January 2025 – All Aboard Explorer of the Seas

Written by Kim

Our first leg of this January’s adventure is an 11 night cruise out of Miami on Explorer of the Seas. This is our 4th time on this ship but the last time was 2018. It’s a bit of a special ship for us because we met many great cruise friends on this ship in 2007 and have sailed with them many times over the last 17 years.

We drove down to Florida but stopped overnight in Daytona which is about a 7 hour drive. It didn’t feel that long because we stopped in Jax to have lunch with Stephen, Bethany and the kids. They fill m6 heart just seeing them for an hour or so. Luke wanted to come in Nana’s car and didn’t like our short visit because we never do that but they will join us in Singer Island for a few days after the cruise so he seemed ok once we told him that. I love my grands (in case you didn’t know 🤪😂). We had dinner at a really cute brewery, Ormond Brewery, where Tom, the cat, ruled the roost. Beer was really good so we bought some to have after our cruise.

Traffic into the Miami port was horrible – especially since we went out of Terminal G. We got to the port later than usual at about 2 pm but it was fine because this is not our first rodeo and the positive is we could drop our carryon right in the room since rooms were open already.

As usual, we headed up to the pool deck for Sailaway after a quick bit at the Windjammer. We enjoy all the hype and energy of Sailaway up there but let the newbies crowd the rail while we sat and had a few drinks (guess we’re getting old).

Dinner was at Chops, the steakhouse. Chops never disappoints. Our waiter, Andriy, was from Ukraine, he was fantastic but it was quite sad when we asked how his family back home was and he told us his dad was killed in the bombing. His mom and sister have moved to a safer area but it is so sad to hear of first hand impact from such a tragic situation,

I did a terrible job with food photos but I promise to do better for all those who enjoy food photos

We played a bit in the casino. I broke even but Alex lost so we decided to go to the headliner show. Well that was a fail we were both snoring after 5 minutes so left. lol. When we got back t9 our cabin we realized our cabin steward never came because we left a list of requests with the most important being an extension cord for Alex’s Cpap. In 26 RCCL cruises we never had a cruise were you didn’t see the steward the first day. We called housekeeping and waited an hour for someone to come only to tell us they didn’t have an extension cord. We made it work with Alex’s short extension cord hanging over the bed. We met our steward today and he brought a cord. Yeah!

We have 2 sea days before hitting our first port. We chose this cruise because it goes to several ports we never visited – Limon, Costa Rica, Panama, Cartagena Columbia. It also goes to Aruba with an overnight stay and Cococay. I’ll post again probably tomorrow. Until then….