Days 8,9 - Celebrity Apex

Weather
Cloudy, low 60’s

What we did
We walked back into town to look for a place for breakfast and had a pleasant enough meal at a pub called “The Standing Order”. An interesting thing we learned or relearned is that when you first enter a pub, you order at the bar, pay and then they bring you your food. It’s actually very efficient. We then checked out of our hotel and walked to our awaiting ship. There were long lines, but they moved quickly and we were onboard in 21 minutes! The ship is beautiful. This is our first cruise with Celebrity and each line seems to have their own ways of doing things. For example, on Celebrity, you can immediately go to your room which is nice. Your luggage arrives later, but you can at least drop off any carry-ons, etc. We then spent the afternoon exploring the ship, meeting our cabin steward, Sharon and unpacking. We have an “Edge Stateroom with Infinite Veranda.” What this means is, instead of a balcony, we have a sitting area where the balcony would be and the whole window lowers down to railing height, so you can have an open window and the benefit of sitting on a balcony, but can take advantage of that space all day. We are quite happy with this room!

We have a reservation at the Cyprus restaurant each night at 5:15pm, table number 458 and we can just walk in and sit down, or we can go to any of the other 3 main dining rooms at any time (but may have to wait). The four dining rooms are Cosmopolitan, Cyprus, Normandie and Tuscan. Each has their own distinctive atmosphere and regional specialities. What’s great is no matter which restaurant you go to, you can order off of any of the four menus! Our waiter’s name is Cyrus and he took great care of us, so we have a feeling although it’s early, we’ll be back many times at this restaurant over the next two weeks. After dinner, we went to the 7pm show where Julian Smith played the soprano saxophone, a really nice show. Then, we headed back to our room to binge watch the Diplomat before calling it a night at 1am!

The next morning, our first sea day, we got up and headed to the Oceanside Cafe for a quick bite before finding other Mahjong players. Oceanside Cafe is a huge cafeteria style eatery with many stations with a huge variety on the 14th deck. The food is good but the downside is we seem to hit it at peak times and finding a place to sit is challenging. We had breakfast and headed to the solarium where the Facebook group for this transatlantic cruise had mentioned passengers were self-organizing Mahjong playing. We met at 10am and some people brought their own mahjong sets! Tom and Amy played with Sherry (New Jersey) and Kathy (Florida) for over 2 hours. Finally, Tom won the last game. We enjoyed ourselves enormously (even though Amy didn’t win a single game). After, we went back to Oceanside Cafe for lunch. We then rested, read, exercised and watched the world go by from our beautiful window until dinner time. Being “diamond” status on Royal Caribbean equates to “Elite” status on Celebrity so every day from 5pm-7pm we get a free “happy hour” at the main bars. Our dinner routine seems to start off at the bar grabbing a drink and then bringing it to dinner. After dinner, we went to the 7pm show and this time the performance was “Crystalize.” The performance included acrobatics, choreography and stunning visual effects. The theater was packed and the performance was quite good. The cruise director mentioned that over our 13 day cruise, there will be 23 performances! I don’t think we’ll be able to catch all of them, but I think we are in for a very entertaining cruise! After, we headed back to our room to update our travel blog and get some sleep. Tomorrow is a big day, our first port of call, Vigo, Spain.

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