I’ve been working on this write-up for nearly a month. It’s long and rambly. I don’t have the patience to put it in Grammarly like I do with most of my articles. I know it would have 500 corrections on tiny style things. So please excuse any typos or grammar issues that are surely in here.
You may have noticed that I didn’t post much in March. I was on vacation for two weeks in the middle of it. I’ve found that a two-week vacation actually requires at least 3 weeks. You need another half week on each side – one to pack and prepare and another to get caught up.
The trip started off terribly…
The Quest to Get to Florida
We had booked our flight from Providence, RI (actually Warwick) months in advance. I read reviews from a new airline called Breeze that had a mid-luxury ticket. You aren’t paying ginormous first class prices, but for a little extra money, you get a little of the first class treatment. It sounded great to us! We booked an afternoon Saturday flight giving us a full day before our Sunday early afternoon cruise check-in.
Friday, March 8th – Where’s the plane?
The day before our Saturday flight, Breeze texted my wife to say that they don’t have an airplane and may not have an airplane. They also said that they might get an airplane. I’m not clear if the plane disappeared or if it was broken, but we effectively didn’t have a flight.
You can’t be late with a cruise, so we scrambled.
My wife double-checked that we had cruise insurance. It turns out that somehow she ended up with hotel insurance for the night in the hotel before the cruise. We had no cruise insurance for our $6500 cruise.
My wife was able to find Southwest flights leaving almost the exact same time as the Breeze flight. We bought those tickets and got a refund from Breeze. It cost us a few hundred extra dollars. I was not happy about that, but I thanked 30-year-old Lazy Man for investing a few dollars back then. That made this “surprise expense” not too bad.
Saturday, March 9th, 10AM – Off to the Airport
We took two Ubers to the airport – one adult with each kid. It was cheaper than parking at the airport for two weeks. We initially tried to take one Uber XL, but it was going to be an hour before one could get to us.
We got there four hours early. We don’t mind going early because my wife’s active-duty service gives her lounge access through Servicemembers Civil Relief Act (SCRA). Most military get to go to the USO, but that benefit got taken away a few years back. I usually have to pay for my lounge access because she can only bring the kids with her.
Unfortunately, there are new restrictions on how early you can show up at the lounge. We could only check in two hours before our flight. The family was hungry and there was nothing else to do, so we went to lunch. As we were finishing up our lunch, they moved our flight up earlier, so could go to the lounge. As Alanis might say, “It’s a free lunch when you’ve already paid.”
Saturday, March 9th, 11AM – Lounge Time
We got to the lounge and proceed to live there for the next 3 days. Not literally, but it felt like it. Southwest changed the time of our flight at least 5 or 6 times. They’d move it back and then move it up and then finally move it back again. It wasn’t just Southwest, it was all the flights. The weather was fine in Warwick, so that wasn’t an issue.
At around 3:30PM, we get ready to leave to go to our 4PM boarding. One of my son’s friend’s family walks into the lounge, so we chat with them for a couple of minutes. We give them our comfy couch and start to head out when my 11-year-old says, “The board says the flight is cancelled.” We had been checking the board frequently because they had changed the flight times so much.
Saturday, March 9th, 4PM – Airport Chaos
We head up to the gate to ask what’s going on and there’s a line of about 150 people ahead of us to ask the same question. Everyone in the line realizes that with only a couple of people working the gate, we’re going to be in the line for a couple of hours. It would have been nice if they could have made an announcement of an explanation, but they didn’t
At some point, one of the people at the gate makes his way down the line to explain to people what happened. There were thunderstorms in Orlando and the weather indicated that it wouldn’t get better until after midnight. I presume that this is why everyone’s flights were wonky.
It’s at this point that I’ll note that Breeze was able to get a plane for our original flight and they took off normally. We found out later that we had friends on that flight as well.
