In early September, crossed from Harwich,
England to Boston on the Vision of the Seas, in a trip marketed as the Route of the Vikings. Now Royal Caribbean is not responsible for the wind-driven water we met. It's a lousy storm season this year and will remain so for a while. Our captain said it was the worst Atlantic storm he
had seen in 40 years at sea.

I'm a pretty good sailor, and if I'd been traveling on my own, the theme-park ride aspect of the voyage would have entertained me no end.

Recommended Reading - Hurricane Georges should demonstrate that what I'm writing about here is unusual, but not impossible. Anyone emjoying this note will get a kick out of reading _Typhoon_ by Joseph Conrad, _The Perfect Storm_ by Sebastian Junger, and _Cod_ by Mark Kurlansky.

The People On Board - An irritable, competitive bunch, the kind who go into a revolving door behind you and come out in front of you. Each passenger seemed convinced that they
were uniquely clever in booking this cheap repositioning cruise, the smartest person in their home town. Then they had to confront 1900 other smart shoppers, and some took it worse than others. "Have YOU been to Oslo? WE have, and
they don't take American dollars there." Spare me. The best moment came when a passenger asked the captain if we would see the Titanic. The captain replied "I hope not."

Major Beef - The staff never figured out that the
repositioning passengers were different from the usual Caribbean/Mediterranean fun-in-the-sun,
summer-camp-with-booze crowd. Goombay music played
everywhere, even on empty decks in all kinds of weather, just what you want with the misty, gusty North, and the clueless cruise director lamented that the disco was empty most nights. Well, of course it was!

Design and Decor - The exterior design was by Maytag. OK, Kelvinator. A big, white, topheavy monster. It's big without gratifying the eye. When we could dock, we generally had to dock by the gasworks, which look pretty much the same from country to country. We had to tender in
a lot of ports. In fact, we were thoroughly tender-ized.

The decor was better than that, harmonious and appropriate to the occasion. Time after time, the decorator stepped right up to the bounds of good taste, and stepped back. Only in the theater did he fall over into excessive glitz, the room
looking like Atlantic City had thrown up over it. It's the kind of theater you design when you don't have much confidence in the acts.

Public Spaces and Music - This is a ship that deliberately turns its back on the sea. Despite an unprecedented amount of glass, the windows give the impression of watching an out of focus TV with the sound off. The open areas offer
no deck chair rugs, Even in calm weather, it took
considerable effort to find the ocean outside and look at it.

Music was omnipresent in all public spaces at all times. With a more thoughtful and ocean-oriented bunch than usual on board, you were never allowed to commune with the sea or be alone with your own thoughts, read a book or even converse quietly without jarring and inappropriate music.
The seven-story atrium called the Centrum continually rang to the sounds of an English white female vocalist who thought she was Ella Fitzgerald, a string trio that played without vibrato, producing an effect less like Heifetz and
more like Carl "Alfalfa" Switzer, a bored and boring steel drum combo that specialized in the "Never On Sunday" Polka, all of this inescapable throughout, even in the
Library.

The traffic flow in the Windjammer Cafe was chaotic. Once out of the cafeteria line, tray-holding passengers suddenly went catatonic, unsure where to go and bumping into each other. There was no accumulated memory, either. Few learned what to do and managed to remember it the next day, as people seemed just as lost and trancelike the last day as the first.

Food - To begin on a positive note, bread and rolls were excellent. The menu read much better than the food tasted, using words like coulis, savarin, jicama to intimidate the reader into thinking the dishes must be good. This pretension worked for around five days, and then we caught
on. Incoherent bits of every food trend of the last ten years were thrown together to disguise an unavoidable reliance on leftovers. Okra hash? French brie topped with Japanese wasabe mustard and Indian mango chutney? It wasn't interesting or intriguing, it was garbage. And if the ingredients become too stale, pour liquor over it, set fire to it and describe it as flambee. We soon soughtrefuge in the simplest foods, grilled chicken or sirloin steak.

It seemed that desserts all came from a giant vat of gelatinous goo, colored yellow and pink and tan and brown depending, but always tasting the same. Menu descriptions remained unreliable - poached pears were the canned pears
from breakfast with some jam on them.

The wait service was anxious, because passenger
dissatisfaction with the food is here blamed on the waiters, rather than the menu planners, food buyers and chefs. This is a good way for Royal Caribbean to avoid hearing bad feedback on the food. The waiters themselves were a little frantic, talking loudly in funny voices to
each other and complaining nonstop in a way no restaurant would tolerate. Memorably during a storm, a Bahamian waiter juggling a tray with 16 lidded entrees bellowed to no one in particular, "I WANT TO GO HOME!"

