Tag: Cruise Page 2 of 10
We are back from another crazy, life-changing trip! This time we spent 12 nights at sea sailing from Florida to Portugal. When we arrived on land, we explored Lisbon, Porto, Toledo, Madrid, and Reykavik getting around by train, plane, and boat. This trip involved four separate flights on four different airlines. Here is a sneak peek at what is to come over the next few months:
Day 1: Orlando
Day 2: Board Norwegian Getaway in Port Canaveral
Day 3: Great Stirrup Cay, Bahamas
Day 10: Ponta Delgada, Azores
Day 12: Funchal, Madeira
Day 14-16: Lisbon Day 1, Day 2, Day 3
Day 16: Sintra
Day 17: Douro Valley
Day 18-21: Porto
Day 21-23: Toledo
Day 23-24: Madrid
Day 25: Reykjavik
The trip alternated between a relaxing week at sea without much to do and jam-packed days exploring European cities. We saw many historic sites and beautiful churches. We tried some of the most amazing food of my life and drank some delicious wine. Without much time at each place, we got a feel for many of our stops without really being able to see and do everything so many of these places have been added to our “must return” list for future travels.
Thanks for stopping by! To read about some of our previous trips, visit my Trips Page. If you like my photos be sure to “like” my Facebook Page and follow me on Instagram! For my list of gadgets to make your travels easier, click here. To see inside my camera bag, check out my updated Gear Page.
Our March 2023 Pacific Coastal Cruise on the Celebrity Solstice was our first time sailing on a higher-end cruise line. There were three main factors that went into booking this cruise: dates (it lined up with my spring break), ports (Pacific Coastal with a focus on California ports is an unusual itinerary), and price (this was the cheapest cruise I have ever booked) so the more-luxury amenities didn’t really play into our decision to book this at all, but they were very nice perks!
The Grand Foyer
I originally booked us in an oceanview cabin but as we were getting closer to sailing, I notice the prices going down and I called our travel agent who was able to upgrade us to a balcony for $100 total with an additional $250 in onboard credit. This was much better than the minimum bid to upgrade that the cruise line offered. I highly recommend making a note of the fare when you booked and keeping an eye on the prices as you get closer to sailing. It is important to note that if you booked with any perks like free drinks or gratuities, a lot of times the sales may not include them so you would have to decide between your perks or the upgraded stateroom.
Embarkation in Los Angeles was much improved over the headache we experienced in Vancouver. We had an 11:00 check-in time and we had to sit around for a little bit waiting for boarding to begin. Celebrity is known for having several higher-end cabin options including Concierge Class and Aqua class. Guests in these cabins and those that are Elite and above in the Captain’s Club (Celebrity’s Loyalty Program) were able to board first but we were on the ship in no time and enjoying lunch in the Oceanview Cafe.
The food on Celebrity was unbelievable. I am not usually a fan of cruise ship buffets, but I chose to eat lunch at the Oceanview Cafe instead of finding a restaurant on land several times. They had a large variety and everything we chose was very good. The ship was sailing at about 60% capacity, which is unheard of right now, but it was never a problem to find a seat and the crew was always around cleaning tables. There was a crew member that stood in the middle of the buffet singing good morning to everyone. It put a smile on my face each day.
Grand Epernay Dining Room
After our experiences with my time dining on Royal Caribbean, we booked the early dinner on this cruise. When we got on board, we went straight to the Maitre D and switched the late dining and I am really glad that we did. At home, we are not late diners, but the late dining time allowed us to eat a big lunch and not worry about having dinner in just a few hours. One thing that surprised me, was when she made the switch, the Maitre D asked if we wanted a table for two or to share a table with other young people. Part of me wished I was more outgoing because that could’ve been fun. It also could’ve been very annoying, so we opted for the table for two.
