April 11, 2018: A Visit to Phuket, Thailand
April 9, 2018: Boarding the Mariner of the Seas
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April 9 - May 6, 2018:
Aboard Royal Caribbean's Mariner of the Seas
Singapore to Barcelona

 

Well, we boarded our cruise ship on Monday, April 9th, and it will be our "home away from home" until we dock in Barcelona on May 7th. On this page, I want to aggregate together all the shipboard pictures that we took; this will make it easier to show you the areas of the ship we frequented, and also help eliminate duplicate pictures- since they won't be spread across all the pages for the cruise.

The Mariner of the Seas

Previously in this album, I have chosen to aggregate ship pictures on their own page, so doing it this way won't be entirely new to you. But there was something different about this ship, that hasn't been true before. What's that, you ask?

Before, when I've done pages for our cruises, I've included lots of pictures and descriptions of the ship. I did that not just to keep my own memory straight, but in some small part thinking that you might one day be on that ship, and might appreciate knowing ahead of time what it was like. But that won't be true with the Mariner of the Seas. This is because this will be the last voyage of this ship- at least in its current incarnation.

That's because when we all get off in Barcelona, the ship will be taken to Lisbon, Portugal, where it will be totally transformed. All the onboard decoration will be changed, attractions will be changed out, and even new decks will be added. This is all in preparation for taking the Mariner of the Seas out of Asian service for good; after its transformation, it will be taken to the Caribbean, where travellers expect a totally different experience. So look at the current Mariner of the Seas while you can; you won't get another chance.

Incidentally, it is largely for this reason that I won't bother trying to find deck plans and such, but will, instead, describe the ship more generally. While the basic structure isn't being changed, all the public areas (where we spent most of our time) will all be different, and many of them located in different places. No, they aren't moving the theatre, the pools, the dining rooms, and major venues like that, but the small bars, the shops, the specialty restaurents, the spa, and the casual dining will all get entirely made over. So this time, I won't attempt a deck-by-deck description, but we'll just look at the places where we spent our time.

It will be on this page that I will also put any candid pictures that we took of each other and of the rest of our group on board the ship. This will also be the page for pictures of the ship's decorative elements (although we didn't bother taking a great many of them, since we knew that it would all be changed in five weeks time).

So, with all that said, here are our onboard pictures from the four weeks we spent on the Mariner of the Seas. Enjoy!

 

The Royal Promenade

This was the first time that Fred and I had been on a ship large enough to be designed with a multi-story interior space, although this is a common design on the larger ships being built today. Here on our ship, this seven-story open space was called the Royal Promenade.

Fred at the Aft End of the Royal Promenade

The Royal Promenade was actually Deck 5 through Deck 9; above it, on Deck 11, was the Pool Deck, and below it, on Deck 4, was the Art Gallery, Ice Rink, and some other venues aft, and the Savoy Theatre forward. We'll talk more about those venues later.

At either end of the promenade were elevator banks with those kinds of glass elevators that the Hyatt Regency Hotel chain made famous beginning in the 1970s.

Lining the promenade on both sides were the various shops, a pub, and a little 24-hour cafe. On previous ships, these shopping arcades have been spread across a couple of decks, but these decks were of normal height. The only place we found multi-story atriums would have been at the elevators, and then only on some ships. The promenade was the main way people got from one end of the ship to the other, and so it was almost always busy.

In the picture of Fred at left, you can see those rows of windows on Decks 6-8; these are interior staterooms. Here on this ship, there were some interior rooms on the lower decks; but these had no windows at all. These balcony rooms at least had a view, although people on Cruise Critic say they are often noisy because of all the activity on the promenade that extends into the wee hours of the morning oftentimes. When I was walking down our hall that divided our outside cabin from these interior ones, I seemed to notice that there were lots of families in these interior rooms, so perhaps the cruise line tries to put families with kids in them, figuring that a little noise won't make such an impact.