Folks at the next table just before the dessert course:
Could we have a doggie bag?
Mr. Wang (horrified): No doggie bag! Just marinated berries, apple strudel or cheesecake!

He apparently had a nervous breakdown and quit partway through. The assistant head waiter served our section for the last few days of the cruise.

The North Sea weather was its usual filthy self - 50 mph winds and 45 foot waves and we all thought we'd had an adventure.

And for one day the sun came out. We looked like a ship of vampires, raising our upper arms palm to the sun like Christopher Lee, to protect our eyes against the unaccustomed glare. That night about twenty or thirty of us saw the Northern Lights, braving the cold on a landing outside the Viking Crown Lounge on Deck 11.

The next day we hit a mean storm south of Greenland. It may not have been the Perfect Storm, but I'd give it a 98.
Winds reached 80 mph and the waves hit 70 feet in height. These are official figures. The closed-circuit television described the winds first as "moderate," then "heavy," then "phenomenal." That's a direct quote. The stabilizers had been adequate in the North Sea storm, but now found
themselves overmatched.

After the Vision buried her nose in the waves, the
resulting spray would rise above the level of the
aforementioned Deck 11 Viking Crown Lounge. When propeller screws rise out of the water, they stop turning so as not to fly off. When they return to the water, they start again with a bone-rattling sideways shudder. Imagine this all day and night for 3 days.

Captains' announcements over the PA system were accompanied by a banshee wail of whistling wind from the bridge, so things must have been pretty rough up there.

Best line overheard in a bar: "I figure I'm going to throw up anyway, so I might as well have something interesting in my stomach."

At this time, the Silver Cloud, a superluxury vessel on a similar crossing, turned back to Rekjavik after their veranda doors became unglued and TVs broke loose and started ricocheting around cabins. Apparently many of
their people were flown home from Iceland. There is some dispute whether it was the Silver Cloud or the Seabourne Pride (2 days ahead of us) on which the grand piano turned turtle, lying with its legs in the air.

Meanwhile back on the Vision, windows blew in at 3 A.M. on Deck 3 - at least one cabin's windows shattered, lacerating passengers and blowing lots of water onto the floor and into the halls, flooding the cabins on either side. I spoke with a couple in the cabin next to a
defenestrated one, and to others on that deck.

For fans of the film Titanic, the two women whose cabin first flooded found it difficult for the longest time to open their cabin doors while the water was coming in the window. Convinced of disaster, they showed up in their life jackets at their muster station. Finding no one else
there, they then went inside to the Purser's Office, and other passengers laughed at them standing there wet and scared. I thought that was a little lacking in compassion.

I believe that some people really were comfortable in the rough crossing. It does not therefore follow that everybody else was. Reasonable people may disagree on when
and where to throw up. Some of us may enjoy being a sneaker in a dryer for one day, but find three consecutive days of bouncing around demoralizing.

At one point 7 of the 9 elevators on board were out of service. People were missing meals right and left, and considering the abysmal quality of the food throughout, who could blame them? One woman stayed in her cabin for the whole three days. There were numerous sprained or broken wrists, one smashed kneecap on a tender in
Akureyri, and a grand total of 5 deaths, that figure vouched for by an end-of-life professional on staff, one who by his oath is more bound to tell the truth than most, and who I trust implicitly.

Interestingly enough, when I questioned the captain and some other officers about the
deaths, my questions were charmingly turned aside, not flatly denied. I would not wait for the notoriously secretive Royal Caribbean management to issue a press release either.

Throughout, the usefulness of the official communications from the bridge was nil. In personal conversation, the captain and the officers we spoke to were uniformly
evasive and unhelpful. This sailing was clumsily run at the first, and what little efficiency there was broke down completely with the weather. Three years experience made for veteran status on board, and the purser's office could be relied on to answer every question with "I don't know."
That includes "What time is it?"

Disembarkation in Nova Scotia after the storms turned into a near-riot, as people could not wait to get onto dry
land.

As the captain's PA system announcements were now
generally greeted with jeers and derisive laughter, those duties were turned over to the cruise director and others.

The disembarkation in Boston was a total fiasco. Plans and procedures drawn up at corporate HQ in Miami may have been impressive, but proper execution remained an unsolved mystery on board. Contradictory announcements a minute apart about which deck held the gangplank had passengers
with rollaboards clambering up and down stairways. It wasn't funny for the folks in wheelchairs.

We chatted with a British couple who had been given this trip as a make-good for a disastrous cruise in Southeast Asia! They swore to us that they'd never sail Royal Caribbean again.

[ 09-30-2005: Message edited by: desirod7 ]

I think that I must point out for any new members that not all cruises on ‘Vision of the seas’ or with RCI are that bad! That was obviously not a normal cruise, by any means!