The food and service in the main dining room was spectacular. There has been a lot of talk in the Celebrity Facebook groups about reduced offerings in the main dining room and the quality going downhill. If that is the case, I cannot imagine what it was like before. The food was leagues above what we experienced on their sister-line Royal Caribbean.
With that extra onboard credit, we tried two of Celebrity’s signature restaurants, Tuscan Grille, the Italian Steakhouse, and Murano, the French restaurant. The steaks from Tuscan Grille were great but I feel like we missed out because we didn’t order sides of the pasta. Murano was amazing. We had the Chateaubriand for two and it was prepared tableside. The atmosphere of Murano was not for me. It was too stuffy. I really don’t need a server to ask for permission before setting down the food that I ordered. If we sail Celebrity again, we would probably try Tuscan Grill again but skip Murano.
Soundtrack Band
Entertainment on the Solstice really blew us away. There was live music going on pretty much all day somewhere on the ship. We really enjoyed the house band, Soundtrack. They played a lot of Scary Pockets arrangements of songs, which is Chris’ favorite YouTube band so we watched them pretty much every night. The theater shows were high quality and we enjoyed the special acts they brought on for our sailing. One of them was on the current season of The Voice.
The Celebrity Solstice is a mid-sized ship, but the offerings were very unique. Up on the top deck is the lawn club (below) where there is real grass that you could sit on, play bocce ball, and practice your putting. There is also a hot glass studio. When the ship launched it was a partnership with the Corning Museum of Glass, now it is the Hollywood Glass Studio. The weather on this sailing was chilly so there weren’t a lot of people hanging out by the pool and chair-hogs definitely weren’t a problem. The Solstice was a lot more low-key than the rock wall and Flow Rider on the Royal Caribbean ships, and because of that, there are few children on board. Nothing about the ship was stuffy or too formal, which was one of my worries about booking on a higher-end cruise line.
Our balcony stateroom was great. It was an average size for a balcony cabin, but the bathroom was bigger than on the Royal Caribbean ships and had more storage. Since we upgraded to a balcony guarantee, we had an obstructed view, so we got to watch the crew members power washing the lifeboats during port days (below). Our stateroom was toward the aft of the ship which made it very easy to get around. Our stateroom attendant was great and was very quick to clean our room each day. Celebrity is still servicing staterooms twice a day and they are still leaving chocolates on your pillow at night. I haven’t seen that anywhere in years so I was impressed.
All of our encounters with the other guests were very positive. We were definitely some of the youngest guests on the ship, but everyone we ran into was friendly and happy. They didn’t constantly complain like on our Alaska cruise with Royal.
Disembarkation was a bit of a mess, but it wasn’t Celebrity’s fault. The port of San Pedro had two other ships coming in that day, so we had to use a third pier a ways away from the other two. Because we were disembarking with the ramps they use in ports and they are very steep, we were not able to carry our luggage off and we had to take a shuttle to the area where we could pick up our luggage from a tent. We found our luggage no problem, but since we ended up in the last disembarkation group it took forever to get a ride back to Los Angeles and it ate into our day of exploring the city.
Overall, this was a wonderful trip and I would book a Celebrity cruise again in a heartbeat. I have already been searching to see where the Solstice will be next year on my spring break. Chris says this is the best vacation we’ve had in a while and if you’ve been following this blog, you know some of our recent trips have been once-in-a-lifetime kind of trips.
Thanks for stopping by! To read more about this trip, check out the Cruising the Pacific Coast Trip Report. To read about some of our previous trips, visit my Trips Page. If you like my photos be sure to “like” my Facebook Page and follow me on Instagram! For my list of gadgets to make your travels easier, click here. To see inside my camera bag, check out my updated Gear Page.
When planning this trip, I really didn’t know what I wanted to do for our day in Santa Barbara. There were not many excursions offered by the cruise line and the ones they did have were very expensive for what they were (walking tour for $125, no thank you). Not too long before the cruise, someone in the Cruise Critic group mentioned the free tours offered by Walking Tours Santa Barbara. If you have a cruise booked, I highly recommend joining the roll call over on Cruise Critic so you get tips like this one!
