Usually, my TRs are based on day to day activities. Cruise ships are not really conducive to that sort of reporting when there’s extended at sea sections and but one real port of call (in this case, Bermuda). The days very much blend together, and seeing as your transportation, accommodations, entertainment venues, casinos, restaurants, and so on are all together in one somewhat compact package, I find it essentially impossible to separate them. Besides, how fun is “eat, sleep, eat, sleep, gamble, gamble, eat, eat, show, sleep,” to read?

Deviating from that, I’ll first review the ship and the ports, then the destination for the cruise (in this case, pseudo-nation state Bermuda), and then Albany. Seems only just.

NORWEIGAN DAWN:

Itinerary – 7 Day, NYC departure, 2 at sea days, 3 days Bermuda (1 day dock, 2 tendering), 1 day at sea

This is the first cruise I’ve ever been on, and in spite of the total lack of any real expectations, the planning process was arduous. For whatever reason, I was dead set against Royal Caribbean or Carnival. No real logical reason for that, but I wanted to go at least maybe a quarter step up from them. Holland America, Princess, and Celebrity had no departures that really caught our eyes and worked airfare wise, but Norwegian with their run out of Manhattan to Bermuda. As an introduction, I’d get 3 days docked at Dockyard and plenty of at sea. No need to worry about Island hopping, just real easy stuff.

That was the intention, and the road to hell is paved with lots of good ones. Not that this was “hell” by any stretch of the imagination, but one thing was: Getting bumped from our spot in Dockyard for two days about a month in advance of the cruise by what turned out to be a Celebrity ship. This led to the evil, evil process of tendering, and I’ll get more into that as I review the Bermuda part.

ROOM:

If you’ve seen me post on rec.roller-coaster, you know I don’t fuck around with rooms. I won’t settle for a inside cabin unless I absolutely have to, and right now, I don’t. We went with a mini-suite w/balcony that was to be put on the 11th floor…. until the upsell offer came in. Our room thus became 9002, a penthouse on deck 9 at the front of the ship. The room itself was massive by cruise ship standards, featuring a little sitting area, a 20 in. TV with a internal DVD player, large closet, and a king size bed. The balcony, err, deck, was almost as big as the bedroom itself, measuring something around 200 sq ft. As awesome as that was, this was the Atlantic ocean, and we were at the front. We basically never used the deck at sea because it was simply too windy to do so. Since over half the cruise saw the boat moving, we weren’t all that overjoyed. We’ll actually settle for a lower ranking cabin next time if we stay with Norwegian, but what was great was the VIP perks we got. The trays of snacks every evening were tasty, we had expedited tendering, exit of the ship (which was great when our concierge Anca grabbed us out of a giant line during disembarkation), a VIP party with free drinks to meet the captain and various high ranking crew members, oh, and of course, breakfast and lunch at the upsell restaurant we didn’t anticipate visiting that we ate almost every day.

CREW:

There’s 1000 crew members on the boat, or like 1 for every 3.5 people on board. That’s pretty nutty. When I worked in amusement parks, a good day was like 1 for every 50. But I digress. The staff was heavily Filipino, and I really, really wanted to chat them up to find out how big Manny Pacquiao is back in their homeland, but alas, found no real opportunity. Our concierge Anca came from Romania and was effectively everywhere we looked ready to help us. Our butler Armando seemingly disappeared after day 3, but was nice enough to bring me a pitcher of  milk when I requested it early in the cruise and was generally helpful when we called.

FOOD:

Norwegian’s big gimmick is “freestyle cruising”, which means for people like myself and my fiancee who have this odd problem with other people existing, much less existing at our *dining table*, we get to eat alone. We also made sure to eat at every upcharge restaurant (of which there are 4), along with many visits to the free restaurants on board. Somehow, I weighed 4 lbs less the last day of the trip than I did when I started in spite of eating four meals a day. Maybe eating constantly forsaking the elevators for stairs wasn’t a bad idea?

Also of note, the significant other (my fiancee, Meredith), is a vegetarian. This was not even remotely an issue, as each restaurant has at least one veggie entree each night, with the two main dining rooms featuring both a permanent and a rotating one every night.

-Main Dining Rooms (“Venetian” and “Aqua”): We actually liked these best. Besides having the permanent menu, the food there wasn’t of significantly lesser quality than the upcharge locations, the wine list obviously was no different, and the ambience argurably as good or better. Same level of service, and no annoying upsell on bottled water (the ice water on the boat is actually better than most bottled waters, no lie).

-Bamboo: This is the Asian upcharge on the boat. The food was okay, but nothing to write home about, and not significantly better, if at all, over the local thai hole in the wall you probably have wherever the hell you, the reader, reside. I believe its an additional $15 to your bill. Not particularly suggested. Some decent veggie choices, though my fiancee isn’t big on eastern cuisine (she found her’s “too spicy” for her liking).