Southwest took the courtesy of rebooking us for a flight on Tuesday – a couple of days after our cruise sets sail. We promptly cancelled that and got our money back.
The Providence Airport generally has quite a few options to go to Florida, but nothing was reliable at this point. We looked for an overnight flight and none of those could be found. We even tried to fly somewhere close to Orlando where we could Uber the rest of the way. There was nothing.
I finally found a JetBlue flight that left Boston around 5:30AM and arrived at around 10AM. The only tickets they had were premium ones, so it looked like we’d get a little taste of better seats like we planned with Breeze.
Of course these tickets were even more expensive than the Southwest ones that were more than the Breeze ones. We were probably paying over $1000 more in total now. Not only that, but we had to Uber from Providence to Boston. We also had to get a hotel. While we were Ubering, my wife found a deal through some last minute hotel travel app on the Hilton hotel that’s at the Boston airport.
Saturday, March 9th, 7PM – Hotel Check-in
We get to the hotel and get ready to check-in. They don’t have a reservation for us. Of course, because this is the kind of day it has been. My wife checks her phone for the reservation and the app company emailed her and cancelled the reservation. Perhaps they offered a price that they couldn’t deliver? I don’t know.
The hotel does have vacancy, but it’s going to be another $200 more than the app’s price. My wife suggested that we look for hotel with a military rate, so we step aside. She finds that there is indeed a military rate and that it’s $25 cheaper than the original app price. She books that and we check in with no further issues.
Sunday, March 10th, 1:55AM – Wake-up for the Flight
Two years ago, we were traveling early on a Sat night/Sun morning and ran into a problem. We set our phone alarms for 2AM. Unfortunately, it was the one day of the year where there isn’t a 2AM. Our phones sprung ahead to 3AM for daylight savings time and our alarms never went off. This time, I set my alarm for 1:55AM and we had a hotel wake-up call. I’m still amazed that I remembered it was daylight savings time after all that we went through. Waking up at 1:55 may seem early for a 5:30AM flight, but it was effectively 2:55. We had to take a shuttle and get through security to be boarding by 5AM.
Sunday, March 10th, 10:30AM – Welcome to Orlando
The rest of the flight to Orlando was uneventful. We had a stop, but it was quick and smooth. We landed at around 10:30AM and had our luggage by around 11AM. We found the car my wife reserved and got to Cape Canaveral at around noon. That gave us a full 30 minutes before our check-in started. Royal Caribbean was happy to take us onboard a little early though.
In contrast to that adventure, our flight back on Southwest was less than 3 hours on a direct flight. Everything went smoothly there too.
I go back and think of what we could have done differently. We won’t make the mistake of going with Breeze again. I’d like to say that we’ll plan more buffer time to travel before the cruise, but that’s not always possible with the kids and school. In this case, we had a Saturday morning appointment, so we went to the airport as soon as we could.
The last few trips my wife has taken for work haven’t gone well either. I think that’s just the state of travel nowdays.
Royal Caribbean Review
After that 1500 word aside, it’s time to start the review of the actual vacation.
We went on a week-long Royal Caribbean cruise leaving from Orlando going through CocoCay, Cozumel (Mexico), Roatan (Honduras), Puerto Costa Maya (Mexico), and back to Orlando. CocoCay is Royal Caribbean’s private island waterpark. That was a big draw for the kids. My wife and I liked the idea of being able to introduce them to a couple new countries. I haven’t been keeping up with the safest ways to travel to Mexico lately, but I knew this was one of the ways.
We originally were going to take the brand-new, biggest ship of all time, Icon of the Seas. However, my wife found that the Wonder of the Seas was 30% cheaper. It’s about 5% smaller and came out in 2022. It reminds me of buying a slightly used car and saving big. The Wonder of the Seas has a lot of what I call “candy on top of the sundae”. If you look at the ship there are water slides and other fun things. In contrast we saw a Holland America cruise that looked like a boring oil tanker.
