked on the airless stairs with nowhere to go for forty-five minutes. It reminded me of the marching band being led down a blind alley in the film ANIMAL HOUSE. Not a good situation for several seniors who can't stand for a long period. If there had been an emergency, it would have been a shambles. Read more