-Impressions: Okay Italian, but again, nothing that so blows away what’s  downstairs on Deck 6 that you think you’ve spent a quality $15. You do get to hear someone doing a lounge act every night though.

-Le Bistro: This is, I think, a $15 a person upcharge. It also features a big two person Chateaubriand at $10 or $20 a person which we obviously skipped on. My chicken stuffed with foie gras was nothing blow away, but my girlfriend did like her’s. Again, you’re basically paying for the opportunity to pay more on an item that’s not available elsewhere.

-Cagney’s Steakhouse: My girlfriend didn’t want to come, what with it being a steakhouse and having a carpet designed to have a cowhide look to it. Then they told us we got free breakfast there every morning, and it was on. I assume this was what was in Venetian in the morning, but I honestly have no clue if it was or not because when it came to breakfast, this is where we almost always went. Steak and eggs preceeded with coffee, orange juice, water, and a croissant, then chased with a waffle? Now that is how one starts a morning.

-Salsa: A spanish/tapas sorta thing that was free and located on deck 8 in the atrium area. Really quite good. Again, odd to me that Bamboo is extra and this is free. My only guess is that its so they can bilk the asian tourists (of which, probably 20% of the boat consisted of them).

-Blue Lagoon: The 24 restaurant featuring “comfort food”, which is a fine way of saying “Continental US favorites featuring tons of fat”. The Mozz sticks were good though, and it was always fun to go in there and request nothing but 6 orders of them split onto just two plates (hey, one portion was merely 3. 3! What am I, 5?). And then, you leave, and you don’t have to pay anyone anything after eating them. Damn, I’ve been missing out. Its a good thing I didn’t take a transatlantic like this, because I probably would have worked my way into obesity/type 2 diabetes.

-Whatever the buffet is called: It wasn’t that bad opening day. The live stations were pretty decent, particularly the pasta one (even if the alfredo is way, way watered down). Then it was never the same. Our one day away from the breakfast at Cagney’s led us to try eating here, and after noting that the food was at best lukewarm, we decided experimentation was unnecessary. Only dessert was generally worth eating. Essentially skippable unless you are shaped/sized like a dirigible.

DA GAMING:

Arcade: Kinda crappy. Small. The cabinets looked pretty old, and I think a pair of games in it were older than the boat. There was a DDR machine (I don’t play it, so I don’t know what mix/edition) and a couple larger performance type machines. No ticket redemption.

Casino: First time I’ve ever seen a coin pusher game utilized for the function of casino gambling in my entire life: there were stacks of bills inside along with dice keychains and poker chips redeemable for sparkling wine. Being masters of the damned things, we’d play for an hour and a half on $20 and were able to get one such stack to fall out (the $10 bill covering it came along with two singles) and a keychain. Pretty decent selection of slots, small video poker area, lots of table games. The blackjack was done with 6 decks in a good ol’ strip style shuffler, but I actually did alright and was able to play for about 5 hours with $80 on a $5 table and take home $80 in profit, with a high point at about $230. No one played dice almost the entire time, which was a shame. There was also 5 card Texas Hold ‘Em casino poker, Wheel Of Fortune, roulette, and dumb shit like that for guidos who want to lose money. No baccarat.

ENTERTAINMENT:

The TV had ESPN, which I intentionally skipped watching and which saved me ultimately from none of the spoilers I tried to avoid. There were also the usual compliment of cruise entertainment channels showing things that had happened on the ship. Since my fiancee and I do a really awesome old person impression on vacations in spite of being in our mid 20s (we were asleep by 10 almost every night), we ended up watching many of the bad shows through those networks. We also watched intently to the shopping knowledge of Jason Bridge, who is a rep for Colombian Emeralds (who have shopping space on the ship) and is its shopping guru/director/whatever. He’s an incredibly effeminant (nearly to the point of self parody) gemologist with this voice that could have sold us anything. We didn’t like the way Ammolite looked, but, man, listen to this dude’s voice for like 5 minutes and we were almost buying from the TV promo he cut for it. My girlfriend remarked that they could do a 90 minute show where he reads out of a dictionary and it would be pretty awesome, and I had to agree.

The stage production shows were typically put on by the Jean Ann Ryan Production company, and they were all pretty good. The highlight show for them is the Bollywood show, which as enormously uncomfortable as a boat full of italians from Long Island watching something influenced by Indian film might seem on the surface, worked brilliantly, largely because the only thing it had in common was no kissing and lots of singing and dancing. Oh, and trapeze acts. Meredith and I both imagine Jean Ann Ryan being some old woman with enormous sunglasses smoking out of a cigarette holder while yelling at the Russian dancers on the troupe about how she can find ballet dancers like them on any Moscow street corner. That really didn’t need to be included, but its a vision that makes me laugh hard.