The Wonder of the Seas had so much candy that it reminded me of the car Homer Simpson’s designed (potential paywall). The Wonder of the Seas can serve over 7,000 guests. However, I’m not sure it was designed to serve them well.
One of the activities was a “FlowRider surf simulator.” It’s very cool as you can practice your surfing skills one water that is pumped fast to simulate a wave. Unfortunately only two people can do it at a time. The line to try it was often more than an hour. The kids really wanted to do it, so we waited an hour for it. It was a lot of fun.
The water slides were similarly a long wait. The whole week there, I didn’t even go on them once.
There was also the Ultimate Abyss – the tallest slide at sea. It’s a regular slide, not a water slide. It looks intimidating as it is several decks high. However, you could legitimately fall asleep sliding in it – it was that slow. I think the mats they give just have too much friction. There was a long wait for that as well. However, we did it as the very first thing on the ship, so it wasn’t time that we were using for much else.
There were a pair of rock climbing walls, but I couldn’t convince the kids to give it a try. They had a pair of robotic arm bartenders. The kids loved having them make mocktails. It was exciting to watch for a few minutes, but I thought it got old after a while.
I could go on and on about the ship itself. There was an ice skating rink, a park area, and tons of small shops.
My wife went to an art auction and loved a couple of pieces. I showed her some articles that the art auctions on cruise ships are scams. Here is one. Here is another. Basically avoid anything with the name “Park West Galleries” on it and you should be fine. However, if you have a few thousand dollars to spend and like the art work, feel free to buy it. They tried to convince me that it was limited edition, premium brand artists, and stuff like that. Nope, they seem to pump out as many as they can sell. It seems that you might not even get the exact art work that you buy. They ship them to you from a warehouse.
Food was included, but you could reserve premium restaurants. It didn’t seem like too many did this though. Prices are normal restaurant prices, which doesn’t make much sense when you get free restaurant quality food in a number of other places on the ship. My wife booked the Mason Jar which was supposed to be difficult to get into. There might have been one other group there. The food and service wasn’t anything special. I’m happy that we tried it, but we wouldn’t do it again. Maybe I would consider the steak house for a special occasion like a birthday.
There were also alcohol packages that you could buy. Royal Caribbean changes their drink package program depending on the cruise. A lot of people say that it gets to $67/day. I think the lowest it was for us for us was about $80/day. If one adult in the cabin gets all adults have to, so it would have been $160/day or $1,120 for drinks on the cruise. We skipped it and it seemed like a wise choice. A day or two into the cruise they had $90 cards that covered 10 drinks. We each bought one that lasted us until the end of the cruise. That’s nearly $1,000 in savings.
If you drink more, the drink package may be right for you. If you drink less, you could save even more money. This represented a good middle ground for us. I did notice that beer was often $7 or $8, so it wasn’t great to use my $9/drink card on them. However, they did have Foster’s Oil Can a huge 25-ounce beer. That’s one $9 drink using the card. At a price of $4.50 for about 12-ounce beer, I think it’s the best value on the ship.
Here’s what we did at each port:
CocoCay
We got a good price on the Thrill park add-on, so we took advantage of that. We did mostly waterslides the whole time. There’s a record-breaking tallest water slide in the hemisphere or something like that (it may have gotten surpassed). The 135-foot Daredevils Peak gets so high that it’s a little scary just to wait in line. It’s not steep, but you pick up some very good speed by just going on it for so long. We only left the Thrill park for lunch, so I couldn’t tell you about anything else there.
Cozumel (Mexico)
My kids got to add a new country to their list, Mexico! I hadn’t been since college spring break. Both Mexico and I have changed a lot sense then. Going with a cruise tour seemed like the smart, safe way to do Mexico. We got a tour to see Chichen Itza. My kids studied it in first grade, so it was great for them to see the real thing. It was a long, long bus ride, but worth it. The Mayas were great engineers. It’s always a bonus to trick the kids into a day “world schooling” after a day of water slides.