One good way to give you a realistic impression of the promenade is to show you a couple of movies we made. One was made aft, near Guest Services and the main dining rooms, and the other was made forward, at the elevator lobby by the Savoy Theatre:

The Promenade Looking Forward from Guest Services
(Mouseover Image Above for Video Controls)
 
The Promenade Looking Aft from the Deck 8 Elevator Lobby
(Mouseover Image Above for Video Controls)

Like most of the passengers, we used the promenade to navigate the ship frequently, although other than that, we spent little time on it. We didn't do any shipboard shopping, and we never frequented the pub. We did make use of the cafe at our end of the promenade, and of guest services at the aft end, but mostly when we wanted to head aft for meal we either went aft along our stateroom hall to the aft stairs, or we went up the forward stairs to Deck 11 and then walked by the pool heading aft. Either route was more convenient than using the promenade.


The Promenade Looking Forward
 
The Promenade Looking Aft

At left are a couple more pictures of the promenade. I never did take any from the middle, but it was usually so busy that all you would have seen would have been people about.

The Promenade
(From Aft, Just Outside the Main Dining Room)

At right is another picture of the Promenade, looking forward. To help orient you, the picture at the far left was taken from just where the couple is standing in the picture at right.

When you come outside the Deck 5 Dining Room, you can go left or right to the glassed-in elevator banks (and stairs) or you can go straight across a kind of bridge towards the promenade. (From that bridge, you can watch the elevators go up and down, and you can see down to Deck 4.

But if you are standing where the couple is, you can see two decks down, and see the graceful glass staircases that lead down to them. Deck 4 has another main dining room (there were three) and the movie theatre and some other stuff, and the next deck down, Deck 3, had the Art Gallery (where you can purchase overpriced art from relatively unknown artists- I think every cruise ship has a Park Gallery outlet) and the ice rink.

The Royal Promenade connects the forward and aft elevator and stair lobbies, so let's take a look at them next.

 

Forward and Aft Elevator Lobbies

The forward and aft elevator lobbies were quite different, so let's have a look at the aft one first.

 

Aft Elevator Lobby

The aft elevator lobby is located just forward of the three main dining rooms (which are on decks 4, 5, and 6).

Looking Up in the Aft Elevator Core

There are actually ten elevators for passengers aft- five port and five starboard. On each side, two interior elevators are enclosed in glass enclosures, but since they have glass walls, you can see into the atrium as you go up and down. There are three outside elevators on either side, but since these are not actually on the outside of the ship (as they were on the Jewel of the Seas) they are totally normal elevators with no view.

In the picture at left, we are in this aft lobby looking up through the atrium- which goes all the way to Deck 10. Deck 6 is the entry to one of the main dining rooms, but decks 7-10 have things like the library, the the cruise director's office, an Internet cafe, and a lounge. You can cross from one side of the ship to the other on any of these decks, but there are also stairwells on either side.

This lobby was unremarkable, although because it was right outside the dining room, we went through it quite a bit. Most of our need to use these elevators was if we wanted to go up to Deck 14 where the card room was; these are the only elevators and stairs that access that particular deck.

I might also mention that when we left the ship, it was usually through a gangway aft, and so to get down to Deck 1, you had to use these elevators and stairs, as they were the only access to that deck as well.

 

Forward Elevator Lobby

The forward elevators were a lot more interesting- for a number of reasons. But they were also a lot less frequently used, as they were nowhere near the dining rooms or the buffet, and other than being at the forward end of the promenade, the only major venue they served was the three-level Savoy Theatre (where the ship's nightly entertainment was).

The Forward Elevator Atrium

First, let me explain a bit about these elevators. Like those aft, there are ten of them, five on each side. And, just like aft, there are two facing the atrium and three "outside". The outside elevators again are not actually on the outside of the ship, so they are totally enclosed and look like any other elevator.

But the inside ones are like those you've see in hotels and offices; they are cylindrical glass cars that run on a track up and down, so they look neat from the outside, as the go up and down, but they are also neat from the inside, as you can look up and down as you are moving.

To provide added interest, there are glass lanterns that hang from the underside of Deck 10, and they are arranged so that there are globes at all levels as you pass. This provides added interest and something else to look at. More about the globes in a minute.