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BERMUDA:

The boat, afterall, did go somewhere. This wasn’t some two night cruise to nowhere. The first day was at Dockyard on the edge of Bermuda, which is a sorta nice down where the big fort at the dock has sorta kinda been turned into a tourist attraction, with some empty unused buildings, some others that you can take pictures of, and of course swimming with Dolphins. Just like real Bermudians!

We walked around for an hour and hopped a ferry once we found a booth without an hour line of stupid Americans to prevent us smart Americans from getting all day passes. We decided for whatever reason that this was to be a good day to get over to St. George’s, and we went for that. That is my poor segue into discussing public transport on the island of Bemuda. For the very uninitated, ignore the size of Bermuda. Yes, its only 20 square miles or so in size. That is meaningless. These are islands with nothing approaching freeways. If you plan, like us, to take buses around, realize that wherever you are going, it is probably 20 minutes from Hamilton. At least. If you’re travelling from Front Street to the bus depot, its like 10 minutes alone because of traffic. That’s maybe 6 blocks of travel. The rest of the island is enormously thin 2 lane roads with people riding or driving around like psychopaths. It reminded me of riding with my dad in Portugal on the sides of mountains in all the bad ways and none of the good.

As a result, a large amount of time in Bermuda is going to be taken up by travel unless you plan on being somewhere awhile. We never really did, probably because we’re city folk and not running on some bullshit “Bermuda Time”.

The ferries are fast. Sometimes. That’s if you don’t take the pink routes, which are old and slow as molasses. Luckily the high speed catamarans run most of the routes you want, like the St. George/Hamilton/Dockyard circle. Of course, they take off either 1 hour between or 2 1/2 hours between, depending on whether or not you travel during tea time. I’ve been to England. They don’t just shut down the trains because its time for crumpets. Anyhow, back to St. George’s. Its a UNESCO landmark merely by existing, and its pretty nice and all, but I dunno, it doesn’t flip my wig. I guess its really cool it you live in Kansas City and you’ve never seen anything more than 200 years old. There’s a perfumery I wanted to go to because of Jason’s recommendation on TV, but didn’t get to hit up because I forgot it was there. I did take some pictures, walk around, admire how much cheap tourist shit there was to buy, and then Meredith and I walked to Tobacco Bay.

Tobacco Bay is actually really, really nice. Its beautiful, not heavily visited, square in a residential area (we were clucked at by roosters. Roosters~!), has lots of clear blue water, pink sand, is pretty shallow, no monster waves, lots of craggy shit photographers love, blah blah blah. We also went over to visit the nearby Fort St. Catherine, but that was apparently closed. Maybe next time?

(For those who love urban decay, there’s the enormous remains of a failed Club Med around there too. Kinda disconcerting, but supposedly it’ll be replaced with a St. Regis soon.)

After our nice walk, we took the ferries back to Dockyard and went back on the ship. With no wind and lots of sun, we sat on our deck. And then we fell asleep. For 4 hours. By the time we woke up, it was 6:30, and we had 8pm reservations at Impressions, along with a show my girlfriend really wanted to see downstairs, and then some other stuff. Total waste of a day.

Day two saw us go out to some bay on the island as our “anchoring” in Hamilton, and an antiquated ferry pull up. It was time to tender, and tendering we did. From the time we stepped on the first tender at 9:45AM till when we actually left over an hour later to when we arrived in Hamilton, some 40 minutes after that, our combined mood changed quite violently. Arriving in Hamilton, we found that the local Tourism folks were at the dock, though they could provide us with literally nothing but pointing and some maps. This would be great if we had bought 2 day passes, but of course, we hadn’t (stupidly), and thus needed to walk to get them. The problem in this case is that they closed the tourism office just two blocks away on Front Street to greet us with their tons of crap we already had and with none of the things we actually needed. So we then walked to the bus station and everything turned out okay, though it felt unnecessary to do so.

We were on the first #7 bus out available, but rather than take it all the way towards Somerset as planned, we ended up departing early, and jumping on another 7 going the other way because after 45 minutes on the bus with another 15-20 likely, the boss had enough of it. We instead went to  Horseshoe Bay immediately, where we were greeted with $5 hamburgers and, soon after, rain. That caused us to scuttle that idea, and after a coin flip, we went off to Crystal Caves, with the idea that we would return to the island the following day for the aquarium, another interest of ours.

Crystal Caves was perfect for us: tourist trappy, not that far from Hamilton on paper, and probably entertaining. Getting back to Hamilton, we were greeted with a choice: The #3 was a much faster way to get to Crystal Caves, cutting 15 minutes off the time that the #1 bus would take. It was also packed, and dashing around mountain/island roads standing on a bus is not cool. The #1, on the other hand, had seats. We are lazy in this way, and went with that. Our luck had us encountering a number of tree pruning jobs and stops at virtually every pole, getting us to Crystal Caves after 54 minutes of riding the bus. This would have been acceptable if we got to spend lots of time at Crystal Caves.

