My Life On Board Ship

My husband and I traveled for twelve days in July aboard the Celebrity Eclipse on a cruise through the Baltic Sea. I didn’t really know what to expect. I’d never been on a large cruise ship before, only the Viking River Cruise in 2014.

Well, that’s not quite true. I had been on a smaller cruise ship in the Aegean Sea that stopped at a few Greek Islands when I was on the People to People trip in the summer of 1971. That had not been a great experience. Four high-school girls in one small stateroom. The seas pitched enough that I felt the need for Dramamine, but I didn’t have any with me.

I have suffered from seasickness on other occasions also, most notably when I was on a junk in the Hong Kong Harbor during a business trip. That was a mortifying event.

Despite my weak stomach, I had thoroughly enjoyed the Viking cruise on the Rhine River without any queasiness, so I had high hopes for the ocean cruise. “How much could a huge ship pitch and roll?” I asked my Surface-Warfare-qualified Navy husband.

“Oh, you’d be surprised,” he said.

That gave me pause. But off we went.

We boarded the ship in Amsterdam. Celebrity had the boarding process down to a science. Except that even cruise lines are at the mercy of technology like everyone else in the world these days. Their computer wouldn’t scan our passports. Then it wouldn’t scan our credit card. We moved to another PC terminal, and all was well.

Sunset from our veranda

Our Celebrity stateroom had a veranda, which made it bigger and nicer than what we had had on Viking. I give my sister credit—she decided the deck we would stay on, though we picked the specific room. Most days, my husband and I spent at least some time on the veranda. We gazed at the sea. Or at passing ships. Or at the shoreline. Or at wind farms. Whatever appeared within view. We saw the waves roll, but the ship stayed steady.

A passing cargo ship

And we ate well. Overall, I liked the food better on the Viking cruise. But there were more options on the larger Celebrity ship. Any time we were awake and hungry (and even when we weren’t hungry), there was food available. My husband and I typically ate breakfast (and lunch, when we weren’t on shore) in the huge Oceanview cafeteria with wide windows. We liked the immediate availability of food and the great variety—as well as the views. My sister and her husband, by contrast, typically ate their meals in the sit-down main Moonlight Sonata Restaurant, preferring the greater attention and more attractively presented food.

A castle on the Danish shore

Dinners the four of us ate together, usually in the main restaurant. But we had pre-purchased a three-dinner specialty restaurant package, and we thoroughly enjoyed each of the three specialty restaurants we tried—Tuscan Grille (Italian food, of course), QSine (a tapas-like meal of original dishes), and my favorite Muranos (with European cuisine).

One of many wind farms

And the desserts! I don’t typically eat prepared desserts at home, though I indulge my sweet tooth often enough with sugary granola bars and chocolate bars. But on the cruise, I ate dessert at every lunch and dinner, and that was after pastries at breakfast. I was lucky to only gain two pounds during the trip.

A shipboard lecture

We did more than eat and watch the ocean. We went to lectures on the cities where we would stop and on the ship’s engines and navigation systems. My husband paid for an in-depth tour of the ship, but I didn’t care to spend the money on that.

We shopped—or I should say we window-shopped—in the ship’s retail area. We picked up free coffees and teas and ice creams (because we had purchased a beverage package, and because meals weren’t always enough).

We sat on the pool deck and on the sun deck. We sat in the library (where I even wrote five pages on my novel one day . . . though that was the only work I did the entire trip). We sat in lounges and on viewing decks. We walked the hallways of the ship.

And we walked on shore trips. More about those in a later post.

I can’t speak to the quality of the Celebrity shore excursions, because we used Alla Tours, another tour company, which my sister had found. (She got our family’s planning gene in even greater quantities than I did.) More about Alla Tours in another post also.

It was a full and varied twelve days. I felt the ship’s engines most of the time, but the seas were calm and I didn’t need my Dramamine. (Though I kept it with me at all times.)

On the whole, I would say I preferred the Viking experience, because the ship was smaller and more intimate. Even after twelve days, I saw passengers on the Celebrity ship I’d never seen before. On Viking, while there were too many people to get to know, we at least recognized our fellow travelers. The Viking food was better overall, but the Celebrity food gave us more variety, and the specialty restaurants were at least as good as Viking’s food. (And it must be easier to prepare food for 150 passengers, as opposed to 3000.) Service was wonderful on both cruise lines.

I would be happy to take another Celebrity cruise. But I would look first to see if Viking traveled to the destinations I wanted to visit.

If you’ve taken a cruise, what did you like best about the experience?