While we were in Europe this summer we spent about half our trip on a cruise with our good friends Travis and Holly, in the Mediterranean Sea. We departed from Venice and visited locations in Greece, Turkey, and Croatia. Not only were the places that we visited new to all of us, but the entire experience of cruising was completely new to me. Here I give my thoughts about this first experience cruising. The cruise was on one of Royal Caribbean’s smaller ships, the Rhapsody of the Seas.

Food

Whenever someone talks about cruising the inevitably bring up the food that they ate while on the cruise, so I’ll just talk about it right away. On our ship we had a few different options for eating, there was the Edelweiss dining room, the Windjammer buffet, and the Solarium cafe all of which we could go to at no extra cost. We prefer to think of this food as prepaid food rather than free food since it was included in the cost of our ticket. There were a few other places you could eat on the ship at extra cost. Since there was plenty of variety among the prepaid food we never had a reason to spend any extra money at the restaurants.

We ate in the dining room every night of the cruise, and I thought it was a lot of fun. I always tell Meagan that I am just not a fancy person so I haven’t spent a lot of time in fancy restaurants with all the silverware and the different courses and such, so it was a lot of fun to get to experience this, especially in an environment where I could order whatever and however much I wanted. The four of us were able to eat together every night which made it a lot of fun and we were able to have the same table reservation every night except one so that meant we were able to get to know our servers a little bit.

Most of our other meals we ate at the buffet. I was impressed with the variety of food that was served there they had a lot of different kinds from all over the world and that gave me the chance to try a lot of different things. My favorite part was that they had fresh kiwis every day something I rarely have at home so I made the most of it by eating them every day.

The schedule of the three food places was arranged so that one of them was almost always open. This meant that we normally ate at the Solarium cafe which was by the pool when the buffet was closed at night.

State Rooms

Of course having never cruised before I had never been in a ships staterooms. Meagan had told me they were very small, and she was right of course. But they weren’t so small that it was difficult for two people to share one. We had an interior state room so had no windows and no balcony. I thought this lack of natural light would bother me, but we didn’t spend very much time in the state rooms so I didn’t really mind. And on the plus side it was super dark when we went to sleep so I slept really well.

Entertainment and Recreation

Since this was my first cruise I had nothing to compare it to in terms of the entertainment and recreation available on board. I am told that since it was a smaller ship there was not as many activities as there sometimes are on other ships. Fortunately we spent most of our days at different ports and only had two days at sea so we normally had plenty to do. We went to the shows every night in the onboard theater, there was a lot of variance in the shows, some I really liked, some I really didn’t. The crew did a lot activities, which also varied in quality. Meagan liked going to Zumba and I won a Minute to Win It type game. My favorite activity was the rock wall which unfortunately was only open for a short time each afternoon, but I climbed nearly every day and the crew who ran the rock wall (and other sports) were super nice.

Sea Sickness

I only got sea sick one time on the cruise. I think it was the second night in and the waves got pretty rough and we were in the front of the ship for the show. I felt really terrible by the end of the show, so I went straight to bed after taking some dramamime. I took it one more time during the cruise when I started feeling a little queazy because I didn’t want to feel that bad again.

Ports of Call

We will of course be talking a lot more about the ports we visited on the blog over the next couple months so I won’t go into to much detail here. But I loved being able to visit a different place each day and to see many beautiful locations in such a short time. Of course this is perfect for travel bloggers. We only used a service provided by the cruise ship one time because they tended to be very expensive and we liked to do our own thing. The only service that we ever used was a direct transfer bus in Croatia, other than that we were able to find our own way without too much trouble.

The Traps

Even though we got a good deal on the cruise it was still a huge purchase for us on our budget, so I wasn’t expecting the amount of things that they would still try and get us to purchase on the ship. When we first got there Travis told me that the whole place was full of traps and we had to avoid them. A perfect example is when we got to our stateroom and I almost opened up a bottle of water there, turns out that bottle of water cost like five dollars! Most of the traps weren’t that tricky though, and we were able to successfully avoid them.

The Internet

Many people enjoy being away from the internet and communication while they are on a cruise and there certainly are some perks to it. The problem of course for us was that blogging is an internet based business, and internet on a cruise ship is extremely expensive. We had prepared by doing a lot of scheduling of posts and social media, but of course we also wanted to give some in the moment experiences to our readers. I didn’t anticipate how hard internet would be to find in the ports of call and how most places that had internet it wouldn’t actually work well. We did end up paying for one day of internet on the ship using some on board credit that we had, but only because there was an important email that I needed to send. There were definitely perks to not being connected all the time, but there were downsides too.

Sum Up

Cruising is great. It’s a fantastic way to travel, and I had a ton of fun. One of the things I liked the most is that even though there were lots of times they tried to get us to spend money, we had already paid for everything we needed. That takes a huge load off your mind trying to figure out what to eat, what to do for fun, etc. It’s a very relaxing way to travel.