Fate again conspired against us. Crystal Caves’ Crystal Cave was down due to maintenance. A cave. Down. Due to maintenance on electronics. Is this a Six Flags property? We were informed that their other cave, which is as good as Crystal Cave (as it “has stalactites and stalagmites too” said the manager to an angry Indian family) was open though, and hell if I was getting on another bus without something to enjoy. Their alternate cave is actually pretty nice and was a good 30 minute diversion, but I’d really have prefered, you know, something else to do along with it. Sure enough, we were at the bus stop again, and waited about 10 minutes for another bus to take us back to Hamilton. What arrives first? Well, its the#1! With much trepidation, we got on and enjoyed being sat in the back between a couple of bitter looking codgers who looked as pleased to be presented with our company as we were of their’s.

After another 45 minutes of rollicking travel, we were back in town. We walked a few blocks, looked in some shops, noted there was really nothing in Bermuda that was terrifically unique, and then left on our tender. Well, we tried to. It would be 45 minutes of waiting on the ship before it left, and another 40 minute run back to the boat. We had enough Bermuda for a lifetime. Plus, there was nowhere to get a passport stamp. Isn’t that half the fun?

In short: Tendering suuuuuuuuucks. I would consider skipping islands if that was what I had to do. I am really, really interested in only going with smaller cruise lines (a la Silversea) just to avoid it.

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Bermuda’s combat sports scene is pretty minimal, to say the least. There’s a couple hole in the wall boxing gyms I know exist, and only one gym promoting anything bordering on kickboxing (this was in St. George). MMA will probably be introduced en masse via CBS’s broadcast in a couple weeks. The sole kickboxing gym seemed to based on Shotokon Karate, but was closed when I walked by. There were no promotional materials for any upcoming fight cards of any sort, though there had recently been some sort of point fighting karate tournament the week before, leading me to believe there’s another school, likely in Hamilton, or its all some Villariesque cult.

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ALBANY:

Stayed in the Springhill Suites before taking the bus down from Albany. Pretty decent hotel. The new business suite class of hotels that’s been taking off is awesome for travellers. Basically, for Courtyard prices, you can get an Embassy Suites level room through newer brands like this and Hyatt’s Park Place. The big surprise of the trip came for Meredith in Albany. While shopping, I inquired about some discount pass they were offering at the Macy’s we were in, and we were told that Tim Gunn would be appearing and heading a Liz Claiborne fashion show in the store that very day. This meant absolutely nothing to me, but to my girlfriend (who adores Project Runway, his TV show on Bravo), it was like Christmas in April. So yeah, I sat through it and I took photos for her while she sat intentely (we were in the standing room only section, but were able to get the last two seats on the floor when the people in front of us decided to enter a contest rather than walk to the runway). It was okay, I guess. She was really happy though.

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Amusement park dorkdom! Knowing some of the demographics in that hobby, perhaps they were enthralled with my stories about Bermudian beaches and TV fashion celebs and arrived at this point naturally. I doubt it though.

-HOFFMAN’S PLAYLAND- (5/4/08)

So we take the bus from Albany because its cheap to do that rather than park in NYC or do the same thing from New Haven. We never intended to be in a mall on this trip: That day was reserved to be at Sylvan Beach opening day, until it was bumped back. Worked out well though, especially since there was a sale on UFC DVDs. This was planned however.

Hoffman’s Playland is a small park in Latham, NY, just north of Albany, and no more than 10 minutes from the location where our bus left from. It has no more than maybe 6-7 adult styled rides, a collection of kiddie rides, a small picnic area for kids, a lousy arcade (though there was 25 cent Skeeball), and a Subway. Best we can tell, its owned by some dude named Hoffman, who also happens to own a number of car washes in Albany (and a Subway). A few things stand out for park people:

1) The adult rides are heavy on Eli classics. The Scrambler and Wheel are staples. There’s also a hub for some ride of indeterminant origin sitting around, a train, and a Paratrooper.

2) The coaster. Its a credit, you know. And at a $1.50, priced right.

3) The bumper cars. No one was on these when we were there, so I didn’t bother trying to ride them by myself (all the kids were eating cake and riding the kiddie Eli wheel), but they’re old Lusses just like Knoebels. Look very good, in fact.

COASTERS:

-Roller Coaster (#528): A Herschell Little Dipper model kiddie coaster that’s more intense than most anything modern. I’m glad it was cheap.

OVERALL:

Meredith was embarassed. Rightly. I promised I’d stop riding this shit too.

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