Each day of the voyage we had the Freestyle Daily paper delivered to our room door the evening before. This was our list of all of the many activities taking place on board for that day. This voyage had seven at-sea days where we underlined lots of things to try. Each morning started with exercise (I walk/Tony runs) on the Level Seven Deck that runs clear around this ship, a leisurely breakfast, and then Sukoku in the library. The rest of the day was spent eating lots of amazing food, consuming drinks of all kinds, playing cards and cribbage, competing in Progressive Trivia with Cruise Director Alexis, learning dances from crew staff or production cast dancers (well, just me and new friends), attending language and craft classes, watching the show in the Stardust Theater and dancing with live music before bed. What is not to love about being pampered and entertained on a cruise ship?!

David brought a favorite card game that he and Sandy played with Mom and Dad called Forty Below. We also played Hearts and Spades.

Progressive Trivia was given by our fun Cruise Director Alexis. Each day at sea we played one round in the Spinnaker Lounge and our scores were tabulated and totaled for prizes on our last day. Alexis allowed for challenges and she graded our papers to keep it fair. Each day had a theme like science, nature or music. Tony and I started the first day with Marnix, who joined us each day and was a great contributor. He was born in The Netherlands, emigrated to the US and had an engineering career here. He speaks multiple languages, has traveled a lot and had fun stories including a scary one when his Egyptian cruise ship had to go dark around pirates. Dad joined our group starting on Day 2, and David and Bill helped on Day 6 when Tony went to see a hypnotist session. We came home with Third Place overall!

We had Dance Parties every night on the pool deck or in the Spinnaker Lounge if the weather wasn’t cooperative. Members of the Cruise Director’s staff were always present, some in drag, and sometimes the production cast dancers would perform as well. This was a good way to end the day and burn off some of the excessive calories we were consuming.

Those excess calories came when we had reserved dinners at the fancy restaurants, or waited with a buzzer (never long and with drinks in hand) to get into the complimentary restaurants, or walked right into the Garden Cafe with an awesome set up of themed buffet food throughout the day. The Topsider Grill served hamburgers and sides by the pools and the open deck behind the Garden Cafe served tea-time foods and desserts every afternoon. Every lounge and eating place also had a bar, and we used this opportunity to try all kinds of cocktails.

I enjoyed the dance classes offered by crew members. It was fun to see these trained dancers get a bunch of older people to try and imitate their moves. Like all good teachers, they had to make modifications on the spot. Cruise Staff Guzman taught several Philippine Folk Dance classes. I learned that Argentinian Spanish differs from the rest in pronouncing “y” and “ll” as “sh”. Ella becomes esha and yo is sho in Argentina.

Our evening shows in the Stardust lounge were varied and excellent. We saw Broadway revues, duet and single vocalists, comedians, magicians, a hypnotist and gymnasts. They would perform at least twice on different nights with different shows (for example one young vocalist had a salute to Judy Garland and a country music show). When finished, they would exit the ship at the next port and others would come on board. The Production Cast stayed with us the full voyage and interacted with us through the dance classes and dance parties as well as practicing, performing and keeping in shape.

We found the ship’s control room and enjoyed the lovely works of art on display in the form of gift plaques from each port of call to commemorate Jewel’s first voyage there.

We had 1,034 crew members representing over 60 nationalities taking care of us on board from enthusiastic crew members who sang “washy-washy, happy-happy” at the doors of the Garden Cafe to encourage, hand sanitation, to our Cruise Director who had six suitcases full of colorful clothes and shoes (I asked her how she had room for her beautiful wardrobe), to the many servers, cleaners, chefs, and bartenders, to the Captain who loved to give us rambling, stream-of-consciousness announcements about our next adventure and his sailing crew.

The staff and crew of the Norwegian Jewel are world-class professionals!