Cruising Again: This Time a 1-Week Cruise to Bermuda from Boston

Spoiled by our world cruise last year on the Viking Sky, Rita and I can't give a good review to Norwegian Cruise Lines. This report is written on day 2 of the cruise, after spending a night in Boston.

Having dropped my Mustang Mach-E at Freeway Ford to repair a broken seat hinge, we got a ride from fellow GW resident Roger Wright to DIA for our flight to Denver. We made our customary stop at Pour La France near our boarding gate, where I had French onion soup with sliced baguette and Rita had a burger with brie and sauteed onions. Our waitress, a charming Haitian-American who speaks 5 languages, took this picture:

As you can see, I haven’t shed all the weight I gained on the world cruise….

Arriving at the Hyatt Centric Fanieul Hall Hotel about 9 p.m., seeing Boston was limited to what I could squeeze in between breakfast and leaving for the dock at 1 p.m. I walked over to the Boston Common and back, visiting Fanieul Hall before meeting Rita at the hotel in time to check out and hire a taxi. When the taxi was 20 minutes late without showing, we called an Uber which (of course) arrived in 3 minutes. We will stop hiring taxis after that experience. My inclination has been to support that industry.

Fanieul Hall has not gotten in step with the Trump admin’s anti-woke policies. It’s a National Park Service facility, where I learned about the “Black Heritage Trail” which takes pedestrians to important sites related to the Underground Railroad. I took a picture of two displays:

I also watched a well-produced video about the Underground Railroad that was playing on the lower level. I wonder whether this African American history will be expunged by Trump and his white supremacist cronies.

Boarding the 2.300-passenger ship was easier than expected. They had required passengers to choose one of several half-hour slots for boarding. Our slot was the last one — 1:30 to 2:00, and we arrived at 1:45, thanks to our Uber driver. There was no line! It took maybe 15 minutes to drop off our luggage, pass through security, register, get our room cards and walk onto the ship. Boarding the 900-passenger Viking ships is much more time-consuming.

Our first (and lasting) impression was that the noise level on the Norwegian Jewel from other passengers and entertainment is LOUD - even overwhelming, including in the main buffet-style restaurant. There are children, teens, young adults, old adults. We immediately missed the Viking ships, which ban children under 18 and have very few non-seniors as passengers.

In the atrium of the Viking Sky you might hear a pianist playing unamplified classical and modern toons on the grand piano or a string duet performing classical pieces. In this ship’s atrium, there was a band with trumpet playing! Not only is the ambience LOUD, there is obviously little attention paid to acoustic dampening anywhere on the ship.

The food is not as good, and there’s less variety. This was most apparent on the dessert area, where there were just two choices at lunch and dinner. The salad choices are pathetic. Unlike on this ship, on the Viking Sky, all food was served from counters with the kitchen behind the servers. There was an attendant at, for example, the salad counter to make any salad you wished, if it wasn’t one of the self-service choices. On this ship, there are soft-serve ice cream machines; on the Viking ships, there’s an ice cream counter where six or eight choices of ice cream are scooped by request onto cones or in a bowl, as you wish. “Would you like nuts or dark chocolate sauce on that?” There’s a sushi counter every evening in Viking’s World Cafe. Special requests are welcomed. I went on a celery binge for a couple weeks during the world cruise, and every evening one of the waiters would bring a plate of celery sticks to me, even if it wasn’t offered then at the salad counter. Viking serves Norwegian salmon, which we feel is much better than Atlantic salmon. Despite its name, Norwegian ships only serve Atlantic salmon.

24-hour room service is free on Viking ships. You could eat every meal in your stateroom, if you wanted. On this ship, there’s a $9.95 fee for room service.

The daily schedule delivered to each stateroom is paltry in its information. There’s little information about ports. There’s a port talk in the theater at 11 a.m. which we missed, and it is not broadcast on our stateroom TV or available for streaming thereafter. I heard no morning announcement in our stateroom describing such events so we wouldn’t miss them.

We paid for the beverage plan, but it does not include water, and the tap water is undrinkable. Obviously, they don’t have a reverse osmosis system for the ship’s water, as Viking does. We could bring glasses of drinking water from the restaurant, but that was tedious, so we bought 24 12-ounce cans of drinking water for $35 that we had to order in person, and it was 10 hours before it was delivered to our stateroom.

Like Viking, this ship has Starlink service, but web browsing is tediously slow at times AND it costs money if you want more that 150 minutes of connect time for the 7 days. I paid $199 for unlimited internet access, but that can only be used on one device at a time — laptop or iPhone (for great WiFi calling), but not on both at the same time. I paid an extra $280 ($19.99 per day per device) to have full-time internet connectivity on my laptop plus both our iPhones. Total: $479 for our 7-day cruise.

There’s a wide selection of specialty restaurants (Italian, French, Asian, Sushi, etc.), and two seatings were included in our package. Without that, passengers have to pay $50 per person to eat in one of those restaurants. Such restaurants require reservations on Viking ships, but are free. We chose Japanese tonight and French tomorrow. There are additional fees even on our two free seatings - I paid $25 to add a lobster tail to my beef & broccoli entree. Also, they present a check to sign at meal’s end, with a line for entering a gratuity. On Viking, you just get up and leave. The best part of the specialty restaurants is the reduced noise level, but the Japanese restaurant is open to the atrium, so we heard that trumpet I mentioned. The French restaurant should be quieter tomorrow.

Rita got this cruise “free” from the casino she frequents in Las Vegas, but of course, we had to upgrade to get an outside cabin with balcony, plus the beverage plan, and more. We got a similar cruise on Norwegian to Alaska last year. (Water was free last year.) The plan is called Casinos at Sea, and the casino on this ship is BIG! Not just slot machines. There’s blackjack, craps, roulette and more. I get what they’re doing. Just like hotels give free rooms to regular gamblers, Norwegian offers free rooms to the Las Vegas regulars, knowing they’ll not only make money on upgrades but hopefully get money lost by gamblers. Rita’s not going to the casino, but she did visit the jewelry vendor and got me to pay for a must-have ring…. We’d probably have been better off if she gambled, because she almost always comes home with more money than she takes.

The shore excursions in Bermuda don’t interest us, so I wisely used my internet connection to reserve an electric 2-seater for all day on Monday so we can see the entire archipelago. We dock at the Royal Naval Dockyard, miles from most of this British colony. Fortunately, the “car” rental place has an outpost there. Here’s a map:

That’s my report for today/tonight. BTW, Bermuda is one hour earlier than Boston, three hours earlier than Denver, in case you want to call Rita or me. Our phones ring like at home, thanks to Starlink! Warning: If we’re not in our stateroom when you call, expect lots of background noise!