Roatan (Honduras)
The cruise tours that we wanted were all sold out. I found a Royal Caribbean blog that recommended Roatan Five Starts and they were phenomenal. The big draw was an animal visit where you interact with the animals. A giant macaw sits on your shoulder for a picture. You go in a cage with a bunch of monkey who crawl all over you. They are super gentle and it’s quite fun. Finally, you get to hug a sloth.
After that we went to a chocolate factory and a rum factory. Both were very small operations run out of a strip mall-like shop. I didn’t want to buy chocolate because I thought it would melt before we got back to the boat. We wouldn’t have been able to bring the rum on board and it wasn’t so great that we wanted to have it stored to pick up after our trip. In hindsight, we would have skipped these. We had lunch (burritos) and a little time by Half Moon Bay beach for a beer. Then went on the dolphin experience. A place had trained dolphins that you got to touch and swim with. They did tricks too. The kids had “swim with dolphins” on their bucket list and this certainly qualified.
Roatan was our favorite port as we got to do many unique experiences right away.
Puerto Costa Maya (Mexico)
Here we took a boat ride around 7-color lagoon, Bacalar. There weren’t a lot of exciting excursions. There did have a trip to some Mayan ruins, but we did that with Chichen Itza. The boat ride was quite boring, to be honest. They stopped at a place and we went swimming a bit. The lagoon had a lot of colors because the depth of the water changes drastically in some places.
We had met some people the night before who had been on the cruise before and they say that they stay on the ship. In hindsight, I probably should have done a little more planning. I found some Reddit threads of what people do.
Next time, I think we’d have more fun if we stayed in the port. Right before boarding the ship we found a “fish pedicure” where dozens of fish eat the dead skin off your toes. It wasn’t planned. We just saw it and did it. I saw it on the Travel Channel twenty years ago, and I haven’t seen it in the United States. The kids loved it and our feet felt so good afterwards. My wife skipped it as she had a regular pedicure before we left for the cruise. It wasn’t until later that we found out that there’s a lot of cringey in-humane stuff going on. Also, I guess there are rare cases where it can go terribly wrong and infections can happen. I didn’t know any of this.
That covers most of Royal Caribbean. If you have any questions, please use the comments. I respond to all comments unless I miss something. I know there are a lot of Royal Caribbean blogs out there, but they are probably sponsored by Royal Caribbean in some way. At the very least, those bloggers go on a lot of Royal Caribbean cruises and their experience will probably not be the same as yours or mine if you just take a cruise every 10+ years.
Disney World Review
I need to start any Disney World review with the mention that we are military. We get to stay at Shades of Green, a military resort at Disney. It’s not the fanciest place, but you get huge rooms for a very low price. We also get cheaper military rates on tickets. I think the savings used to be a lot more, but now it’s not so much.
We went to Disney World in 2016 and again in 2018 as well as in 2019. For that last trip, my kids were age 5 and 6. It’s ridiculous that they went to Disney World three times before age 7 and then not for another five years. Of course, we went on a Disney Cruise in 2022 and to Disneyland last year.
I don’t like Disney that much, but the locations tend to work out for my wife’s pharamcy conferences or when friends are traveling there. That was again the case this year, where my wife’s pharmacy conference fell at the end of our vacation. This gave us a week to spend at Disney World before flying back.
We bought 6-day passes for the kids and me and a 4-day pass for my wife. She was going to be at her conference the last couple of days. Six days at Disney is probably too much. Maybe we should have gone to Universal Studios or something else, but since we were staying on the Disney resort, it was easiest to just stick we were. Also, the price between the four and 6-day passes isn’t too much. Buying another set of passes for Universal Studios would have been a lot more money.
Disney World itself doesn’t change too much, so my previous reviews are probably still quite relevant. When I say that Disney World doesn’t change, I mean that the Winnie the Pooh and Peter Pan rides in the Magic Kingdom are the same as they’ve been for decades. Space Mountain is still going to be Space Mountain.