The picture at left was taken from the end of the promenade on Deck 5. Across the atrium (and from the end of the promenade you can either take the graceful stairs down to the Savoy Theatre or you can go left or right between the inside and outside elevators on either side to reach the other side of the atrium) on this level was the Lotus Lounge (where they had karaoke, trivia, and stuff like that). On that side of the elevators on each deck there were accesses to the stateroom halls on either side of the ship. But with all the major food venues aft, not nearly so many people used these elevators and stairs- unless they were going to the theatre or the gym/spa.

The Savoy Theatre has three levels with entries to the theatre on three different decks. Entering on Deck 4 put you in the balconies, entering on Deck 3 (the main entry) the upper level in back of the theatre, and on Deck 2 you could enter for the seats down front.

Looking Down From Deck 8
Looking Up From the Promenade

You can see some of these features again in the pictures at right. You can see the graceful stairs that lead down from the Promenade to Decks 4 and 3, and you can see the elevators themselves. And, of course, in both pictures, you can see the hanging lanterns.

These lanterns serve another useful purpose; they can tell when the ship is rocking back and forth, even if you can't quite feel it. On our first day at sea, that's what was happening:

"You Are Getting Verry Sleepy"
(Mouseover Image Above for Video Controls)

I thought that this feature of the ship was probably its best; it compared favorably with the beautiful "Emerald City" look of the six-story atrium on Royal Caribbean's Jewel of the Seas that we sailed on about ten years ago. Here are a few more nice views of the forward elevator lobby on the Mariner of the Seas:

 

The Savoy Theatre

One of the standard activities on every cruise ship seems to be the shows that are usually held just about every evening in the ship's theater. I suppose there are some ships that are too small, but I bet that even if all they have is a large lounge, they'll have entertainment.

The Curtain is About to Go Up

The theater onboard the Mariner of the Seas was called the Savoy Theater, and it was typical of those you'll find on this class of ship. My guesstimate is that this theater would hold upwards of a thousand people, but I can't remember a night when the theater was full- or even close to it.

On previous cruises, I've taken pictures or made movies of some of the entertainment, and I thought about doing that here, too. But in reviewing some of those album pages, I decided that, unless you were in the first few rows, the kind of quality I got (and I would have to take them kind of surreptitiously, as there are announcements now that no picture-taking or video recording is allowed) really wasn't worth the effort.

But even though some of our party didn't think the shows were ever good enough to go to, they were certainly passable, the performers energetic, and the cost, well, they were free. What else can I say? This is not to say that some of the guest performers that they bring out to the ship for a port or two aren't a little cheezy (there was one hypnotist that I thought was terrible, and whose "subjects" I thought were just faking it), but it's usually good fun and a decent way to spend an hour.

On this ship, Fred was as enamored of the curtain as anything else, so that's why we have a picture of it (taken when the theater was empty). Also on this ship, the theatre, which is about as far forward as you can get inside, did double-duty as the gathering point for all the shore excursions. So we spent four or five mornings here waiting with our groups to be called to embark and begin our tours.

If you are curious about the entertainment, look for one of our other cruises in the album, and you'll see some movies. I might mention that sometime in 2016 I got an email from a particular performer's agent who had, apparently, been "googling" his client and who thus ran across my page of his performance with a picture and a movie snippet. He told me via email that such unauthorized posting was illegal and that I should remove the offending content right away. I told him I would be happy to comply, and I sent him the text that I planned to put in place of the picture and movie, and asked if that would be satisfactory. (Think of the absolutely worst Yelp review you have ever seen.) I never heard back.

 

The Main Pool on Deck 11

Deck 11 was one of the most often-visited decks on the ship- and not just by us. Far aft on this deck is the Windjammer Cafe (Buffet) where we (and thousands of other folks) took their breakfasts and lunches and many of their dinners. (All three meals were also available in one or more of the main dining rooms, but during the day few people want to waste the time it takes to get served.) At the forward end of that deck was the gym, and just aft of that, the spa. But taking up most of the center of the ship are two swimming pools- one that is part of the spa and a much larger one (actually, a group of them) out in the open air for everyone to use.