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Originally posted by Malcolm @ cruisepage:
That was both hilarious, yet deadly serious! Am I being gullible here or was thee really deaths onboard? Surely not!

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Anyhow, I would love the roller-coaster aspect. Here's hoping it's not too calm next week.

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Originally posted by desirod6:
Major Beef - The staff never figured out that the repositioning passengers were different from the usual Caribbean/Mediterranean fun-in-the-sun,summer-camp-with-booze crowd.

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We had the same experience on the SS Norway's final transatlantic! The crew much preferred their regular 7 day round trips of the Carib.

My brother and his wife did the Norway X-Atlantic the previous year and loved it.

There were many French passengers aboard, he speaks fluent French and had a blast.

They too, like myself found NCL food to be inconsistent. Alvy Rose, the Norway entertainment director has first rate productions and music.

The 4pm tea with Classical Music in the Club Internationale is a bright spot.

The hotel staff, with the exception of our wonderful waiter, could have done better. The navigation staff was top-notch.

We live in north Florida and felt really lucky that year to have gotten to England between tropical storms. I was absolutely amazed to see on British TV that the same storms were lined up and set to strike.

This was a 14-day cruise with many days at sea. The typical passenger was older than us and had time to spare. We had a top-class verandah suite on the 8th deck.

We encountered sea fog on our first day, but this dissipated when we reached Stavanger. We docked right downtown. We enjoyed our tour and were surprised that this town is involved with oil.

One of the interesting things about this cruise is that when we left many ports, there would be one or more singers and musicians singing “Amazing Grace”.

Our next stop was to be the Shetland Islands (Lerwick). The wind really started picking up, and the seas were rough. This was our first rough night.

My husband and I were eager to see this port. In fact, it was an important reason why we booked this cruise.

By the time we were in Lerwick Harbor, the winds were at 40 knots. This was to be a tender stop. And, all the tour buses were lined up on the dock.

The Captain believed that it was too dangerous to tender, especially in light of some of the passengers’ age. He attempted to dock, and we got within 1,000 feet of the dock. This attempt was not successful. He also tried to anchor in the harbor and used three anchors. Didn’t work. The result of this attempt was that the ship ran aground. We had to be pushed off the sandbar.

During these attempts, there was a forlorn bagpipe player on the deck. He was dressed in a kilt and finally gave up when there was no hope of docking.

Our next stop would be the Faeroe Islands (Thorshaven). The ship had to make an emergency docking in the middle of the night. A gentleman had suffered what was reported to be a heart attack. Both he and his spouse were taken off the ship. We later learned that he did not survive. I believe that RCL did not have docking rights at that time; so, we went back out until we could dock in the morning. Our information is that five passengers died on this cruise. This is believable because many were frail – using walkers or wheelchairs.

Between the Faeroes and Iceland, the ship was hit by a rogue wave. We were told that this hit basically one cabin on the third deck. The people in that cabin had been asleep and awoke covered with glass and water. The people were moved out and probably given cabins on our deck. The repairs were made quickly. I talked to one person involved and he seemed satisfied with RCL's treatment.

It is also my understanding that the ship broke one or more propeller shafts during this part of the trip.

This was the beginning of the storms. These storms continued until we were very close to Canada.

We went above the Arctic Circle in getting to Akureyri, Iceland and were presented with certificates that marked the event. This was another tender stop. There was a full-force gale with snow and ice pellets. I really wanted to see the pseudo-volcanoes but gave up when the wind almost knocked me over. When we returned to the bus, we noticed that another empty bus was really getting hammered by the wind.

Tendering back to Vision was extremely difficult because of the wind. Many of the elderly passengers had to wait out in the wind and cold.

I do remember a public announcement later that afternoon concerning storms. The Captain was trying to “beat” them.

Unlike the prior night, the cruise to Rekjavik was pretty smooth, at least in relation to the other nights.

The weather was reasonable in Reykjavik: about 50 degrees and pale sunshine. We will never forget the bus ride we had on a lava field. By the end of the day, we were on a hill in Reykjavik, and it was extremely windy.

Silver Cloud was docked next to Vision. It is a much smaller ship.

I believe Silver Cloud left before us. My information is that this ship returned to Reykjavik and that 50 percent of the passengers had been injured.

I also remember that throughout this part of the cruise the waves came up to the middle of the dining room windows. Sea foam was on our verandah. We ate breakfast upstairs and watched the waves hit the ship. We could predict exactly which wave would cause the ship to slap the ocean. We could see the foam going over the top of the ship.

