August 25 – Life At Sea on Celebrity Eclipse

The weather has improved considerably. It is sunny and warm enough to enjoy the pool deck.

On Saturday night as we headed off to a lounge for a pre-dinner drink, I looked out to the west and saw land. We were a few miles out from St. John’s Newfoundland. It felt great to be back in Canadian waters. Our cell phone service even worked, for a few minutes at least. We’ve been introduced to two new people on the cruise crew, Dan and Lorraine, who live in the St. John’s suburbs. Two nicer people you could not meet. I love Lorraine’s accent. She reminds me of Mary Walsh from CBC’s “This Hour Has 22 Mintues.”

Before dinner went to see the musical group Vox Fortuna. These three tenors again put on a fantastic show. Their amazing voices just filled the theatre with pure music.

Our dinner was great. It is a theme restaurant call “Le Petit Chef.”  There was a four-course meal, and the unique feature is that you were treated to a three dimensional automation between each course that was displayed on your table top. The basic story portrayed in this cartoon is about a chef who finds a magical cookbook and each course of the meal comes from this book. Each course was accompanied by a short comical automation that tells how the chef went about preparing the meal.

Ordinarily theme restaurants tend to have “OK” food, but this was delicious. The soup was a potato leek soup, my appetizer was cod loins with citrus fruit, while Marg had a lamb salad. My main course was a Beef Wellington and Marg had a filet mignon. The dessert as they say “was to die for.”  It was a wonderful chocolate pudding, covered with raspberry toppings. There were gum drops on top of this and some sort of sweet crumple. This was accompanied by a raspberry sherbet. This was without a doubt was the best meal of the vacation.

Our dinner on Sunday night was the captain’s dinner. We both had two lobster tails. We were stuffed but it was wonderful.

I’m sorry for the negative tone of the rest of this blog entry, but I had to get this off my chest.

We’ve chosen Celebrity as our favourite cruise line. We love their outstanding service and wonderful food, and this trip has reinforced our opinion. Unfortunately, there are many other problems that have cropped up on this trip which has made us reconsider our opinion.

It started off by rescheduling our port of call on the Canadian east coast from St. John’s to Halifax. We’ve been to Halifax multiple times in the past and really enjoyed our one time visit to St. John’s. So, we were very disappointed, although we are seeing friends who now live the Halifax area.

Celebrity is now charging for breakfast delivery to your cabin. One of the joys of cruise is having breakfast on your balcony. But it now costs around $100 for that service, if we were to use it each morning of the cruise. They never used to charge for this and neither have any other cruise ships that we’ve sailed with.

The most popular lounge of the ship is the Sky View Lounge. It is spacious, comfortable and offers a wonderful panoramic view through its enormous windows. It is always full of passengers. On this voyage Celebrity decided to rent out the lounge to Park West. They are having daily art auctions for a very small select audience and turning away other passengers. It is like they are giving us the middle finger.

The daily trivia was always held in this lounge. The new space only holds about ¼ the number of participants. Our progressive trivia team was disqualified because we couldn’t find table or chairs for the third round. Again, our complaints are answered by scripted replies and empty promises to do better. And yes, the obligatory bottle of wine.

The Eclipse is starting to show its age. Some chairs are worn or broken, rugs need to be replaced, there are loose door handles and hinges. The downspout visible on our balcony is so rusted that it looks like it will spring a leak at any time. This is not a good look to have, but in fairness to Celebrity the boat is going in for a refit early next year.

Our reservation included the basic Internet package. It was understood that you could not run video with this service.  But they’ve gone and throttled the speed of the basic package and made it inoperable for any activity. The only fix was to upgrade the package. This is just another cash grab.

This is day ten of the voyage, and I must say I’ve only enjoyed three of the daily shows. The cast of the production shows are average at best. Two of the three female singers can only screech and the male singers have all the emotions of a mannequin. One the solo acts was Marie Electra. She is a French violinist who fancies herself to be also a singer and a dancer. I can’t count the number of notes she missed on her violin. Someone should tell her that skipping like a five year old is not dancing. And as for singing, words are inadequate to explain how terrible she was. It was brutal.

We will doing another Celebrity cruise next spring, but it will be on a newer and larger ship. Hopefully we won’t have the same problems.