After having so much fun in December 2019/January 2020 with a New Year’s Eve Cruise, we planned a Christmas + NYE cruise for the following year… and then 2020 happened. 🙁 This was replanned for 2021, and thankfully it actually happened!
The rest of the post details the adventure but long story short… It was the tale of two cruises, with the first half being as wonderful as it possibly could be and the second half marred by the Omicron variant. My family was blessed to not get sick, but this trip ended up as a source of stress instead of an escape from it.
Fort Lauderdale & Christmas at Sea
A couple weeks before the trip, I saw someone on CruiseCritic’s Celebrity forum post pictures and details about Hotel Maren Fort Lauderdale. I’d never heard of it (and I thought I knew all the FLL Hilton properties pretty well by now), but it turned out to be new. It was gorgeous and the reviews were great, so we made a last second switch. SO grateful that we did, as it exceeded all expectations. We got upgraded to an oceanfront room with a balcony almost as big as the room, and they arranged a car service for us to get to the port in the morning. It is $$$$ but I will happily use a free reward night there anytime I can.
I followed my normal FLL departure routine (and added an extra step!):
- Dinner at Bubba Gump’s. Yes, it’s silly. Yes, it’s delicious every time.
- Get up at oh-dark-thirty and go for a walk along the beach at/near sunrise. Since it was Christmas Eve, there were only two ships in port, so didn’t get to see them coming in (that happened earlier than I was willing to be up).
- New – light breakfast at Hotel Maren’s beachfront restaurant. With the warm sunshine, it was a perfect morning.
I don’t have a stated goal to sail on every single Celebrity ship (although I wouldn’t mind it if it happened…), but exploring a new ship is always fun. Being a OCD planner, I watched videos and looked at deck plans to get excited for the trip. Seeing Silhouette (or “Sillie”) all decked out for the holidays made it even more beautiful. There was a string duo playing Christmas music at the bottom of the elevator “hole in the ship” and the navigation channel on the TV also had Christmas music on a loop. It was perfect to listen to while I decorated.
One major advantage over the Solstice Class (or “S-Class”) ships over other Celebrity ship classes is being able to open the divider between balconies when your party is in more than one cabin. The space is HUGE and we spent a lot of time out there. Silhouette set sail almost exactly on schedule (4pm), and we got a bit of a “show” as the Coast Guard herded a few stupid boaters out of the way of our significantly larger ship. They got put in the “penalty box” behind some buoys until we had passed.
The ship (which can hold ~2800 passengers) had somewhere between 1000 and 1400 onboard (I got different answers from different crewmembers). A cruise ship that is only 40-50% full is a wonderful thing and we are getting very spoiled. This was definitely a higher percentage than Summit in November, and (since this was a holiday sailing) there were more activities where groups of people got together in one place.
- Christmas carols with the crew (first video in the Instagram post below) was so much fun. They gave out little books and for some reason, we sang the songs completely out of order, but that just made everyone laugh.
- On Christmas morning, after opening stockings and drinking hot chocolate (just like at home, except home doesn’t have room service), we joined the Santa parade (second video and the photo after it in the Instagram post below). It started in the Sky Lounge, with Santa and a band that I can only describe as “New Orleans style”. We took the track above the pool deck aft toward Oceanview, with the band playing Jingle Bells over and over the whole time. As we passed the buffet, about 1/3 of the group went “ooh, breakfast!” and peeled off. The rest of us continued back outside, down to the pool deck, ad forward to the other elevator bank/stairwell. The final destination was the Grand Foyer (Santa had presents to give out to the children onboard).
- The food was incredible (as always) and we saw an AMAZING sunset over Cuba.
Also got to do some stargazing and saw Jupiter, Saturn, and Venus.
Curacao, Aruba, and Bonaire
I had never been to the ABC islands before, but wanted to for quite some time. I was not disappointed by any of them and want to go back.
- Curacao was one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been. The waves on the north shore, the various blues of the water… fantastic.
- Aruba answered the question of “what’s a desert island look like?” It was so strange to see the landscapes there.
- I did not dive at Bonaire (I think I’ve hung up my regulator) but after just going snorkeling there, I know why people go there to dive. The crew of the sailboat was incredible, too; I cannot recommend BlueBay enough.
Other notes:
- The Spa was just lovely. I had two treatments – seaweed wrap and restorative salt stone massage. Both were great and the staff was so wonderful. I also got a pedicure on the last day since I had some OBC to spend up; my nail technician was both amazing at her job and very nice to chat with. The Persian Garden was disappointing compared to Reflection; I had a free port day perk, and knowing what I now know, I would not pay money to go.
- The Specialty Restaurants were hit and miss. We had a miss with dinner at Lawn Club Grill, the open-air restaurant next to the Lawn Club (real grass growing on a cruise ship) and a serious hit with the pop-up Indian restaurant Taj X at Sushi on Five. Celebrity needs to just make an Indian restaurant on all the ships; Taj X was amazing, and their Indian dishes at Oceanview are always very good. I also think they need to make more pop-up restaurants of various cuisines on all the ships.
- The crew in the Main Dining Room were perfection. Our waiter, assistant waiter, sommelier, bartender, and maitre d’ made us feel like both royalty and long-lost friends. They learned our favorite drinks, told us we were missed after we went to the specialty restaurants, and shared stories about their backgrounds and families.
