This was an . . . odd cruise.

We took this cruise for two reasons: to try Norwegian (NCL) and to experience sailing out of New Orleans. The Port of New Orleans is on the Mississippi River, and you sail about 100 river miles before reaching the Gulf of Mexico. Basically, the first night is a river cruise

As with Galveston, NCL only sails from New Orleans during the winter and early spring months. The itinerary (Cozumel, Roatan, Harvest Caye, and Costa Maya) was the same as we could get out of Galveston, but this sailing happened to be $400 less than the same time from Galveston. We pretty much always spend the night before a cruise on or near Galveston, so the only extra expense of note was gas to and from New Orleans; it was cheaper this way.

We were not expecting much leading up to this cruise. We’d had a very bad pre-cruise customer service experience, and we’d been hearing that NCL’s food isn’t good lately. We did have one thing happen shortly before the cruise that gave us some hope. We originally booked an interior stateroom. As with other cruise lines (such as Princess), NCL has a system where you bid for upgrades. On a lark, we called them and asked if any upgrades were available. There happened to be a single (regular) balcony available, and we got it for about an extra $60 total. Not bad. Things were looking up.

Embarkation Day

The bulk of my pictures were taken on embarkation day. This will wind up being the longest section.

If you’ve never been to downtown New Orleans/the French Quarter, it’s a mess. Nav got us about 99% of the way from where we stayed (Slidell) to the cruise terminal, but that final 1% (the parking garage) was an absolute disaster. Streets didn’t actually exist or were closed. After circling a time or two, we finally saw the sign directing us to the garage, but even then, we weren’t sure we were going the right way until we actually got to the entrance.

The terminal itself was weird. The shuttle from the garage basically takes you a block or two and drops you off sort of in an alley. You then still have somewhat of a walk to get into the terminal, and then a long walk once you’re in to get into the security line. They were giving us conflicting info as to what documents we needed when. We were told to have passports and boarding passes out long before either were needed, and as it turned out, we never needed our boarding passes at all. That is as it should be. Everything is computerized. We have to provide travel documents ahead of time, and the booking is linked to those.

There was a lot to like about Norwegian Escape. The ship was pretty inside. Somehow, I never really made it to taking pictures of the interior.

One nice feature of the ship was a promenade that went almost all the way around the ship. You couldn’t walk around the bow but you could walk all the way around the stern, which is where I took most of my sailaway pictures. Most, or perhaps all, of the specialty restaurants are on the promenade deck and have outside dining. We never ate outside, but you can use those tables during the day when the restaurants are closed. They would place board games on some of them.

Now for sailaway. Remember, this is the Mississippi River, so the water is very muddy. This first picture is as we were just pulling away. In the foreground is a hotel.

New Orleans is well known for paddle wheel boats; we saw a number of them during sailaway.

Louisiana is home to the longest bridges in the US, with several of them in metro New Orleans. One of those is the Crescent City Connection, which carries US-90 Business across the Mississippi River. The bridge is very prominent, and is visible from well down the river.

This picture was taken as we rounded Algiers Point, with the point to my back.

As is normal for major rivers, the Mississippi is an industrial corridor, and the Port of New Orleans is one of the busiest in the country.

This old Domino Sugar plant was interesting. Much of the facility looks burned out and/or abandoned, and yet some whisps of what I assume was steam indicates it is still is use in some way.

And, of course the petrochemical industry is major here.

Roatan

Since we were in a different part of the island, I have some slightly different pictures.

That’s it for pictures. I really didn’t take many. And, naturally, there are a lot that wound up being unusable.

General Impressions

We enjoyed almost all of our food. The best fish I’ve ever had at sea was in the main dining room. Our package included three specialty meals. We wound up using ours on the churrascaria, the steakhouse, and the French Bistro. They were also running a special where some of the specialty restaurants were two for one during certain hours. The churrascaria was one of those, and, had we known about the special, we would have tried the seafood restaurant and used a two for one for the churrascaria.

We had dinner twice at the Asian fusion restaurant. It was some of the best food we’ve ever had at sea. It was supposed to be in the two for one special but, for unknown reasons, we were never charged. I didn’t complain.

The production shows we took in were outstanding. Escape is one of the ships in Norwegian’s fleet that performs The Choir of Man. As far as I can tell, these are “official” Choir of Man performers, and not people hired as part of the ship’s general entertainment staff.

One of the live music venues is Syd Norman’s Pour House. One of their big shows — so big it was moved into the theater — is a performance, in order and with the background story told, of Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours. I am not a fan of Fleetwood Mac. I enjoyed the show immensely and, after having given the real album a listen in order, I think the band on the cruise ship was better. Maybe some of that is just that live music has a differnt energy.

The other show we took in was basically a review of late 70s through 90s pop and rock hits. It was performed by the cast of Choir of Man and was, again, very good.

Now for the reasons why we likely won’t sail on NCL again.

We’re not fans of the big screens on the pool decks that so many of the large cruise lines have. After our experience on Escape, we will never complain about the pool deck screens again. At least on this ship, the screen was in the artium. They would play movies twice a day, I think, once during lunch and once late at night. We ate lunch about half the time at O’Sheehan’s Irish Pub, an included restaurant overlooking the atrium. It’s hard to have a pleasant meal with a loud movie. It was far more distracting than some of the other entertainment that are typical of mid-day in an atrium. Using the artium at night — along with another detail I will get to in a bit — for movies deprived us of one of our favorite activities on a cruise.

Typically starting at around 5PM, cruise ships will have live music at a few venues, one of which is the atrium.