Me on the Sports Deck Above the Main Pool

I am not big on swimming pools, although I will use a small one at a hotel or someone's house occasionally. But maybe that's because since I had melanoma before, I severely limit my time in the sun. But lots of people used the pool and its satellite hot and cold tubs all day long on sea days. On those days, all the deck chairs seemed to be gone by 9 in the morning.

This particular shot looks aft; I am standing on deck 12, above and between the main pool and the spa pool. If you are curious that is indeed a super-large TV screen where, at night, movies were often shown. (Actually, I never did find out if the ship has an actual movie theater.) The Windjammer Buffet is also on Deck 11, just under and behind the structure. The circular windows were actually those of the main lounge, which, along with the game room and the rock-climbing wall, were on Deck 14. (Oddly, the only thing I found that was technically on deck 15 was the chapel. I was exploring one sea day and ran across it. It didn't look as if were often used, but then I never went close to it on a Sunday.)

But the main pool was always the center of activity on sea days and oftentimes in the evening; to encourage such use, the ship had thoughtfully sprinkled four bars around the area, so no one would need to be thirsty. Ever. Here are two more good views of the pool- one looking forward and one aft:

Forward View
 
Aft View

We often walked along the starboard side of the pool to get to a meal; it was easier to take the stairs up a few decks, walk along the pool, and then either go to the buffet on the same deck or take the stairs back down to the dining room. It was a lot easier, and much less noisy, than using the Royal Promenade.

The Main Pool at Night

At night, the pool had an entirely different ambience- perhaps because it was almost deserted. Sometimes, after dinner, we'd come up here to just sit and watch the TV screen or just get out of the airconditioning. I suppose we could have gone swimming, as the sun wouldn't be an issue, but we never did.

I might note that on other ships, there is often a hotdog or hamburger outlet right by the pool, but on this ship the only thing nearby was soft serve ice cream- unless there was some special mealtime event.

Here are a final few pictures of the pool deck:

(Click on Thumbnails to View)

 

The Sports Deck (Deck 12)

The Sports Deck is just above the Pool Deck, so it's Deck 12. Its main attraction is the jogging track, and in the morning one can always find the early risers and professional walkers up here practicing their technique.

Fred on the Sports Deck

The jogging track is pretty popular, but it doesn't run the entire length of the ship. It actually runs almost to the bow, going around on Deck 12 right in front of the windows of the gym. Then it heads aft. Midway on its trip aft, just before it reaches the main pool, there is a cut-across from one side to the other- kind of a branch. I don't know for sure, but I think this makes a one-sixteenth mile circle near the front of the ship, whereas if you go all the way to the end of the track (which crosses forward of the aft superstructure- right below the main lounge on deck 14), I think the distance is supposed to be an eighth of a mile. I didn't pace it off, so I'm not sure.

One day I was on the starboard side of the ship, near the Johnny Rockets specialty restaurant, and I took a picture looking forward. You can see in this picture the track coming across from the port side underneath the main lounge (Ellington's, it was called) and turning to head forward. I am also standing under the curved windows of the lounge.

The track did not go all the way aft, although if the ship had been laid out a bit differently, it could have. But I think there were four reasons why it didn't.

The first would be that the distance would have resulted in an odd figure if you calculated circuits per mile. As it was, you could do sixteen per mile or eight per mile; going all the way aft would have made it maybe five-and-a-fraction per mile. This would have made it hard for the mathematically-challenged to keep count in their heads as to how far they'd gone.

Second, aft on the Sports Deck there was a large open area with lots of deck chairs- for people who wanted to get some sun but didn't want the noise of the pool or even the joggers going by continually. This was a quiet area, and there were usually people here lying on their chairs and reading or doing puzzles.