What changes a lot at Disney are the policies for getting in early, staying late, and getting on rides with premium passes. Since those are constantly changing, I don’t think it’s worth explaining the current ones now. There are a million Disney blogs that cover them in detail. The only hiccup is that Disneyland and Disney World have different policies, so you have to make sure that you’re reading for the right place.
The new attractions at Disney are the Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance in Hollywood Studios, the Guardians of the Galaxy Cosmic Rewind in Epcot, and the Tron Lightcycle Run. I’ll give a run down of these three rides.
In third place comes, Rise of the Resistance. I’m not a Star Wars person, but if I was I would think that was the best ride ever. It’s a long ride, about 18 minutes including the video introductions. Visually, the whole ride was amazing with rows of dozens and dozens of storm troupers and huge AT-ATs. The actors running the ride treat you like crap, because you are essentially being kidnapped. I would say that it was an incredible experience, but not what I would call thrilling. If they had a Buffy the Vampire or Serenity Version, I would have gone on it multiple times despite the wait.
The Tron Lightcycle run comes in second place. It’s all about speed, zipping you around at 59mph. You are strapped into a motorcycle-like coaster and speed around. There are no stomach-churning drops. The visuals are great and you feel like you are really racing against another lightcycle team. They limit this ride to once per day as you have to book the virtual queue in Disney app. If you book at the earliest possible time (7AM for us as we were staying on the resort), you might get an appointment for 2PM. Then at 2PM, you get to come wait in line. The first time we went, the line was about an hour and a half. The second time it was 55 minutes. It’s a mess of waiting for a very short ride. For this reason, we liked Thunder Mountain better. Often we could get on that with only a 10-15 minute wait.
The award for best new ride is Guardians of the Galaxy Cosmic Rewind. We specifically went to Epcot on our extra days just for the one ride. Like Tron, this is limited to once per day. However, if you have extra hours, you can get rebook for a second ride after 2PM. Usually, your time will be 10PM, so expect to spend a whole day at Disney to do this twice.
Guardians starts out with a story. You have to save the galaxy of course. The evil is from Marvel’s Eternals, which is a forgettable movie except for the most uncomfortable movie scene I’ve ever watched with my kids. You get through twenty MCU movies and you think it’s relatively safe and they slip a sex scene in there. Nonetheless, it’s a good story and Drax is hilarious as usual.
When you get to the ride itself, it’s an indoor roller coast, much like Space Mountain. It’s 60mph just to beat out Tron, but you aren’t strapped in like you are in the lightcycle. They also play one of six sound tracks such as Blondie’s One Way or Another. The ride is the same for every song, but you want to “collect” them all nonetheless. We ended up going on it five times overall. If you want to go on Guardians or Tron more times, you can buy a ride which ranges around $13-17 per person. I made a deal with the kids that I’d cover $10 if they paid the other $7 out of their allowance. This was one of the days that my wife was at the conference. When Mom isn’t around I spoil them a bit to make up for it and this was a way to do that and allow them to have some skin in the game.
After the first couple times on the ride, I was dancing in my seat to the music. I was especially happy that we got Blondie, because I have started a music history class on the ride to school. I’ll pick a band’s greatest hits and explain their history a bit. I’ve been going alphabetically and Blondie happened to be the current musician of the week.
One of the six days had an extremely light drizzle, so we could do almost any ride with no wait. I was surprised how empty Disney was the entire time we were there. We found out later that Florida school vacation was the week before, so most Floridians had their fill.
Final Thoughts
At nearly 5,000 words, I really need to upload this and hit the publish button. Of course I have a ton of pictures. I should add a bunch. However, we’ve been back from this vacation for over a month now and I need to cover all the other interesting things that have happened since then so that I can get back to writing regular personal finance articles.