A little about atrium design.

Some cruise lines, such as Carnival (this is the atrium on Breeze) and, from what we can tell MSC, have a design like this: the bottom floor of the atrium has the atrium bar as a focal point with a stage above it used for live music and other events. This will typically be against the forward and aft wall of the atrium.

Seating and overlooks from higher decks attract attention toward this focal point. Everything makes sense with this layout.

Now, for Princess. Princess makes the center of the atrium the focal point.

Behind me and to my left is the stage. It seems out of place, but it works and opens up the middle as a dance floor, and some of the musicians will leave the stage and perform in the center. What you can’t see is how everything focuses into the atrium. On this deck we have the International Cafe, which has 24 hour complimentary food and serves specialty coffee. There is seating at and near the Cafe, including behind me. Off to one side was the gelato shop, which, again, has seating. Also on this deck is one of the large bars, Good Spirits at Sea, which has a large seating area that focuses people towards the atrium. Directly above my head on the next deck is another, smaller bar which, again, has seating that focuses on the atrium. On the same deck is also one of the casual restaurants, Alfredo’s Pizza. Although its seating doesn’t directly overlook the atrium, it is open to the atrium. Two decks above my head is Ocean Terrace, the sushi restaurant; you can eat lunch (sea days only) or dinner directly over the atrium. Also on that deck is another of the large bars: Crooners. This bar even has a piano and will host musicians at times when there is no one performing down in the atrium.

Everything is geared toward the atrium.

Norwegian’s atrium design is just . . . weird. There’s no focal point. The atrium bar is off to one side, the stage, such that it is, is off to another. There is seating off to the port and starboard sides, but they don’t really direct you anywhere. As far as seating for the stage, it was woefully insufficient. And Norwegian knows it. Probably 1/3 to 1/2 of the seats were folding metal chairs. I didn’t pay $2000 to sit in a folding metal chair.

Back to that screen in the atrium.

If you’re showing a movie at night, you’re not doing live music there. If the other live music venues (I’ll get to that shortly) were workable, we could have tolerated that. But one of the two times we caught part of an act at the atrium they did something that neither of us could believe and we believe to be just downright disrespectful. While the band was playing, the were advertising one of the game shows and selling cards for it on the big screen. What? That’s just terrible.

Cruise ships will have live music in multiple places, sometimes overlapping and sometimes not. I will ignore pooldeck music. Sometimes there is a band there and sometimed it’s a DJ.

In addition to the atrium, our experience on Carnival is that they also have live music in Ocean Plaza (on Dream class, this is in the middle of one of the main decks by the coffee shop and Alchemy Bar) and in the piano bar. That venue is usually hard to get into; the only time we’ve been really able to was on Carnival Miracle, where the piano bar is huge.

Our experience with Princess is that, in addition to the atrium and Crooner’s Bar, there is also live music at the Crown Bar (the steakhouse bar) and in one of the lounges. You can pretty much always access live music.

On Escape, the live music venues outside of the atrium were the aforementioned Syd Norman’s, the comedy club, which doubled as a piano bar, the District Bar, the Manahttan Dining Room, and one other that I will mention in a bit. That sounds like a lot of places, but for practical matters, it really wasn’t. I can’t stress how tiny Syd Norman’s is. I don’t know how many seats they have, but it is always SRO. With timing (and the difficulty of planning any activities due to how low-tech Norwegian is), we never even had a shot of seeing anything there. I was able to hear some of the dueling pianos coming from the comedy club and it didn’t sound very good. Similarly, I heard some of the music from The District and it just wasn’t good. The Manhattan Dining Room is one of the MDRs. You can choose whichever of them you want. The one time we had dinner in an MDR it was at that one, and we did catch the end of one act and the beginning of another. If we weren’t going to eat in an MDR then Manhattan was simply not going to work.

One common thread here is timing. When you have a tiny venue you have to be able to plan around it. So much of the time, live music didn’t match our schedule. But what we should have been able to count on was music in the atrium. On both Carnival and Princess, there will be music in the atrium until 11:30 or midnight. Norwegian was showing a movie then. So, where did they move the live music that should have been in the atrium?

Wait for it. You won’t believe this.

While they are showing a movie in the atrium, they move the live music to a bar in the smoking casino.

Yes.

Seriously.

Want to listen to live music late? Stand around in a cramped venue or be a second-hand smoker.

I am of the opinion that smoking should never be allowed on cruise ships.

IDK if you’re an addict. You are putting everyone at risk.

It’s not just the health affects of second-hand smoke. Fire is the single biggest threat at sea. Ships don’t just sink for no reason, especially in the open ocean. Fire, though? It’s a terrible risk. It can spready quickly. And it’s not like we don’t have fairly recent experience of fire on a cruise ship caused by smoking.

So, no, we don’t think we will be back on Norwegian, and a huge part of it is the ridiculousness of having entertainment in a smoking venue.

Up next is MSC Seascape for our fifth anniversary in September. We do have a family trip planned to Big Bend over Independence Day. We want to get out there before the zenophobic regime destroys the region with an unnecessary wall and associated infrastructure. There are two limiting factors to this trip. One, my Jeep has been at the dealer for, as of this writing, 16 days for warranty service. I’ve started investigating the Texas Lemon Law and will probably contact an attorney in the next few days to see if I might have a claim.

The other limiting factor is someone launching an illegal war in the Middle East and raising gas prices to ridiculous levels. Gas out in Big Bend is expensive to begin with. I know it’s been well north of $5.50/gallon.