Our New Home

 For nine months we will move from our spacious house with four bedrooms where we raised our family to a cruise ship cabin about 10% of our accustomed space.  Even that 10% is spacious on the 100+ cruises we've done.  The diagram below shows a birds-eye view, but mirror image of our cabin, where our bed and bath will be on the top of the image (we do not anticipate birds to view our cabin, however).  We will have a bar to the left of our cabin door and bathroom to the right.  Our couch, chairs and coffee table will be beyond the bar on the left and our bed on the right.  The television will be in the sitting area.  The balcony, which includes two lounge chairs, two chairs and a small table, adds 105 square feet.  The bathroom includes a tub, not common on a cruise ship.  The tub is likely to be used as a dunk tank for clothes, but seldom used as we have washers and dryers available to us as well as three laundry bags weekly to be done for us.  There is a curtain to be pulled to separate the bed from the remainder of the cabin.  We are on the starboard (right side facing forward) and next-door to the "Royal Suite", the biggest cabin on the ship (including a grand piano).  The strategy in picking a cabin adjacent to the fanciest one is that it is likely we will have the same cabin steward, who is likely to be the best on the ship.

The ship includes four specialty dining areas including Chops, a steak house, Giovanni's Table, an Italian restaurant, Izumi, an Asian restaurant, and Chef's Table, a one table restaurant with the chef introducing each of the multiple courses.  It also includes a disco area, a gorgeous glass "Centrum", the Safari Club, retail shops, pools, hot tubs, a walking/running track and self-leveling pool tables where the balls stay in place despite the movement of the ship on the ocean.

We have heard that about 800+ guests will be aboard for the entire nine months, though the ship can host 2,490 guests and 891 crew members.  Many guests will be aboard for shorter segments than the full nine months.  The ship was christened by Whoopi Goldberg and it made its maiden voyage August 25, 2003.  Interestingly, we made our decision to do the nine-month cruise October 20, 2021 and boarded the Serenade of the Seas the next afternoon for a four-day cruise departing from Tampa.