2009 The NCL Pearl

In the months before the cruise, I participated in CruiseCritic.com and even made it to roll call. Noone had set up a meet & greet for this cruise, so at the last minute (within a week of our trip), I emailed the group administrator and she got us a spot in the Indigo restaurant for Mon. morning at 11. It was a nice meeting with refreshments provided by the ship and the hotel manager even came and spoke to us. I requested a tour of the villa suites which we got at the end of the cruise---for $30,000 a cabin they are quite impressive. The meet & greet did have about 12 of us there. I got a kick out of the location we were put in. I don't know if they purposely put us in the corner by this artwork or if it was coincidence, but it made me feel right at home (St. Louis).

Most of our meals were eatten here in the buffet restaurant. I don't think any of us had any complaints about the food. There were plenty of choices and most of it was quite tasty---some of the best I've had in my 7 cruises. I did find the set up of the buffet a little harder to get around then some of the other ships I've been on. At the time this picture was taken, it wasn't busy, but during peak times, it was hard moving around. Instead of individual stations, they were all run together. If you didn't want something 15 feet back, you had to cut in front of people or wait in a slow line. The choices were pretty much the same each day, but that was fine by me since they always had what I wanted (like cream of wheat every morning).

The Pearl has 12 places to dine, with 5 being free. We didn't try any of the specialty restaurants with the extra fee since we were quite happy with the ones included in the cruise price. The main restaurant (Summer Palace) is one of the free ones. Indigo was another free one, but was considerably smaller so harder to get into. We did eat in each a couple of times, plus at the outside grill one night, and the buffet (Garden Cafe) most of the time. Here is Summer Palace getting ready for lunch. We even celebrated Uncle Joe's birthday here on Sat. night. NCL even made him a birthday cake.

Here is the Blue Lagoon free cafe which is open 24 hours a day. It features comfort food: hot wings, fish and chips, spinach dip and chips, cheesecake, ..., as well as cooked breakfast before the Garden Cafe opens. We had a couple late night snacks here.  I wish more ships had a restaurant like this one!

Instead of a main huge multi-story high atrium when you board the ship like I've seen on many of the other ships I've been on, the Pearl has this rather large room near the entrance. They call it the Crystal Atrium and have a lot of activities here: jewelry tables; bar; huge Wii game screen some of the time; musicians on stage there some of the time; movies shown there some of the time. The stairs to the left lead up to the Blue Lagoon restaurant. Up and to the right is the pay restaurant Mambo's. The restuarant reservations desk and main customer service desks are also in this room.

Speaking of food, this is one of the meals I had in the Summer Palace. It was very good---as was the mahi mahi, lobster, and other stuff we had there.

The cabins aren't as big as most of the cruises I've been on, but it was big enough for Ken and me. I would have loved to have a balcony, but couldn't convince myself to pay the extra $600 for one. But I did pay the extra $400 not to have an inside cabin. I really like getting daylight inside the room and it was larger then the inside cabins.

One of the activities on board this ship and no other ship is the bowling alley. I would have liked to bowl more then the one game. It was definately interesting. There was even a bowling tournament (1 game, 5 different days). Most of the time they bowled at 10:15pm and it was part of our entertainment going and watching the 200+ average bowlers throw gutter balls. Those lanes don't take well to big curve balls! David bowled in the tournie and probably would have taken 3rd of the 16 if he hadn't overslept the last day (a 10am game).

This is a view of Mambo's restaurant as we were leaving Blue Lagoon one night.

In the front of the ship on the 13th floor is Spinnaker Lounge. This turned out to be a place we hung out a lot. The views were great, the seating was varied and comfortable, the activities in there were sometimes interesting (bingo, Salsa dancing lessons, talks about glaciers and such, late night comedy shows, afternoon q & a with Shark Bait, ... ).

One of my favorite places was here---the heated pool. Not many people braved it, but I found it to be as warm as Hawaii water in the winter and spent more time here then in the spa area we paid for! There were 2 jacuzzis here, too, where Jane, Carolyn, Carol and I would sometimes soak away our aches and pains. This was the adult pool area, which didn't seemed to be patrolled the first day. The family pool area was just to the right of this and had 2 jacuzzis, too. Don't know if someone finally got around to kicking kids out, but after the first day we didn't see many kids at the adult side. This was a huge improvement over the RCI Alaska cruise I took with my dad 2 years ago---there the adult pool area was indoors and even though they heated the family pool, they allowed screaming, splashing, rambuncious kids in the adult area. That turned out to be a huge disappointment to me with RCI(as well as their food choices).

On the 7th floor, a few floors below the Spinnaker Lounge was the Stardust Theatre where the nightly shows and different slide shows and Ranger talks were given. It was a great space for the talks and slide shows, but the nightly review shows got extremely crowded. A couple of nights we left because we couldn't find places to sit. They didn't have a full balcony like most of the other ships we were on and many of the shows were only shown 1 time per night instead of 2 x like on ships with assigned dinner times. That was somewhat disappointing, but we just got used to not going to the shows after the first couple of nights. We did see the Welcome Aboard show which was pretty good. Also made a point of going really early to get seats for the Shark Bait show which I'd heard rave reviews about. My sister and sister-in-law went to the Geisha Girls show and said it was very good. The comedian seemed like he would be good, but it conflicted with our dinner since we had to wait for dinner that night. We also missed the NCL dancers show because of dinner but they sounded really good at the Welcome Aboard show.

This was one of the acts Shark Bait did. They were a comedy juggling act. Their interaction with the audience made them hilarious.

Although we didn't try any of the specialty restaurants, we heard Cagney's Steakhouse was really good. I did look in and took this picture one afternoon.

For the most part, I liked the Pearl.  But we weren't really happy with the amount of uncontrolled kids onboard and that staff didn't bother to enforce rules pertaining to them---especially around the pools.  I did like the choice of free restaurants and the hours they had.  But I think Ken is ready to try a more sedate cruise.