The fourth and fifth reasons were that the track would have had to cut right through the outside area where you could play checkers or chess or shuffleboard (yes, there was still shuffleboard) on the painted deck surface port, or right through the Johnny Rockets specialty burger joint (with the inevitable probability of a jogger running into someone carrying a plate of food to the restaurant's outside seating area.


Deck Games Area (equipment in the lockers)
 
Johnny Rockets Burger House

I haven't said much about the "specialty restaurants", although we had lunch at Johnny Rockets once and dinner in Giovanni's Table to celebrate John Toohey's birthday. It is no longer true (if it ever was) that all the food on a cruise ship is included in your fare. Over the years, lines have recognized that their passengers, as a whole, had way more disposable income than they thought, and to separate them from some of it allocated certain areas off the buffet, the main dining room, or elsewhere on the ship, to more "exclusive" dining options. Each of these has a varying extra cost- billed to you at the end of the cruise. On the Mariner of the Seas the Captain's Table (interactive multi-course meal with numerous wines) was $85/person; Chop's Grille Steakhouse (note the extra "e") was $35/person, Giovanni's Italian Bistro was $30, and Johnny Rockets (modeled as a 1950s California diner) was $10. You can still eat as much as you like for the price, though. I have to admit that Johnny Rockets' burgers and fries were indeed good, although I thought that Giovanni's Veal Scallopini was distinctly underwhelming (and we didn't have a good server experience there as well).

I might also mention here that on Deck 14, aft, one could find the rock-climbing wall (I might have tried it, but the crewmember manning it was too much of a distraction). The stairs up to the wall were starboard, as they climbed up from the Sports Deck, past Deck 13 (the basketball/volleyball court), and up to Deck 14. On our way down, Fred took a picture of the Sports Deck from the landing on Deck 13, and you can see that picture here. (I think this area of the ship was completely transformed during the refit, with the rock-climbing wall and basketball court replaced with a water slide.)

We actually spent quite a bit of our time on the Sports Deck, not only because it offered the best views (as when we transited the Suez Canal), but also because it was another easy, uncrowded way to go from one end of the ship to the other (stateroom forward to food aft, for example). Here are two final pictures taken from the Sports Deck:


Here is a view looking aft with Fred on the Sports Deck with the Spa Pool (only used by Spa Patrons) down below him on Deck 11.

The deck chairs by the main pool were reserved for passengers with a higher "frequent sailor" status than us. We were only Gold (sniff), not the required Diamond (Greg, John, and John) or Pinnacle (Susan).

The last thing to mention about the Sports Deck (and above) was that on Deck 13, right next to the basketball court, they actually had a miniature golf course- not a full size one, of course, but with enough holes to be interesting. I am sure that the motion of the ship often leads to some pretty amazing shots.

 

The Spa and Spa Pool (Deck 11)

The Spa and its pool were located between the gym (on Deck 12) and the main pool, with the spa pool on Deck 11 and the spa itself on the Sports Deck (Deck 12); this meant that from the jogging track on either side of the ship you could look down to the Spa Pool.

The Spa is what its name implies- an extra cost option for things like massages, facials, the sauna, and other similar facilities. Greg occasionally gets a Spa Package so he can use the luxury showers and stuff like that when he is sharing a cabin with somebody. I think, but I am not sure, that anybody can use the Spa Pool; there did not seem to be any entry station, and anyone could walk right past it on Deck 11.

Looking to Port, Aft, Over the Spa Pool
 
Looking to Starboard, Aft, Across the Spa Pool

We never had occasion to use the Spa, although when we passed the hot tubs as we walked back and forth on Deck 11, Fred thought he might want to. We just never got around to it. On Deck 11, the outside of the deck has glass panels with openings to let some breeze through, but I suspect its because people often horse around at pools, and maybe someone's gone over a railing before.

The Spa Pool had its own bar (you are never far from one, it seems, in a cruise ship), and also a statue at the aft end of the pool that turned out to be a kind-of-out-of-shape Greek-inspired woman carrying a jug and standing between two small mountains of gourds and fruits. Don't ask me; if I knew what all that signified, I would certainly tell you.

