All Aboard MSC Seashore

Written by Kim

Today we boarded MSC Seashore for a 7 day cruise to the Caribbean. Our itinerary isn’t great – Honduras, Belize, Costa Maya and Cozumel but the price was right free. We know it’s not really free but we got the cruise from UR Comped which is a travel agent that uses your casino play to give you comped cruises and casino stays. We are not huge gamblers but play enough to get offers. We love to go to Florida in January and hotel prices are high so this gets us sun without a huge price tag. We will play what we usually play in the casino and hopefully come home with some of that money too! We bought the drink package instead of excursions because we likely will just get off the ship and walk around the port a bit at each stop and enjoy the quiet ship at the pool on port days.

Embarkation was pretty easy once we got parked in the garage. Getting into the garage was a grind as traffic was pretty sticky around the port. There are 10 docks at Port Canaveral now. Parking at the port is not cheap ($24 a day with tax) but we needed the convenience due to plans after the cruise….more to come on that! We were on the ship in about 10 minutes after parking.

Since we’re new to MSC we had some confusing info about things you need to do once on board but began our checklist. It is nice you can drop your carryons right at the room (on Royal you need to wait till the rooms are ready). We were told we were comped an interior room but when rooms were assigned we got a balcony which was a nice bonus. The room is well appointed with great storage!

We were told you need to activate your sea pass by putting your credit card in a machine so we found the machine but our cards were already registered.

We went to our muster station, booked our specialty restaurants (we have 3 pre booked) and our main dining room reservations before heading to the top deck for a drink. It’s a big ship – 19 decks tall and a bit more narrow than other ships we’ve been on which initially makes it feel a bit crowded but hard to tell because everyone is exploring at the same time on embarkation day. I’ll have more details and pics of ship in the coming days.

We had a quick lunch in the huge buffet! Lunch was tasty although my salad I must say looks a little gross in the picture.

There were lots of ships in port around us. This is a busy port so they are constructing more parking garages and still building

Our dinner was at Butcher’s Cut, the specialty steakhouse. It was excellent. We went at 8 a bit later and it was pretty empty. We were surprised. The service was great and food was excellent. A small difference from Chops on Royal is that you can only choose one appetizer (sometimes we like soup or salad and shrimp).

Here’s a couple of photos we took of the centrum in the ship. More to come.

I will post again in a few days. We have one sea day before getting to Costa Maya on Sunday. Until then…