We were not watching the TV the night of the big storm. In fact, we were asleep. However, I was awakened by a tremendous crash above me. The only thing above our cabin was the elevated Crown lounge. Within a minute, there was a corresponding crash below me. What had happened was that the wind had gotten under the lounge and almost pulled it off.

I also remember that the ship was almost at a standstill.

For those who complain about the Captain, he stayed up 36 hours straight. Vision was a new ship that had never crossed the Atlantic, and the weather conditions were exceptional. He also had to be a diplomat to the passengers and not unnecessarily alarm them.

The high waves continued for days. Some of the atrium glass-enclosed elevators were shut down. I agree that this was needed because they were extremely unsafe. The wires supporting them were “whipping” around. One wrong lurch, and someone could fall out.

So, we had to walk to where we were going, and we could not go out on deck. I read seven books and hoped that everything would be o.k.

Vision lost so much time that we were diverted to Halifax. My husband and I went to Peggy’s Cove. This is a lovely fishing community. However, there was a TV antenna suspended by a crane. Much of the shore was roped off by the military. There was a flotilla of ships in the distance. These were the people looking for Flight 800.

Once we reached Canada, there were no more weather problems.

Our final problem occurred at debarkation in Boston. This was Vision’s first visit to the U.S., and the officials pay special scrutiny. We were “locked up” for at least three hours by Customs and the Coast Guard. There was at least one emergency going on. The “hotel” staff, including the desk help, disappeared. Many people had problems with their connections, and RCL made it clear that everyone was on their own. I believe that RCL, as a corporation, has the knowledge of what is required to gain entry into this country. They should have trained their staff to manage this situation better. We barely made our flight, and it was four hours after docking.

Food: Our waiter was wonderful, and I understand that he was on the fast track to managing the restaurant. We enjoyed most of our 10 table mates. The food, however, was not very good. A two-week cruise is not two one-week cruises. There is no reason why menus needed to repeat on day 6. We did start running out of items, like fresh vegetables, because stores could not be loaded if we were missing ports. It is also my impression that most of the passengers, who had first seating, appeared at dinner. Few were seasick and few looked like they sustained any injuries.

We thought so much of the waiter that we wrote the to President of RCL praising him and the Captain, but we did complain about the Boston fiasco.

PS:Whitestar, you are not far off. My brother is a director of TV cartoons.

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desirod7 said:
for Kietaro

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Worst were buffets (everything seemed as though it had been sitting there for at least 12 hours - maybe it had been) and the desserts which were the very same gelatinous nothingness your brother describes so well. It tasted like a bad science project, and it was always distributed by our pre-programmed waiter with some outrageous calorie count in the millions (the joke wears off after a week).

The really sad part is that my most recent RCI cruise was almost four years after his, and the food was still lousy! (In fact, I'd actually seen many of the menus before - and I hadn't been on RCI for the better part of two years!)

Why oh why can't RCI produce consistently decent food when everyone else seems to be able to do it just fine? (Note I said consistently decent - it seemed to range, in one cruise, from quite good to unimaginably awful, but most of the time settling for edible but unappetizing.)

[ 07-21-2003: Message edited by: joe at travelpage ]

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Originally posted by cruiseny:
.. but I've found their food to be consistently awful.

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Food is of course is very subjective, but I found RCI's food to be easily better than my Cunards 'M' grade experience!

I'm not so much praising for RCI, but i'm saying that Cunard should be ashamed of themselves. My RCI fare was significantly less than my QE2 one!

[ 10-15-2007: Message edited by: Malcolm @ cruisepage ]

This could be the case with RCI, not experimenting enough in order to attract the European market.

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Originally posted by annnthony:
MALCOLM......why do you continue to "bash" QE 2's M-class dining room....

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Maybe because he ate there, and thought the food was terrible?

I know of two other people who sat at his table on that particular crossing and all of them agreed that the food and service was awful.

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Originally posted by annnthony:
NY.... this post was not directed to you.....get lost! Malcolm, I respect your comment, however, when was your last experience? Maybe, it's changed!

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My experience with storms?

Above experience takes the cake.

Canberra thru a Gulf Stream Northeaster: Ship creaked and had 30' waves. She would plow into a trough, spray would come up to the boat decks but ship did not so much flinch.

Stella Oceanis: Bad South Atlantic storm on Dec 31.
Ship would slap the waves, came over the bow, ship would shudder, glasses would break and kids screamed.

The Radiance class are better sea boats than the Vision class. It is not so much sea motion but ability not do get damaged in severe weather. November is not hurricane season like September.

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Originally posted by Globaliser:
desirod7: I read "My Vacation Tried to Kill Me" for the first time last night. Priceless stuff - thanks!

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[ 01-24-2006: Message edited by: desirod7 ]