The Spa Pool Bar
 
Maybe More Time in the Gym and Less in the Spa?

 

Disco Dance Party in the Royal Promenade

On April 16th, at the end of our sea day between Cochin, India, and Goa, India, we were treated to a "Disco Dance Party" in the Royal Promenade. Passengers gathered under the bridge across the Promenade (which happened to be on Deck 7, the same as our stateroom). The bridge is used mostly for performances like these; thee is a DJ booth built into the inner wall of the Promenade just forward of the bridge itself.

Tonight's "Disco Dance Party" consisted of the members of the Mariner of the Sea's performance troupe dancing and lip-syncing to a number of the big disco hits of the 1970s, including "That's the Way I Like It" (KC and the Sunshine Band), "You Should Be Dancing" (the Bee Gees), "Night Fever" (also the Bee Gees), and "In the Navy" and "YMCA" (both by the Village People).

There were a lot of folks on the Promenade to watch the performers, and many of them got the dancing spirit as well, and didn't do so badly keeping up with the professionals. Fred and I watched part of the show from the Deck 7 elevator lobby- which was as close as we could get without actuall being in the crowd on the floor of the Royal Promenade. Obviously, movies will do the performance more justice than still pictures, so let's watch them first and then have a look at some stills at the end.

"That's the Way I Like It"
(Mouseover Image Above for Video Controls)
 
"Night Fever"
(Mouseover Image Above for Video Controls)

End "You Should Be Dancing" and Begin "In the Navy"
(Mouseover Image Above for Video Controls)

"In the Navy"
(Mouseover Image Above for Video Controls)
 
"YMCA"
(Mouseover Image Above for Video Controls)

(Click on Thumbnails to View)

 

Ship Decoration

All the cruise ships we've been on have been decorated with artwork, statuary, and the occasional oddity, and the Mariner of the Seas was no exception. On other cruises, I attempted an extensive survey of this decoration, photographing any piece I thought interesting. I really have no idea why, save for I might have thought if you were ever on that ship, you might recognize some of it. But it was just a documentation process, and really didn't mean much, or affect your visits with us to the various ports of call.


So, early in the cruise, I told Fred I wouldn't be going off, camera in hand, to try to photograph every piece of art, every sculpture, and every interesting structural decorative element. But almost at the end of the cruise, I was reminded that when we got off the ship it was going to be taken for a complete overhaul, going from a ship that would appeal to Asians (an overuse of red, and more dragons than I could count) to whatever appeals to thirty- and forty-something sunseekers. Oddly, this would have been exactly the time to document, because the vast majority of the ship's decorative elements were about to disappear for good.

But by the time I realized this, it was a little late; I didn't want to spend the last two days going from bow to stern and deck to deck to capture the now gone ambience of the "old" Mariner of the Seas.

But in our almost a month on board, we did have the occasion to take the odd photograph of this decorative element or that, and so in memory of what the Mariner of the Seas used to be, I am going to include them here. I really don't have explanations for what all these items are; very few were labelled. So just have a look at some of them:

(Click on Thumbnails to View)

 

Showtime on Ice: "Ice Under the Big Top"

I mentioned above that the Mariner of the Seas has an ice rink down on Deck 3. I am not sure if any of the other ships we have been on have had one, but I think not. It is a typical ice rink, and passengers can come borrow skates and move around the half-basketball-court-sized rink. But twice on the first cruise and twice on the second, the ship presents an ice show by a skating troupe brought on in Singapore and taken off in Cochin, and brought on again in Aqaba and taken off again in Ashdod.

There are two shows on each cruise, and any given passenger is only supposed to go to one of them so that everybody can be accommodated. We missed the two shows on the first cruise, so the show we went to was actually on one of our sea days between Aqaba and Ashdod. Greg already told us what to expect, as he went on the very first day. (He also came with us, but there were empty seats so I don't think it mattered.

