Sunday, June 20, 2010

Aboard the Norwegian Jade

Cruise #2 was on the Norwegian Jade. This happened to be the same boat that our friends Lindsay and Dan were on during their Mediterranean Cruise in March.
Our room was located quite a few levels higher on this cruise.
The room was very similar to our first in terms of layout and size. The deoor on this ship is much brighter and there is crazy carpet everywhere!
Instead of long straight hallways on either side of the ship, the rooms are in long winding hallways. This ship is “Freestyle Cruising,” which means you don’t have an assigned dining time or table. There is a large buffet with a great selection of food. There are two formal dining rooms and one restaurant serving “comfort food” that is open 24 hours a day. In addition to these dining options that are included in the price of your cruise, you can select from a number of specialty restaurants if you want to pay a cover charge to get in. We decided that the buffet and other restaurants offered more than enough food options and stuck with those for the week. We mainly ate in the buffet, which had about every type of food that you could want. We did really like the food, but we both agreed that we liked the formal dining time and assigned table style of our first cruise because it gave us a chance to make some friends on the ship The Norwegian Jade had two outdoor swimming pools one for kids and one for adults.
This was nice because if you wanted to swim, you didn’t have to worry about all of the kids canonballing into the pool around you. The kids pool did have a pretty cool spiral water slide. We tried it out, but I really think it is intended for smaller people.  I had to scoot myself along in parts to make it all the way down.  The water wasn't quite strong enough to push an adult down the slide.  It had a nice fitness center and a deck where you could play baseketball, tennis, or volleyball all on one court.
Our first night on the ship was an interesting experience.  I was so tired by the time we got on the boat that the first thing I wanted to do is take a nap.  I'm not usually a nap type of person because I feel like I am wasting my day and I usually feel so groggy afterwards that I would have been better off not to have slept at all.  I was exhausted though and I gave in.  The ship was taking off at 5 and I woke up at 7 to find we were back in Barcelona.  At first I thought Steven was joking with me, but then I realized he was being serious this time.  The boat had gotten out to sea and someone had a heart attack!  They turned to boat around and took them back to Barcelona.  That was just the beginning of the crazy evening and night.  We had not experienced any rough seas during the first cruise, but the first night on the Norwegian Jade we experienced some insane waters.  Our room was located at the front of the ship and that night it was so noisy as the ship felt like it was lifting up and crashing down.  It was literally so rough that when we were in bed we would almost come off of the mattress.  We woke up the next morning to find our bed had moved to one side of the room.  It was so bad that in the middle of the night I was certain that any minute I would hear the alarms going off and an announcement that we were going down.  I was tired enough that I wasn't worried, I figured there wasn't anything that I could do about it so I might as well go back to sleep!  I was certainly glad that this was our second cruise because I knew from experience that this wasn't the norm.  Had it been our first night on the first cruise, I would have been figuring out a way to get off that boat the next day!

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