- New Year’s Eve was a bit less festive than 2019/2020. COVID cases onboard were increasing, so we didn’t really want to be in any crowds. The normal pool deck party was cancelled both in an attempt to spread people out and because we were expecting bad weather (high winds and waves). They instead had multiple parties in multiple places – the string duo in one bar, a silent disco on the pool deck, a band in the foyer, etc. Very grateful to the resourceful crew who had to throw together all of those parties with 1 day notice. At midnight, dozens of balloons got dropped in the foyer. I tried capturing video, but due to operator error, I just have pictures of the aftermath.
Five Days, No Ports…
The fun and games ended after Bonaire. The morning that we arrived there, the Captain announced that 1 symptomatic crewmember had tested positive for COVID. (Later learned that the crewmember was the casino manager, so that was closed for multiple days as all staff had to be quarantined just in case). That night, there was another announcement that 2 passengers tested positive. The next day, another case and the Captain started recommending we wear masks. As the case numbers continued to increase over the next few days, that became practically begging (but not requiring).
We were supposed to arrive in Cartegena, Colombia around 5AM on 12/31. I woke up at 6:15AM to still see water outside… and according to the Navigation channel, we were heading straight north at 15kts. We’d apparently entered the harbor, but got denied permission to dock (due to the 13 passengers and 3 crew COVID cases onboard) so spun 180 and left. I got a glimpse of the skyline in the distance.
Missing the port was sad (it would have been my first time in South America!) but… those were the times we were sailing in. We were extremely thankful at that point that the CDC had forced the cruise lines to have agreements with US ports to allow docking – there would be no repeats of March 2020. Cases continued to climb (we eventually got to at least 44 passengers and 13 crew) and we were also denied entry to Bimini, Bahamas, our last port. This led to an unexpected 5 straight days at sea.
I’ve survived 10 straight days at sea before, but that wasn’t with a virus spreading onboard. The five days were difficult at times – stressful and sometimes sad.
- I was grateful that the Captain continued to give us case numbers, because I wouldn’t want to be worried that they were hiding things from us, but it did put a damper on the vacation. One night in the Main Dining Room, when the overhead system went “bing-bong,” there was an audible groan through the whole room because we knew that an unscheduled announcement meant more cases.
- We saw cabins near us with the balcony tables in the hallway and we knew that meant they were under precautionary quarantine (the tables are used for contactless food delivery). Later, the tables disappeared and a crewmember was seen fogging the hallway with disinfectant (someone had tested positive and was taken down to the quarantine deck).
- There were multiple overhead announcements each day for people to report to guest services (presumably they were out of their cabins and needed for contact tracing).
- The worst thing was that we didn’t get to say goodbye to our fantastic waiter; on the last night, he was in quarantine as he’d spent some time with another crewmember who had tested positive.
It seemed like cruise line leadership (not just Celebrity) was asleep at the wheel over the holiday break as things fell apart with Omicron. There were no company-wide decisions until the horse had long run out of the barn; the Captains were left to decide things for themselves. The situation on sister ship Equinox seemed worse than Silhouette, with case numbers quickly growing and then they just stopped reporting them. Multiple people started reporting online from quarantine onboard the ship – the crew seemed totally overwhelmed and they were lucky they didn’t end up with some real medical emergencies. Silhouette’s buffet was all crew-served, including handing you plates and silverware, while Equinox allowed passengers to get their own plates – and reuse them! (ick, that’s just Buffets 101). Royal Caribbean seemed to have even bigger problems than Celebrity. The cruise lines paid for their lack of preparedness with a wave of cancellations for cruises in January and later in the spring. Hopefully they learned.
A couple days before the end of the cruise, I was asked by someone online whether I was glad I’d went or if I might have been happier if I’d cancelled. I’d been discussing this with my family already and really tried to look at the situation objectively.
This is a hard question for a couple reasons. One, I don’t want to unduly influence anyone else. What’s okay for us may not be okay for you; we all have different situations. Two, the cruise isn’t over yet and I don’t want to jinx us. But as of right now, today – yes, I’m glad I came on this cruise. I LOVED the ABCs and want to go back to see more. I enjoyed Christmas onboard the ship. I am so happy to have met our wonderful waiters and steward; every time I meet people from around the world, I have more appreciation for where they’re from and for my own home.
I’m also glad I came because this cruise has shown me the limit of my comfort level … I’m not new to COVID cruising. The world situation was different for each of [my] 3 cruises. The first 2 were barely affected by COVID, but that’s obviously not the case right now. I’ve gotten a glimpse of how bad ‘bad’ can be from this experience and from others writing live threads right now, in terms of both risk of exposure and impact on the cruise. And I’ve realized that I don’t currently feel comfortable with a cruise that doesn’t originate/end in the US. I’ve taken a lot of comfort from knowing this ship will get me back to my country in the end no matter what happens along the way. If I had to worry about if the ship is going to be allowed to dock, testing and quarantining in a place where I don’t speak the language, getting home from another continent… no, thank you. I couldn’t relax with all those possibilities out there. I’m very grateful to not have found my limit because a situation pushed me past it.
Final Thoughts
This was a very unique experience that I hope not to repeat (at least the second half). Once safely home, I tried to focus on how wonderful the first half of the cruise had been instead of the stress of the second half. After about a month, I was ready to plan another cruise. 😉 Hopefully the world will hold itself together and no more crazy variants.