I was prepared to take some movies of the performance, but Greg said he'd seen someone do that a couple of weeks earlier, and he heard that he been hassled and had to erase those movies (and I did see the signs posted on the way in). But the sign said "Videotaping and Flash Photography" were not allowed, so I interpreted that to mean that still pictures without flash were OK. But that meant that most of my pictures had to be taken when skaters were relatively still, often at the beginning and end of the individual "scenes" in this circus on ice. They didn't all turn out well, but even so, enough remained for me to choose a slideshow to allow you to look at them.

The Lead Skater as a Clown

So I have put a selection of the many ice show pictures I took in the slideshow below. They aren't all great, but you can certainly use the little forward and backward arrows to move through them quickly. There are 28 of them, and you can track your progress with the index numbers in the upper left corner. Enjoy "The Big Top on Ice"!

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Other Pictures Taken Aboard the Mariner of the Seas

In this last section, I want to put some uncategorized pictures that we took while on board. I'll try to group them appropriately, and we'll begin with pictures taken of our group- me and Fred, Greg, Steven, John and John, and Zoran and Richard.

First, I mentioned that we celebrated John Toohey's birthday in Giovanni's Table, one of the specialty restaurants on board the ship. Although the meal took much longer than it should have because of the service, we all had a good time (save for the vegetarians). Greg gave John a dozen skeins of yarn he'd bought at the souk in Muscat, as John is fond of knitting (or crocheting, I'm not sure which).

Greg, John Toohey, and John Lambert
(In Giovanni's Table Restaurant)
 
John and His Yarn
(Mouseover Image Above for Video Controls)

I want to insert a picture here that had nothing to do with our own group, but another group I had the pleasure to join. If you're going through this album sequentially, this may be the first time you will hear me mention Susan Swiderski, but I will mention her quite a few times on the pages for this cruise. Susan was traveling on this cruise with her husband John and their twenty-something son, Johnathan. Johnathan is somewhat autistic, but a thoroughly nice young man, and Susan is very proud- and protective- of him.

The Mariner Masters

Among other things, Susan is a trivia buff, and the picture at left is of the team she formed or joined on the cruise- the "Mariner Masters". Susan is second from right.

I first met Susan when I was playing bridge with some other ladies in the card room (before Fred, Zoran, Richard, Greg, and I started playing routinely on sea days). When one lady left, Susan sat in, and we began to talk. To condense her story severely, she and John live in Deerfield Beach, Florida, which is about twelve miles up A1A from Fort Lauderdale. Indeed, Fred and I have ridden our bikes up further than that on at least a couple of occasions.

John owns a business that maintains fitness and gym equipment, and he counts among his clients almost all the professional South Florida sports teams, as well as two Florida universities. He does quite well, it seems, and can literally run his business from anywhere- hence his ability to cruise. John is British; he and Susan married when she was a nurse working in a hospital in England for a time. They cruise all the time; and I do mean all the time. This is more Susan's doing than John's; she love cruising and seeing new places, and John joins her on most of them. Johnathan comes along quite often; he has a part-time as a lifeguard at a municipal swimming pool in Deerfield Beach.

Having cruised so much, Susan is in the top loyalty level on Royal Caribbean (Pinnacle) and so gets all kinds of perks. She, her husband, and Johnathan were in a junior suite, which was quite nice, and she was always attending this function or that, put on by the cruise ship for its most loyal passengers. (I did not know it at the time, but on this particular cruise almost half the passengers were either Diamond or Pinnacle (the two highest levels), which is why public areas were always being comandeered as the ship wined and dined its most frequent sailors.

Anyway, Susan joined our little bridge group and she was very entertaining, always seeming to be plugged in to all the shipboard gossip; I believe she actually knew the Captain of this ship personally, as he lived in South Florida. We met Susan on the first cruise, and our friendship continued through the second. Actually, Susan had, prior to Singapore, done a cruise around Australia and New Zealand, and after the ship docked in Barcelona, she and her family would be getting on another cruise to make their way back to the United States. That's how you get to Pinnacle!

Susan was already a pretty good bridge player anyway, but she still sat in on our lessons frequently, entertaining us all with her stories of shipboard "intrigue"; her story of how she defended her son when some officious crewmember hassled him for wearing shorts into the main dining room and then almost immediately let a woman in behind him wearing (you guessed it)- shorts. She took that one all the way to the Executive Officer, successfully challenging the double standard.

Anyway, Susan asked me to join her trivia team midway through the second cruise, as they had lost a member. I was able to help them a fair amount (the Periodic Table was my specialty), and we ended up coming in second for the cruise, each winning a bag of forgettable swag. Susan is a thoroughly nice person- direct, non-nonsense, and, of course, very accepting. We hope to stay in touch with her as we have with other people we have met on our various cruises.

Our Table in the Main Dining Room

Since there were eight of us on the cruise, we were assigned to a table for ten (no tables for exactly eight, apparently, but then we've had good luck with meeting new people when we've been assigned a table with them). This time, we met Mary Suarez and Nikos Samoularas, a husband-and-wife tour guiding team. They have a thriving business of booking themselves on cruises and then becoming the private guides for whatever group of their frequent customers decide to come on the cruise with them. (Their cruises end up costing them nothing, even considering the expenses they incur hiring private transportation, arranging shore meals and admissions, and the like. They also give lectures on board, usually the day before we make a port that they have been to before.

They were also very nice folks, and had lots of stories to tell. We were also able to pick their brains, even though we weren't paying customers. (Although I expect that will change next year, as they are going to be on our cruise in March, 2019, from Buenos Aires to San Diego. I am in contact with them, and we hope to use their services rather than the ship's shore excursions. It's a more intimate experience and, they tell us, their charges usually work out to be less than the ship's.) They made excellent tablemates.

In the picture at right, from the lower left around the table, are Mary, Steven, Greg, John Toohey, Zoran, Richard, John Lambert, myself, Fred, and Nikos. (If the curtains look weird, it's because the sun was just in the wrong place and it was blinding everybody along that side of the ship for maybe thirty minutes at the beginning of our meal.)

This particular picture was taken at dinner on May 6th, the day before we were to dock in Barcelona; I hadn't taken many dinnertime pictures, as often one or another of us was off somewhere else. But we all made a point to be together on the last night. That same night, Susan came by the table to say goodbye to all of us. We saw her mostly at bridge, so Steven, Nikos, and Mary were the only ones of us that hadn't already met her. We exchanged contact information, and vowed to stay in touch.


Myself, Susan, and Fred
 
Greg, Susan, and John Toohey

As I mentioned, there are so many people on this ship that there are three, almost-identical main dining rooms, one above the other with a large spiral staircase in the middle connecting them- on Decks 4, 5, and 6. Our dining room was called "The Sound of Music" and it was on Deck 5. Each one had its own lobby/waiting area, and its own name. One evening, I hauled Fred to all three to take a picture of that dining room's logo with one of us in the picture:


"Top Hat and Tails" (Deck 4)
 
"The Sound of Music" (Deck 5)
 
"Rhapsody in Blue" (Deck 6)

So, for the rest of the candid pictures that we took during our four weeks aboard the Mariner of the Seas, I think that, once again, a small slideshow is the way to go to allow you to have a quick look at them. I have put explanations for the pictures right on the slides themselves.

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In the slideshow at left, you can use the little arrows in the bottom corners of each slide to move through them. You can also track your progress through the sides by using the index numbers in the upper left.

For the last item on this page, you may want to watch my short movie of the ice rink, which, some evenings, was covered over and converted to a large dance floor. Our friend who is a dance host on cruise ships may find it interesting:

The Ice Rink Becomes a Dance Floor
(Mouseover Image Above for Video Controls)

Well, looking at some of these pictures may give you a better idea of what the Mariner of the Seas was like, and when I mention venues aboard ship over the next series of album pages, you'll be able to visualize them. But now, let's head off to our our first stop- Phuket, Thailand.

You can use the links below to continue to another photo album page.



April 11, 2018: A Visit to Phuket, Thailand
April 9, 2018: Boarding the Mariner of the Seas
Return to the Index for 2018