Walking Tours Santa Barbara offers three totally free tours on specific days and times: waterfront (the one I booked), Old Town, and the Funk Zone. They just ask if you enjoy your tour that you tip your guide. The waterfront tour took us from the Santa Barbara Maritime Museum to the Amtrak Station. The company advertises this tour as the perfect tour for first-time visitors to Santa Barbara. Personally, I felt that the tour went on a little long. This would’ve been a perfect 90-minute tour, but I really can’t complain since it was free.
The iconic Santa Barbara courthouse
Santa Barbara is a tourist destination all year round because of their beautiful weather. It is really hard to complain about a place with average high temperatures from 66 to 77 degrees Fahrenheit all year. The mission-style adobe buildings that the city leaders adopted after the 1925 earthquake destroyed most of the town add to the city’s natural beauty.
After the tour, we did a little wine tasting in the area of town known as the Funk Zone. We started at the Santa Barbara Winery since we were able to get tasting coupons from our tour guides for $12 (much less than we paid to taste in Sonoma). From there we walked to The Valley Project which advertises its wine as spanning the 5 AVAs (American Viticulture Areas) of Santa Barbara. While these wines don’t get the attention of a Napa or Sonoma, everything we had was very good and we brought even more bottles back onto the ship.
One thing that was awkward about our time in Santa Barbara is that it was very obvious that a lot of the locals do not want the cruise ship traffic. We heard a lot of muttering about “ship people” when we were walking around and our tour guides were very curious about our change of itinerary with Monterey banning cruise ships. It is very different than in Alaska where the people were begging for the return of cruise ships during COVID. Once again, it just made me think about what it means to be a conscious cruiser. If we cruisers want cruise ships to be helpful to the local economies they visit, it is important that we to get off the ship and visit the shops and restaurants and spend some money. If we just lay on the beach and eat and drink on the ship, more and more interesting places are going to stop allowing ships to visit.
Overall, I really enjoyed our day in Santa Barbara and wished I had more time in this beautiful area. I guess Santa Barbara will have to be added to that increasingly long list of places I need to return to!
Thanks for stopping by! Be sure to stop by next week for my review of the Celebrity Solstice! To read more about this trip, check out the Cruising the Pacific Coast Trip Report. To read about some of our previous trips, visit my Trips Page. If you like my photos be sure to “like” my Facebook Page and follow me on Instagram! For my list of gadgets to make your travels easier, click here. To see inside my camera bag, check out my updated Gear Page.
Some of the links below are affiliate links and as such, I earn a small commission from purchases that allow me to continue telling you my stories without costing you anything extra.
After our day at sea, we made it to San Fransisco. Since our previous stop was in Mexico, we had to have an immigration check before we could go ashore. We were assigned a number and were asked to bring our passports to the dining room when our number was called. For U.S. Citizens with a passport, it was no big deal. We were off the ship and heading to our wine country destination in no time at all.
When our port stop in Monterrey was canceled and they added back the overnight in San Fransisco I was excited. That was one of the reasons we booked this cruise and it gave us time to leave San Fransisco and get into wine country. We had a trip to Napa and Sonoma planned for 2020 but obviously, it was canceled so this trip allowed us a little taste of what we missed. With only one day to explore the area we decided to spend it in Sonoma because it is a little closer and from my research, Sonoma seems to be more focused on the wine, whereas Napa wineries are more for the experience.
