Day 300 – “Living the Dream”. Thursday, 2/24/2022. At 7am we are sitting and eating our last cruise breakfast.
It is time to head home and hit finishing the house up hard. The line for customs is huge. We grabbed a porter and said we will give you $20.00 to take our luggage to the parking garage. He took us through with a handicapped group. We were through in about 15 minutes. People waited over an hour to get through customs. The long time was due to the heightened security because of the Ukraine issue. It cost $242.00 for 11 days of parking at the Miami cruise port parking garage.
It is nice to be back in the USA.
Our first stop was a rest area for lunch.
No one was saying put your mask on in the parking lot. The only problem is we had to buy our coffee and lunch. MSC coffee was much better than Dunkin Donuts. It was a fairly uneventful drive to Tifton, Georgia Hilton Garden Inn mostly. We always get hit up at rest areas or service areas for money. It must be Steve’s gray hair. He wants to know is he really that friendly looking. So, it happens on every road trip. Today we were hit up by a woman who needed a new battery and was $60.00 short of buying one. Okay we gave her the money and our card. She said she will mail us the money. It will be interesting to see if we get the money back or not. We figure we won money at the casino for some reason. That reason may have been to help this woman out.
I had a lot of time sitting in the car, so I decided to do a review of our MSC Divina 11-night Caribbean cruise (2/13/2022 – 2/24/23).
Here is our final review with 1 to 10 ratings. 1 is the lowest rating and 10 is the highest.
Overall rating: 6 There were not nearly enough general bathrooms on the ship, and they smelled a lot sometimes. Our cabin bathroom was excellent, and we found we just made our way back there and stopped using the ships general bathrooms. The evening meal in the dining room was not really that good and the setup of the server’s stations had us and others seated where you were watching the servers scurry around and scrapping plates. It was not very appetizing. The servers had way too many tables. They served you but did not develop any relationship. They were just too busy. The buffet was excellent. The cleanliness of the ship other than the well-used general bathrooms was excellent. There was great bar service and overall, the employees were wonderful.
1) Embarkation: 7 rating. This would be a 10, except this was a covid cruise. Omicron numbers are on the way down from the peak. The luggage drop off was quick and easy. The parking garage was a far walk. For older people or people with disabilities this would be an issue. It took about 2 1/2 hours to board from the time we dropped off our luggage. That included MSC doing covid testing. When we got on the ship we could immediately go to our room.
2) Cabin: 9 rating. We had a super clean spacious large room, and the bed was very comfortable. I gave it a 9 because of the way deck 14 came out over the balcony. It was hard to take pictures without the roof in the way.
3) Employees: 10 rating. The employees are all super friendly and went out of their way to do extras for you. The jewelry store clerk even fixed an old watch for me. They do not fix watches.
4) Food: 6 rating. The buffet food was excellent, but the dining room food was not good at all. The coffee was really good in the buffet, horrendous in the dining room. Other ships we have been on the coffee is just yucky. The pizza was fantastic. You will want to eat it every day.
5) Casino: 7 rating. The casino had good machines and we did walk away winning. The casino was very clean. I loved the nonsmoking atmosphere.
6) Excursions: 8 rating. They offered a lot of excursions, but they were very expensive. We only did one in Roatan, Honduras. It was good, but the boat we went on had no life jackets. We were in the ocean with no life jackets. The driver had one. Shame on MSC.
7) Entertainment: 5 rating. We didn’t go to any shows. We felt the seating was too close during covid time. The violin player in the sixth-floor courtyard was excellent.
8) Internet: 9 rating. There was excellent internet connection. I was disappointed that once you set a device up, you could not move the connection to another device. We both bought the internet for our phones. But on cruises I usually like to use my laptop in the cabin. I would have had to pay for another internet connection for my laptop.
9) Kids water activities: 4 rating. There was basically none. They had a really nice slide for older kids. I didn’t see anything for younger children.
Today’s product recommendation is for the Rev-A-Shelf. I love this for my pots, pans and lids. The one we recently installed is the 21 inches with a spot on the top shelf for the lids. We will also be installing a smaller one for baking dishes. These are awesome. https://amzn.to/3CzOwwq https://amzn.to/3ZcBuyq
To view the complete daily diary, click here: Living the Dream – Deestimes – Make every step of the journey count