At one point in 2012, we had three cruises concurrently booked. I mention this specifically because after that third cruise of the group, we somehow managed to have zero booked for several months and not even any clear plan of when to next do one, where it would be, anything. 6 months out, emboldened by our new jobs and the revolutionary freedom to schedule things less than a year in advance, we finally settled on something that appealed to both of us. And then we canceled our reservation on the Carnival Valor for this April, departing San Juan.
We never entirely scrapped the idea of doing a Southern Caribbean cruise though. After significant thinking, planning, discussing, and arguing vociferously, we both came to the conclusion that the one cruise that appealed most to us for the year would be the Jewel of the Seas pulling a Southern Caribbean itinerary. It also just so happened to have affordable aft balconies and airfare; facts that we learned only after having chosen it on itinerary and strength of boat alone.
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Odds are exceptionally good that you know next to nothing about my wife Meredith and I if you come across this, as the blog pretty much defines “no hits”. We’re in our early 30s, have nondescript office jobs, and live in a giant college town in South Central Michigan (did I make that one obvious?) and we’re reasonably well traveled for our ages. This is my 9th cruise, all with Meredith. For her, it is her 13th. We aren’t loyalty fiends for cruise lines – there’s an appreciable difference in the level of perk available to us in loyalty clubs for individual lines versus the same sort of activity in hotel chains, and we’re young enough to believe that if we find some sort of perfect cruise line to take repeatedly, we’ll have enough time to switch up and be megagolddiamondplus with them. I only started taking cruises in ’08, but I’ve been on six different lines in that relatively short period of time with a variety of itineraries. She’s obviously been doing this longer and can claim having been on Premier Cruise Lines back in the glorious 1990s.
Outside of cruising, the bulk of trip reports you’d find on my blog will be centered around travel to amusement and theme parks around the world, but I started doing the blog to write about things that weren’t necessarily just that. Our style of cruising is now more versatile – we’ll do official excursions, we’ll get a taxi driver, we’ll do whatever sounds good. In the end, we’re doing this for new experiences, and experiences are how you really grow as a person. I try to do a good amount of research on our ports of call in advance so we can hit some high points, and shouldn’t everyone? Some folks just do what their travel agent tells them, I suppose, and we aren’t those people.
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As is almost always the case, we booked this cruise independently of a travel agent. We did, however, make two significant changes from our usual modus operandi. First, we booked to fly in the day of the cruise. Previously, this was something we thought was risky, especially since we often booked our airfare independently to save a few bucks and get the flights which most appealed. The second change was caused by the first – we spent an extra $25 or so per person to book through Royal Caribbean and have the insurance of having them get us to the boat in St. Croix should things go horribly awry on our travel down. At times, our flights were shifted around to all sorts of ugly times from what we booked, making us wonder if we made a grotesque mistake. A couple of weeks prior to boarding, our final flight set was possibly even better than the one we initially picked. We still paid under $400 for legacy carrier flights to San Juan, which is incredible from Detroit.
I won’t bore you with too many fine points from the pre-cruise prep. We packed stuff, and I used practically all of it. Our transit to San Juan went really smoothly. We had a very early flight out of Detroit, and opted to do a park-and-fly package at the Four Points to get us near the airport and put us over the Starwood Gold threshold. We’ve been there once before prior to traveling to Phoenix roughly a year ago, and we found it acceptable. This time, our room faced the airport runways and was far louder. It was also not nearly as cool as we remember it being – I don’t think I ever got the room down to 68 degrees. Our flights were all on time, and we had just enough connection time to have a surprisingly decent meal at the NASCAR Cafe in the middle of a slammed Charlotte airport. We only recalled two days before departure that I actually ordered transfers, which actually worked out OK even if they are ridiculously overpriced compared to a taxi cab. Hint: take a taxi in San Juan to the cruise pier if you are immediately headed there. It has to be $20 at most. Our transfers were something like $18 a person. But the choice is always yours. It is your cruise, after all. I guess your travel agent wouldn’t get a kickback on the cab ride. I kinda hope for the price we paid, someone did.
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