When planning our day in Sonoma, I relied on a book that has served me well in the past, Wine Trails of the U.S. and Canada. We chose to visit Gundlach Bunschu and Laurel Glen Vineyards. Gundlach Bunschu is the oldest family-owned winery in Sonoma. With the German heritage, it reminded me a lot of the wineries in northern Michigan with outdoor seating around fire tables. It was a very laid-back experience and all the wines we tried were wonderful! Laurel Glen was a much more intimate experience. We had reserved the last tasting of the day and we had the downtown tasting room to ourselves. Laurel Glen has a much smaller repertoire, being known for their Cabernet Sauvignon. In general, I am not a fan of California Cabernets, but what we tried at Laurel Glen was spectacular. I also loved their rose which is made from old vines on the edge of their property that they don’t know (and don’t want to know) what they are. They combine them every harvest into a delicious rose that they sell out every year.
We chose to rent a car and do this winery tour on our own as opposed to using a ship tour or another organized tour because we wanted to be in control of where we went. As I mentioned above, we were looking for good wine, not the best views or winery experience. A lot of the organized tours of Sonoma stopped at Sutter Home, which has free tastings but is mass-market wine that you find on the bottom shelf at the supermarket. If you’re not that picky, one of those tours would be fine, but I am very happy that we chose to go our own way because we tried two fabulous new wineries that we will probably buy more from in the future.
We decided to come back to San Fransisco on the Pacific Coast Highway and we were rewarded with a phenomenal sunset over the Pacific (top). We couldn’t have timed our drive any better. We ended our day back in San Fransisco at an Argentinian Restaurant called Lolinda. Afterward, we headed back to the ship for the night to prepare for another day in San Fransisco in the morning. Be sure to stop by next week as I detail our day to explore San Fransisco and our tour of Chinatown.
Thanks for stopping by! To read more about this trip, check out the Cruising the Pacific Coast Trip Report. To read about some of our previous trips, visit my Trips Page. If you like my photos be sure to “like” my Facebook Page and follow me on Instagram! For my list of gadgets to make your travels easier, click here. To see inside my camera bag, check out my updated Gear Page.
Pin This:
After falling into the Ocean in San Diego, our next day was much less adventurous. Our ship (the Celebrity Solstice) took us down to Mexico’s Baja Peninsula to the town of Ensenada. It may come as a surprise, but one of the things that this region is known for is its wine. The Ville de Guadalupe (The Guadalupe Valley) is known as Mexico’s Napa Valley.
When talking to some people on the ship about this tour, they turned their noses up at it because Mexico isn’t known for its wine. The reason we don’t see Mexican wine in stores in the United States has nothing to do with the quality but more with the quantity that they produce. With such small growing regions, Mexico does not produce that much wine and most of what they do produce, the Mexican people consume.
Our tour took us to two different wineries, L.A. Cetto, and Casa de Doña Lupe. L.A. Cetto has been making wine in Mexico since 1928 and is probably one of the biggest wine production facilities we have ever toured. We tasted some of their mass-market wines and also some of their more high-end wines and everything we tried was on-par with the big American wineries for a fraction of the cost. Casa de Doña Lupe has a more home-spun feel to it and reminded me of a lot of the wineries we visit in Northern Michigan. Our tasting was outside among the vines while a local guitar player strummed a tune. After tasting at Doña Lupe we were able to browse their shop for wines as well as homemade jams and olive oils to take home.
One thing that is tough about a tour like this is that everything we tried was excellent and very inexpensive (a bottle from the reserve line from L.A. Cetto worked out to about $16), but traveling with two adults, you can only bring two bottles of wine across the border without paying duty so we were very limited in what we brought home.
We booked our wine-tasting tour through Shore Excursions Group. We have used them many times and have always had good results. They guarantee to get you back to the ship on time and they are much cheaper than booking through the cruise line.
We really fell in love with the Valle de Guadalupe and hope to return sometime and actually stay in the area. I guess I will have to add it to the list! Thanks for stopping by! To read more about this trip, check out the Cruising the Pacific Coast Trip Report. To read about some of our previous trips, visit my Trips Page. If you like my photos be sure to “like” my Facebook Page and follow me on Instagram! For my list of gadgets to make your travels easier, click here. To see inside my camera bag, check out my updated Gear Page.
Pin This:
