It seems impossible to believe that we have spent 21 days* (*includes crossing the international date line) aboard our floating home already. It’s been such good fun, and we can now officially answer our own questions:

Q: Is there such a thing for us as too many days on a cruise ship?

A: Definitely not! Not even a little. We’d love to keep going even longer!

Q: Will we feel bored or stir crazy with that many days at sea?

A: Definitely not! Not even a little.

Our remaining days at sea were all about the “usual” of participating in onboard activities and classes, eating and drinking, seeing shows, and preparing for our disembarkation in Sydney. We have met people from all over the world on this cruise, learned some new Tahitian (and Aussie!) words, and soaked in some new cultures. We decided yesterday that we would start trying to keep a list of some of the new (to us) Australian English words that we learn. Today’s favorite was the Australian word for koozie (those holders for cans we use to keep our drinks cold): a “stubby holder.” 😂😂

Onboard Sea Days 14-15

Onboard Sea Days 19-20

We have met wonderful people, done so many fun and amazing things, and seen so many beautiful, bucket list worthy sights, and I can’t even wrap my head around how blessed we are to be here and to do this, much less the fact that this ends only leg two of eight for this trip! We still have three months of travel to go! Very, very grateful.

Final Ship Review

For anyone interested in cruising the Solstice (or for us down the road since our memory skills aren’t what they used to be!), here is our critique of the Celebrity Solstice, for whatever it’s worth, based on a 1-5 star rating:

Cabin: 3 stars – adequate storage, we loved having a balcony, but this is an older ship in need of updates such as outlet plugs by the bed and new curtains with no holes, pipes that don’t spit black water randomly 🤮

Cruise Itinerary: 5 stars- we loved all the sea days, and loved our ports of call

WiFi- 1 star. Bought the general WiFi package (very expensive), and it was pure garbage. 20 minutes to load a picture type garbage. But, we figured hey… we are in the middle of the ocean, so any WiFi is amazing. Halfway thru the cruise we “splurged” for the “upgraded WiFi”. Still garbage. Maybe a tiny bit faster, plus we were a whole lot poorer. Although it is nice to be disconnected and unplugged for a bit, but as someone who loves my social media and texting my kiddo and friends and was trying to keep a blog and was onboard for three weeks, WiFi is also important to me. Rob was happy without it this cruise, so opinions vary 😁, but he was also glad I had it so we could look up weather, port info, and keep up our blog, and keep in touch with friends and family.

Food- Main Dining Room: 2-3 stars- This was our biggest surprise and biggest disappointment with Celebrity since our last cruise. The quality of Celebrity’s food has notably decreased in both the cafe/buffet and the main dining room. Basically, it felt like eating at a Costco/Sams club snack bar. I mean, we are not above that and it certainly will fill you up, but you don’t usually want to do it for 21 days straight. Desserts were worst of all- none appeared to be fresh, all tasted frozen, premade and tasteless. When a sweet tooth like me passes on most desserts daily, that’s a shocker 😂. Honestly, we would have fired this pastry chef (or company they order dessrts from) in ANY restaurant. We suspect it was an intentional effort by the cruise line to increase profits by lowering quality of prepaid food and increasing quality of specialty dining, so now if you want “good food”, you have to pay extra for it.

Service- Main Dining Room: 5 stars – excellent and attentive

Food- Cafe (buffet): 2-3 stars – see above. There was virtually no difference in the quality of food between the buffet and the main dining room (another first for us when cruising- we used to go to the main dining for a “nice meal”). We did have some individual good dishes, and one night they had beef Wellington (our only outstanding dish of the cruise from the dining room) and mushy lobster (which still beats no lobster, am I right? 😁😂).

Service- Cafe (buffet): 4 stars- very friendly and helpful service, but not great about tables being clean and quickly turned over

Food- Specialty Dining: 5 stars

Service- Specialty Dining: 5 stars

Shops Onboard: 2 stars. Not much variety, merchandise onboard not refreshed (stared at the same display rack of tshirts and clearance items for 21 days), had a whole section of “high end” shops that rarely had anyone in them except when they gave away free champagne. When you have limited space, why designate four full stores to used designer handbags and watches? Never saw one single person in those stores. Maybe rethink your merchandising?

Entertainment: 4 stars- great variety of acts, multiple shows a day, comedians played to an “old crowd” and told outdated jokes, ship main stage entertainment had great dancing skills but some questionable singing

Activities: 5 stars+ – always something going on, always fun things to do, great variety, activities team was excellent and very visible

Cleanliness- overall: 5 stars – they work hard to keep this ship clean and polished, and our cabin steward was a rock star who kept our cabin spotless twice a day with his efforts. Hand sanitizer stations all over the ship, and (other than the buffet tables), we rarely saw anything dirty or piled up

Information Sharing: 2 stars – this area needs work. They have an app, a daily show, a guest relations desk, and a printed program, and yet none of these adequately informs you of important shipboard things you need to know. The app was often not updated with all the ship’s activities, so you would miss out on things unless you also carried your paper activity schedule. It contained no information about our ports of call or weather. The Daily Show was put on by our cruise and activities directors and gave highlights of the day. We didn’t know about it until we finally flipped around on our tv on day 18 of the cruise, so not real helpful. Maybe a note in the cabin or a prominent posting on the app or daily program to let you know that resource was available? They also didn’t talk about the ports of call much. The printed program had great info on the daily activities, but nothing on the ports of call. Guest Relations desk on the ship was a good source of info, but often didn’t answer the phone if we called from the cabin 😂

In summary, we generally felt like we needed more information daily in what was going on (app updates), and most importantly, we were completely unprepared via our ship for any of our ports. We wanted to know the weather that day so we knew what to wear ashore as our phones didn’t work, how we would get to that port (tender or walk off), what was nearby, and what fun things we could do in the town we were docked in. Could we walk or did we need a cab? Most cruises give us that information in one place (usually their daily newsletter) the night before a port, and/or have shows all about the ports of call, but this cruise did not. Provided info was piecemeal at best and had we not had the internet package, we would have felt wholly unprepared for any port.

Overall Experience: 4 stars. This was a great cruise. We loved so many things about it, and would absolutely do it again. Celebrity had two ships doing the same itinerary one day apart – we chose the older ship for a better price, and it showed. The Solstice is going in for upgrades/repairs next year which should address some of the negatives above (however, food quality is a separate issues).

This was our 30th cruise and Celebrity remains one of our favorite cruise lines. We will certainly continue to cruise, and with retirement, we look forward to longer trips including repositioning intineries with lots of sea days!

Thanks for adventuring with us!