A touch of Disney and 2 cruises in a week! 2nd Travel and Embarkation Day

October 06, 2021

Saturday

Having been at home since Wednesday we were ready for our 2nd cruise! This one was 6 nights with Royal Caribbean on Anthem of the Seas departing from Southampton.

We live in Dorset so didn't really need to travel the day before but not having been away since Feb 2020 (before the 2 cruises) we decided why not?

We did our usual pre travel cleaning routine and I completed my Sept Cycling Challenge on the Peloton (300 miles for Cancer Research - I did 307 miles in 23 days due to being away!)

We got the car out of the garage and discovered that it hadn't charged overnight We had enough to get to our hotel but would need to stop and charge at some point so that we could get home...!

We left home at about 1530, we went via Salisbury and stopped at Next to buy Rob a new suit for formal night (his apparently don't fit anymore) but this meant I could get another Pumpkin Spice Latte from Starbucks

We stopped on the M27 to top up the car - we charged for about 30 mins (cost £3) and then attempted to find our hotel. The sat nav apparently thought we could just leap off the motorway which clearly didn't work so we had to stop and figure out how to find the hotel ourselves. We arrived a little later than expected due to the added detour.

We headed to our room - didn't need to check in because Hilton have a Digital Key so we could go straight up.

We decided not to try and find food outside of the hotel incase we got lost again so instead got pizza and chips from room service (we were apparently not permitted to eat in the restaurant). It was ok, but not particularly exciting.

I think we watched School of Rock again on the TV - there were limited choices tonight.

Sunday

This morning we headed down to get breakfast (we had to book a slot the night before).

Surprisingly again they were offering a standard buffet (which seemed odd given we couldn't eat in the restaurant last night), but Rob was able to order an omelette which he was pleased about. I decided to just have toast and jam in advance of the food fest on the ship.

We left hotel at around 1115 and took the short drive to the cruise terminal. We parked and walked in (it was literally across the road) and were quickly through security.

Check in was a stressful experience, as with Disney the signal was poor and my NHS app wouldn't work, luckily we had saved copies of our NHS code (as we needed them for the Disney process the previous week) and we were finally able to access our PCR test results and were allowed through.

This would probably be my only complaint about both cruises - the check in process was unnecessarily stressful given that we had to provide vaccine info and had tests arranged by the cruise company... so in theory they already had access to all of the information.

We were allowed on board immediately - we didn't have to wait, we had our sea passes scanned and a photo taken (which was awful). Our room was already available so we dropped our hand luggage and went to our muster point to complete the safety briefing. I made some reservations for shows later in the week and dinner for this evening.

We took a little wander around and immediately realised how much bigger the ship was compared to the Disney Magic. Rob got himself some pizza, we collected our drink cups and then we explored deck 14/15. The weather was unexpectedly good so we picked up a soft serve ice cream along the way.

At some point we popped into the Windjammer and got some cake and whilst sat at our table we were then force fed another piece of cake! (I mean not literally but a guy brought over 2 slices and so we had to eat them, didn't we?)

We headed back to the room and then I decided to go and do a power walk (using my Peloton app) on the running track. It was a little tricky dodging all of the people who were just getting on board and getting their bearings but I managed.

Next up a coffee for me (where we figured out how to get my included coffee card) and then we decided to explore decks 4 and 5 which were basically empty. We discovered that there were between 800 - 900 people on board which seemed ridiculously low.

We had dinner in the My Time Dining Room, our team was Jocelle and Jaya, both of which were fab. They learned our names very quickly (how do they do that?)

Rob had mushroom soup, steak and royal chocolate cake. I had antipasti, southern fried chicken and key lime pie. We both also had ice cream The food was excellent, I think the presentation was slightly less good than the Disney food but the quality was brilliant.